Oh, I see.  I guess i must have found the wrong version of the documentation when I searched online.  I was giving a second arg which was a LongTensor that I was expecting it to use for indexing, but which I now see was ignored.
x = torch.randn(3,3)



x



tensor([[-1.4109, -0.0597, -0.8855],
[-0.6355, -0.6556, -1.9610],
[ 1.0115,  1.5676,  0.8374]])



x.permute((0,1), torch.LongTensor([2, 1, 0]))



gives the same as x.
I see now that what I was trying to do, you are supposed to do using indexing operators.