One of the more striking items on the wall of Rep. Mike Rogers , the Michigan Republican, is a framed, gleaming steel hatchet. It was fashioned from the hulk of a Soviet tank destroyed by U.S.-backed mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan 20 years ago.

Today the hatchet seems less the fierce symbol of a U.S. military triumph than a melancholy reminder of how much more complicated things have gotten in Afghanistan the second time around.

In May, Rogers inadvertently made just that point when he returned from Afghanistan with a charge that American interrogators were regularly reading terrorist detainees their rights, including the right to a lawyer.

“I was a little surprised to find it taking place when I showed up because we hadn’t been briefed on it, I didn’t know about it,” said the congressman, a former FBI agent himself.

“We’re still trying to get to the bottom of it, but it is clearly a part of this new global justice initiative,” he said, referring to the Obama administration’s effort to extricate the United States from the legal mess created by its predecessor’s detention policies.

Needless to say, Rogers’ complaints were wafers and wine for fellow Hill Republicans, conservative cable yackers and editorialists.

Message: Obama, soft. Liberals, beyond the pale.

“A Mirandized terrorism detainee cannot even be interrogated,” went a typical screed, in Investors Daily. “A hostile combatant who might have information that can save lives on a foreign battlefield or in an American city has the option, one he is sure to take, to just remain silent — that is, until he begins to taunt his interrogators while his lawyer is present.”

Well, no.

It should hardly need saying that a detainee can always refuse to talk, whether he’s denied a lawyer or a walk in the woods. But let’s say it anyway.

“Whether a person is Mirandized or not, he can remain silent,” Marion “Spike” Bowman, a former senior legal counsel to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III , pointed out for me.

“Interestingly, with a good interrogator, most do not,” added Bowman, who was also at one time a legal adviser to the Navy’s elite counterterrorism unit, SEAL Team Six.

“A Mirandized person may be interrogated — whether he responds is a different matter,” Bowman said. “Some, in fact, related details that ratted out relatives. The Arab culture is not like ours and the ‘right to remain silent’ is not a part of their culture.”

Famed former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan recently related how he broke one captured terrorist who hadn’t been talking with the offer of a sugar-free cookie. The suspect was a diabetic.

In any event, reading certain terrorist detainees their rights is nothing new.

The FBI and Justice Department have been doing it at least since 1998, when Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald flew to Kenya to interview Wadih el-Hage, a suspect in the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa. El-Hage, a onetime personal secretary to Osama bin Laden, was subsequently convicted in federal court in New York and sentenced to life in prison.

Indeed, any such “officer of the court,” which can include an FBI agent, has no choice but to follow the law in interrogations.

“We don’t have any extra-legal capabilities like the [CIA] does,” said an FBI counterterrorism specialist. “We have to behave in a constitutional fashion whether we want to or not.”

Today the FBI and Justice Department insist that very few captives are informed of their right to counsel — only those tied to acts that are potentially prosecutable.

The rest are turned over to CIA or military interrogators, who, it also should hardly need saying, have not been celebrated for coddling prisoners.

As Mueller said in his June 12 letter to Rogers and Rep. Frank R. Wolf , R-Va., “there has been no policy change and no blanket instruction issued for FBI agents to Mirandize detainees overseas. For years, FBI agents have been trained to analyze whether Miranda is appropriate to use on a case-by-case basis  . . .  if prosecution in the United States may occur.”

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd repeated much the same and added: “Miranda warnings have been provided to Bagram detainees in only a small handful of cases out of more than 4,000 individuals detained and interrogated by the FBI.”

As for the idea that interrogations have been taken over by latte-sipping, Euro car-driving, Twittering liberals more concerned about terrorist rights than American lives, Boyd drily added, “Several of these Mirandized interviews in Afghanistan took place before Jan. 20, 2009.”

In case anybody missed it, that would be before President Obama was sworn in.

But Rogers insists something new is going on.

Mueller was using “very clever parsing of words” to disguise what, in fact, was a new administration policy of treating a far greater number of detainees as “high value” in order to prosecute them, Rogers suggested, which requires reading them their rights.

Having declared its intention to close Guantánamo, the Obama administration had to find a new destination for captives: the courts.

The problem with that, Rogers complains, is that extracting intelligence from captives was being sacrificed in the name of prosecuting them.

“The change here is to do just that, to shift from an intelligence priority to a law enforcement priority,” he said. And the result was grim, he charged: “Anytime that you offer confusion in that environment that’s already chaotic and confusing enough, you jeopardize a soldier’s life.”

“I’m telling you, it was being implemented,” added Rogers, who slipped his minders at Bagram long enough to join a regular morning meeting of FBI, CIA, Defense Department and other U.S. agency personnel involved in interrogations.

“I saw it. I talked to people who were doing it,” he said.

Justice Department representatives were bracing their CIA counterparts, who operated under cover names at Bagram, with the prospect of having to testify in court.

“I overheard a discussion that was a little bit strained,” Rogers said. They were assuring apoplectic CIA personnel that “We’re not going to take your false names from you.”

Bowman, Mueller’s former legal adviser, said there is problem that has to be finessed when the FBI and CIA are working together.

“The issue often arises when FBI creates 302s,” the reports agents write up after an interview, Bowman said. “They are required to list everyone in the room, so the CIA people excuse themselves from the interrogations because FBI cannot list them in alias.”

Everything he saw at Bagram and has been told since is contrary to the assurances he got from Mueller, said Rogers, whose amendment to the intelligence authorization bill (HR 2701) prohibiting government funds from being used to Mirandize detainees, was adopted late on June 18 by the House Intelligence Committee.

A senior FBI official later confirmed to him that the policy “was already being coordinated with the CIA and DoD,” he said.

I asked the former G-man if he was calling the head of the FBI a liar.

He paused.