In a Twitter posting, Hastings wrote, “to clarify @AP story: the embed had already been approved for september. now it has been disapproved.” He apparently was working on a story about helicopters and asked for the embed a month ago. The Pentagon acknowledged Tuesday that it had denied the request.

According to the Associated Press, Col. David Lapan “acknowledged that it’s ‘fairly rare’ for the military to turn way a reporter who wants to embed with front-line troops. ‘There is no right to embed,’ Lapan said. ‘It is a choice made between units and individual reporters, and a key element of an embed is having trust that the individuals are going to abide by the ground rules. So in that instance the command in Afghanistan decided there wasn’t the trust requisite and denied this request.’”

But Hastings says the embed was approved, which would show there was “the trust requisite” for at least someone in the military at one point.

Lapan’s vague use of lack of trust as a reason for denying an embed indicates a Pentagon public affairs office that will use this type of reasoning now and in the future to deny access to the troops in Afghanistan – or elsewhere – to any reporter who has written a story that someone in the chain of command finds annoying.

That is a serious precedent. If the military has no evidence that Hastings violated his embed agreement on a previous trip, the Pentagon ought to follow its own rules on his current embed request and approve it.

When Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced new rules requiring military officers and Pentagon officials to notify Gates’ public affairs shop before talking to reporters, a policy announced shortly after Hastings’ article was published, the secretary emphasized that he has often found news reports helpful, “a spur to action” to fix problems like the Walter Reed Army Medical Center problems a few years ago.

“This is not about you,” Gates said of those rules. “This is about us.”

The retaliatory attitude toward Hastings would seem to indicate otherwise.

For years, the U.S.-run prison at Bagram had been reviled and feared, and at least two detainees died while being held there. Detainees were until recently “housed in primitive pens made from cages surrounded by razor wire,” says Jonathan Horowitz, a researcher who has visited the place and whose work is supported by Open Society Institute. The prison now has a new name, Detention Facility in Parwan, and detainees are given brightly lit rooms, neatly pressed sheets on their beds and prayer blankets. On a broader scale, Americans are trying to make the detention system more transparent, creating a FaceBook page to showcase work, and they are planning to turn the system over to the Afghans in the next year or so.

The military recently invited journalists to a trial at Parwan, the first one that the Afghan government had held at the prison. The chief judge sentenced four men to prison for bomb-making, as The New York Times’ Alissa J. Rubin reported, while American lawyers and officers in the next room watched the proceedings on closed-circuit television set.

Handing over the detention system to the Afghans is already underway in other quarters, and the results are mixed. Dozens of Parwan detainees are sent to Pul-e-Charkhi, a facility located outside Kabul that has been renovated with U.S. government funds. Afghan trials are held for some prisoners, although the trials are based on largely evidence collected by the Americans, and the justice is uneven: Afghan guards allegedly pulled 16 men out of their cells one night in 2007 and executed them. Human rights advocates believe that the problems with the detention facilities, and the trials that are being held at Pul-e-Charkhi, are emblematic of a weak justice system that lies at the heart of Afghan instability.

“We are funneling billions of dollars into Afghanistan, and one of the main points of focus is strengthening Afghanistan’s rules of law,” says OSI’s Horowitz. “One of the reasons Afghans have shown sympathy for the Taliban is because of the way they bring speedy, although brutal, form of justice to communities, so even if the U.S. wasn’t handing its detainees and evidence files over to Afghans, there’s strong reason to be concerned about fairness.”

Experts believe that the chances of having an equitable, Afghan-run justice system in place by next year is unlikely. Americans may choose to leave at that point, but afterward the justice system may well deteriorate, sending the country into another downward spiral.