If nothing else, the post-elections violence illustrated the incapacities of our security sector as a whole. The National Security Intelligence Service has since come out fighting, insisting that it had the intelligence and, as it had passed it on, the buck stops with the police.

The Kenya Police Force, in turn, has trotted out the usual tired arguments about its lack of capacity to respond. And, for sure, the scale of the post-elections violence, indicated that capacity is a problem that needs urgent rectification.

Beyond capacity, there is also the question of attitude and institutional culture. And, as the current blame game and buck passing highlights, there is also the question of linkages.

Related to that is linkages with a security institution we have all tended to ignore. The military.

And I am not talking here even about how, when and where the military can be brought out to play within the country. If capacity is indeed an issue, all troops must obviously be brought to bear - under civilian command and again, within the boundaries of the Constitution and all freedoms and rights contained therein.

CORRECT ME IF I'M WRONG, BUT DID THE 1982 coup d'etat not force upon the military a whole host of reforms, including professionalisation?

And does our military not spend most of its time in United Nations peacekeeping operations, whose human-rights controls have become more and more rigorous following scandals from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Liberia and Sierra Leone?

That being the case, how is it possible that our military is violating human rights with such abandon in Mount Elgon?

The Independent Medico-Legal Unit, together with the Child Legal Action Network and the International Commission of Jurists-Kenya, has just released its investigative report into torture by the military in Mount Elgon.

It is terrifying reading.

ACCORDING TO THE REPORT, THE CIVILIAN population, particularly males between the ages of 20 and 30, are being subjected to what can only be termed as collective punishment.

Indiscriminate mass arrests are taking place. Those detained are forwarded to a military interrogation centre - Kapkota Military Camp. They are then tortured - there is no other word for it - for periods of several hours each day for up to five days.

The forms of torture allegedly range from severe beatings to humiliations of a sexualised nature to actual sexual violence (the insertion of gun butts into anuses, for example).

The astonishing thing is that this takes place before interrogation even begins - while torture can never be justified, it certainly can't be justified on the basis of information extraction in this case.

For, in the end, what the military relies on seems to be identification by informers among the so-called Sabaot Land Defence Force.

It is appalling. It is frightening. And it is absolutely unacceptable.

What sort of a country are we living in if this can happen - and in this day and age? When the then National Rainbow Coalition opened up the Nyayo House torture chambers, we were all promised: "Never again."

And while the SLDF has certainly terrorised its own community, the manner in which the military - at the behest of the Kenya Police - is going about stopping them is unacceptable.

Kenya is a signatory to the Convention Against Torture. Our Constitution forbids cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and torture.

We also have domestic legislation outlawing the same.

We should be grateful to IMLU for showing us the extent to which our international obligations, our Constitution and our laws are being breached. We should insist that the military desist - and that all those responsible for this - be held as accountable as we expect the SLDF to be for its actions.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission.