While you weren't looking, torture apparently became OK for the CIA and military, ex-CIA agent Robert Baer said on ABC tonight:

The CIA inspector general is now investigating the deaths of three prisoners during CIA interrogations in Iraq and Afghanistan, ABCNEWS has learned....

If the allegations are true, it would represent a huge departure from what had been CIA policy on the use of torture.

"It was absolutely barred," said Bob Baer, a former CIA officer who was one of the first outsiders into Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison last year after the fall of Saddam Hussein. "Not only that, before we went overseas, we were made to read regulations. No torture. You don't participate, you don't do it, you don't watch it."

Baer said the rules changed after the 9/11 attacks.

"It was systematic and the policy has changed since I was in the CIA, and it's changed in the military as well," he said.

The U.S. Army's own report on the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison found that Army military police "were directed to change procedures" to "set the conditions" for military interrogations....