From John O'Sullivan at the Sun-Times.

In World War II a passerby, lost in London's Whitehall, stopped a military officer and asked him which side the Defense Department was on. The officer thought for a moment and then said:

''Well, it's hard to be sure, but our side, I hope.''

In the last week the coverage of Iraq by the U.S. media has exhibited at least four separate failings:

1. Inferentialism.

Several media reports of the Abu Ghraib scandal have been, in effect, prosecuting briefs for the theory that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld either knew about or authorized the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Since the evidence for this is scanty, reporters build inference upon inference to make the case.

Take the Washington Post report by R. Jeffrey Smith. Smith speculates that because a military intelligence officer was involved in a case in which a Syrian jihadist was subjected to pressures designed to instill fear and make him talk, this "suggests a wider circle of involvement in aggressive and potentially abusive" techniques by senior officers. The Abu Ghraib "abuses could have been an outgrowth of harsh treatment" authorized by the Pentagon. (My italics.) And "although no direct links have been found between the documented abuses and orders from Washington, Pentagon officials . . . say that the hunt for [intelligence] data . . . was coordinated during this period by Undersecretary of Defense Stephen Cambone . . . long one of the closest aides to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The coincidence in timing . . . "

So, in this trial by inference, the evidence "suggests" that "potentially" abusive techniques were used that "could have been an outgrowth" of methods that cannot be "directly linked" to Rumsfeld unless the "coincidence" that his aide was in charge of collecting intelligence at the time is the smoking gun.

In opposition to this towering inferno of inferences, there is an actual fact: The statement of one of the abuser guards that the higher-ups would have stopped the abuses if they had known of them.

2. Selective agonizing.

Ever since the Abu Ghraib photos emerged, the media have shown them on every possible occasion, along with reports and editorials on America's shame and the world's revulsion.

The photographs are shocking evidence of shocking behavior and we should be ashamed they occurred under American auspices. But they are not the only story in the world. Objectively considered, the UN's "Oil for Food" scandal is a far bigger story, involving the starvation of children. Interestingly, the media have been happy to forget it entirely in all their excitement over Abu Ghraib.

Then again, worse rape and brutality than that displayed in Abu Ghraib are known to occur daily in America's prisons without arousing any media interest at all.

And the photographs of prisoner abuse are not remotely as shocking as the pictures of Nicholas Berg being beheaded by Islamist terrorists. You might imagine that the beheading of an innocent American would be replayed endlessly.

3. Taking dictation from terror.

Before we leave Berg, we should note that a vast number of news outlets reported that he was murdered "in retaliation for" the Abu Ghraib abuses. That was the terrorists' own justification. They shrewdly judged that the Western media would eagerly accept it. And they were right. The "retaliation" explanation transferred the blame for Berg's death from the actual murderers onto George W. Bush and the United States. But as the sharp-eyed Australian blogger, Tim Blair, pointed out, the terrorists abducted Berg about two weeks before the Abu Ghraib scandal surfaced. Was that abduction in retaliation for something else?

4. Willing gullibility.

Two newspapers -- the Daily Mirror in Britain and the Boston Globe -- have published fake photographs of British and American soldiers abusing prisoners. In the British case the fakes were quickly detected once they had been published, and in the U.S. case, they had been detected before the Globe published them.

Neither the media's vaunted "skepticism" nor simple fact-checking on the Internet were employed by the papers. The fakes were, in the old Fleet Street joke, "too good to check." As Mark Steyn argued Sunday, the journalists wanted to believe they were real. Indeed, it is worse than that -- since the fraud was discovered and the Mirror editor fired, he has become a heroic figure in British circles hostile to Blair and the war.

Admittedly, reporters and editors make mistakes. But when all the mistakes are on the side of opposing the liberation of Iraq, and none of the mistakes favor the United States or Britain or Bush or Blair, it tells you something.

Namely, which side they're on.