I'M NOT HOLDING MY BREATH THAT THIS WILL BE BROADCAST ON CNN OVER AND OVER AND OVER

On a hot day last summer at Camp Bucca, Iraq, the iceman came but did not bring enough ice to be shared by the whole compound.

1st Lt. David Roberts, a military policeman with the Tennessee Army National Guard, remembers well how the cool stuff was distributed that day.

''The prisoners got ice, and the soldiers did without,'' Roberts said. Perhaps more than any other gesture, that indicates how seriously the 267th Military Police Company of Dickson took their mission of treating enemy prisoners of war in a humane way and in accordance with the Geneva Conventions rules, the officer said in an interview this week.

''Prisoners have never been treated as fairly as we treated them,'' said Roberts, who said he was as repulsed as the rest of the world by the photographs of nude Iraqis taken at a Baghdad prison by MPs from another unit.

''This has been a black eye for the MP corps, and that's a shame.''