LOOK HIGHER, DEEPER THAN PRISON GUARDS

Americans have thrown themselves into a frenzy of guilt, remorse, shame and
apology at the grisly accounts of abuse of Iraqi prisoners. And rightly so.
There is guilt enough to go around, for the military, Congress and the
defense officials who failed to exercise proper supervision.

Courts martial have been demanded and are apparently forthcoming, and there
are bipartisan calls for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

So far there have been few suggestions of punishment for President Bush,
who is ultimately responsible. It was, most people seem to agree, just
another case in which he didn't know what was going on, though he was given
written notice last winter that bad things were afoot in Iraqi prisons.

Public shock at the barbarism is mingled with uneasiness at the realization
that Americans are as capable of savage disregard for humane and moral
standards as others. There may be disquieting suspicions that we, too,
under the harsh realities of war, might have done as much.

Those familiar with the nature of war, of kill or be killed and of the
sometimes-necessary harshness inherent in the imprisonment of the enemy,
will perhaps feel less surprise. Military prisons have never been known for
leniency nor mistaken for spas. Mistreatment of Americans in American
prisons is legendary.

Neither is it surprising that some people -- remembering the four American
contractors murdered, burned and then hanged from a bridge by cheering
Iraqis -- would consider the treatment of Iraqi prisoners only just
repayment, a case of doing unto others as they have done to us.

This ignores, however, the fact that our prisons are supposedly instruments
of justice, not of revenge. And neither justice nor an attempt to win
respect and trust of those to whom we are supposedly offering freedom and
democracy can be achieved through punishment that degrades, humiliates and
sometimes kills.

There is also the disturbing fact, according to veteran war correspondent
Seymour Hersch in a current New Yorker report, that more than 3,000 of the
Iraqis penned in the hellhole of Abu Ghraib were simply scooped up in
dragnet raids, not guilty of violating any laws or trying to aid the enemy,
and eligible for immediate release.

They are not likely to emerge from detention kindly disposed to our
occupying forces or the government that we eventually install in Baghdad.
Such resentment, along with the fury sweeping much of the Arab world, is
not going to make our job any easier or hasten the day when we may
disengage from this costly misadventure.

There must linger the questions of who must pay and how. Punishment should
not, must not, be confined to the uniformed and privately employed
underlings who committed the actual atrocities. Cries are heard on all
sides for the resignation or firing of Rumsfeld, on the Navy theory that
the captain is held to blame for errors occurring on his ship.

But Rumsfeld -- a tough, intelligent, capable man -- has offered persuasive
evidence in his own defense, and if punishment comes down to a matter of
responsibility, it is hard to see how Bush can escape unscathed. The fact
that he received notice of wrongdoing in a vague and routine report does
not excuse him. It was his business to learn, to know and to act.

It is also argued that Rumsfeld should resign or be fired not just for
dereliction in this instance, but for his larger role in advising Bush in
his disastrous decision to rush to war against Iraq, largely without
supportable cause. But that can only raise the question of whether Rumsfeld
persuaded the president or was persuaded by him. Bush, excuses aside, must
shoulder the burden for this horrible mistake.

But some good may yet come of all this if -- after all the breast-beating
and recriminations abate and the fever for punishment subsides -- Americans
face the hypocrisy involved.

The public echoes what Bush repeatedly prates: that this incident does not
reflect the goodness of Americans, that we are not that kind of people,
that we would never permit it on our own. The untidy truth is that we do.

For the past decade, we have been building prisons as fast as we could
afford and pouring into them a flood of Americans, many of whom are treated
as brutally as any Iraqi.

Thanks to a hysterical fear of crime (the rate of which has, incidentally,
been falling for years) and the self-righteous fervor in Congress and state
legislatures for longer sentences for more crimes, more than 2 million
Americans are now imprisoned, not counting those in small jails.

Our per-capita incarceration rate is now higher than that of any nominally
civilized nation. And more than a quarter million of those incarcerated are
guilty of violating nothing more than our cruel, illogical and ineffective
drug laws.

The brutalities and indecencies heaped upon these marginal miscreants -- by
overworked, ill-trained and often sadistic guards, or by fellow prisoners
who frequently rule prison life -- defy description.

Their cost in money, lives and standards of decency are enormous. Yet the
general public pays a fraction of the attention to these conditions that
they give to the bloody mess in Iraq. We will benefit as a nation and a
people if our revulsion at the horrors in Iraqi prisons spur us to notice
the beam in our own eye.