May 1, 2004 - "A year ago I did give the speech from the carrier saying we had achieved an important objective, accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein. And as a result, there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq. As a result, a friend of terror has been removed and now sits in a jail,"

Sometimes it seems that President Bush is just not paying attention. Either that or once Karen Hughes has taught him a canned response it just has to come out of his mouth without regard to the circumstances. Pronouncing himself “disgusted” at the treatment of Iraqi prisoners revealed in the shots seen round the world he promised to see that the perpetrators of those acts were properly punished. That was in the same breath that he defended his premature “mission accomplished” speech claiming that torture, rape and mass deaths had ended a year ago in Iraq.

Rumors about US methods of interrogation and treatment of prisoners and detainees have been circulating for more than a year. We have been ready to dismiss them as so much anti-American propaganda circulated by our enemies. Inhumane treatment of prisoners is so antithetical to American values that the idea that there was a kernel of truth behind the tales was unimaginable. Not that we were above turning over prisoners to less squeamish allies and letting nature take its course that we would reap the benefits of increased intelligence as a result. But American soldiers torturing prisoners? Unthinkable!

Well, there were some minor exceptions, of course. An officer cashiered for having induced a recalcitrant prisoner to talk by holding a pistol to his head and then firing it; four GIs prosecuted for having beaten Iraqi detainees; but those were anomalies. Nothing like torture; nothing like rape; those incidents were just examples of ordinary Americans getting caught up in the moment and stepping over the bounds. The shots seen round the world have changed that perception.

We are supposed to believe that the atrocities of Abu Ghraib were the product of a few bad apples in an All American barrel. The photographs tell a different story. The scenes are elaborately staged with all kinds of props and equipment. It is inconceivable that the superior authorities did not know what was going on under their command.

One of the participants charged claims that the bad apples were encouraged to mistreat prisoners in order to prepare them for interrogation. He also lamented that he was never trained in the requirements of the Geneva Convention nor given any set of regulations as to how to treat prisoners. He is a reservist military policeman whose civilian occupation is as a prison guard described as “one of the best”. Have we come to the point in America that we are so desensitized that we must be trained in common humanity?

The President’s “disgust” statement reminds me of nothing so much as that classic scene in Casablanca in which Claude Raines pronounces himself shocked that gambling is going on at Ricks as the waiter hands him his winnings. We are shocked; shocked that the GIs at Abu Ghraib would be so comfortable with what they were doing as to photograph the scenes; shocked that a girl-next-door soldier would pose herself laughing at the end of a simulated scene of group homosexual sex; shocked that we are disgusted by not at all shocked at the realization that we call them detainees and not POWs so that we are not restrained in our treatment of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Baghram, or Camp Delta.

From General Janis Karpinski to Donald Rumsfeld to the President himself the excuse will be that they just did not know. But they picked up their intelligence winnings just the same when the prisoners broke. If they did not know how the prisoners were broken it was because there are some things that they just did not want to “know” and made damn sure that they did not. Now the world knows and the shots seen round the world will color America’s face to the world; your face and mine.