SHIT HAPPENS

The International Committee of the Red Cross warned many high officials in the U.S. government last January and earlier that it had observed widespread abuse of Iraqi prisoners "tantamount to torture." The ICRC characterized this treatment not as the aberrant behavior of a few but "a pattern and a system," which, like the Army's own report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, gives the lie to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker and his boss, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Meyers.

Schoomaker claimed as recently as yesterday in his Senate testimony that what happened at Abu Ghraib prison was the "inexcusable behavior of a few."  He was hewing to the line set by Meyers, who, you may recall, spent last weekend on the morning talk shows blaming a mere "handful" of low-ranking soldiers and complaining about inaccurate reporting by the press.

On the same day of their testimony in Congress, the ICRC director of operations, Pierre Kraehenbuehl, said the abuse represented more than isolated acts, and the problems were not limited to the Abu Ghraib prison. "We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system," he told a news conference in Geneva.

The ICRC's 24-page report, leaked Friday in The Wall Street Journal, "described prisoners kept naked in total darkness in empty cells at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison and male prisoners forced to parade around in women's underwear. Coalition forces also fired on unarmed prisoners from watchtowers, killing some of them."

Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, and U.S. military commanders were given this report, which summarizes previous ICRC investigations, in February. (The ICRC, based in Switzerland, is a neutral organization. Under the Geneva Conventions it visits prisoners of war and others detained by an occupying power, to see that countries fulfill their obligations under the 1949 accords.)

Equally astonishing are this morning's revelations in The New York Times that the official "who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time."

The official, Lane McCotter, 63, "later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs." And who picked McCotter and the others? That exemplary enforcer and protector of the law, none other than Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As Fox Butterfield reports: "When Mr. Ashcroft announced the appointment of the team to restore Iraq's criminal justice system last year, including Mr. McCotter," here's what Ashcroft said: "Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in their native land, and we will help make that freedom permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable criminal justice system based on the rule of law and standards of basic human rights."

You might conclude from this that our Maximum Leader's apology to the world for America's moral hypocrisy is less than sincere. You might even conclude from this that "torture and abuse" (to use Sen. Edward Kennedy's forthright phrase in yesterday's Senate hearing) is as American as apple pie. To read Butterfield's report, you wouldn't be wrong.

"Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern," he writes. Merely have a look at the photo of the naked Araqi prisoner bound to a bed in Abu Ghraib with women's panties covering his face (fourth image in the Washington Post slideshow) and compare it to Butterfield's description that prison inmates in Pennsylvania and other states "are routinely stripped in front of other inmates," and in an Arizona jail male inmates "are made to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation."

The ugly icing on this rotten cake? Experts told Butterfield, "the worst abuses have occurred in Texas," where the prison system had to be put "under a consent decree during much of the time President Bush was governor because of violence by guards against inmates. ..."

So when our Maximum Leader, his Rummy boy and the Pentagon generals defend American honor with, respectively, expressions of regret, a deep apology, and hangdog looks on their faces, it should surprise no one that people will doubt their sincerity.