Fawaz Turki, disinherited@yahoo.com

The President apologized. The secretary of defense took responsibility and expressed regret. The congress was outraged. The military was chastened. The whole nation was scandalized.

And well they might. The abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison facility in Baghdad is no small matter, particularly when the government responsible for it has master plans to introduce democracy, free markets, social justice and freedom to the Middle East, and never ceases to thump its chest at violations of human rights in derelict Third World countries.

This column suggested last week that what brought the abuses about was the climate of imperial posturing that the neocons, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as their top honcho, created on the eve of war. Where the column erred was to see these abuses as isolated acts by individual military personnel, a few Army reservists running amok, as it were. It now transpires that those repugnant practices had been the norm in several overseas prison facilities that the US established to incarcerate and extract intelligence from prisoners — prisoners designated as “illegal combatants” not eligible for the protections provided by the Geneva Conventions.

The scandal further widened last week with the admission by the army that at least 25 prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan have died in custody.

True, gratuitous cruelty of the kind depicted in those appalling photos would merit possible identification as war crimes. But Arab commentators who have joined the worldwide chorus of condemnation of those crimes should not flinch from writing openly about the inhumane and often sadistic treatment meted out to Arab political prisoners in the torture chambers found in many countries in the Arab world.

No sweet-talking here, please. It’s well and good to recognize the enormity of the horrors at Abu Ghraib, but to turn a blind eye to similar horrors routinely inflicted on prisoners in our own home ground is hypocritical; and to feel sympathy for them when they are assaulted by foreign troops but turn a deaf ear to their entreaties for help when they are similarly assaulted by fellow Arabs, is wishy-washy journalistic commentary.

Americans have taken the moral high ground by taking the Abu Ghraib case very seriously indeed. A string of courts-martial, dishonorable discharges, administrative discipline and prison time await those ultimately convicted in that case. And as far as higher-ups in government are concerned, heads will roll, beginning, most probably soon, with that of Donald Rumsfeld himself.

The only Americans who have not shown the slightest contrition are the neocons and the racists, with the vanguard of the latter represented by the likes of Sen. Joe Lieberman, who disingenuously connected what happened at Abu Ghraib to Sept. 11, claiming that there was no need for the president or any other American official to “apologize,” since those who attacked the US “never apologized to us,” but if an apology were to be made, it should be made because “Americans are different,” i.e. culturally and morally superior. It is precisely that kind of racism, to wit, that “others” are a lower species of men “different” from Americans, that created the climate that enabled US military personnel in Iraq to treat human beings there so barbarously.

During the hearing on the Hill last Friday, I saw the secretary of defense, sitting in a witness chair after he had been sworn in, sans his characteristic pomposity, being hectored, repudiated, badgered and interrupted — the whole 165 minutes of it. And the senators from the Armed Services Committee, who grimly and sternly hurled questions at him, appeared to tell the secretary, and indirectly the world, how horrified and shocked they were at what had gone down. Oh, yes, America is taking this case, I say, very seriously indeed.

My thoughts on leaving Congress that day? Gosh, I look forward to seeing similar oversight parliamentary bodies looking into acts of malfeasance by Arab officials in our own part of the world. Only then, I figured, can we feel justified in pulling rank on Americans when it comes to analyzing this whole sordid affair at Abu Ghraib.