Arab News Editorial

Some of the men held in Abu Ghraib prison deserve to be there. Among them are thugs who enforced the reign of terror which kept Saddam in power. There are also terrorists, some probably Al-Qaeda, who wish nothing but ruin on a free and independent Iraq and curse anyone anywhere who does not share their perverse and wicked bigotry.

Likewise in Afghan jails and in Guantanamo Bay there are men who represent a grave threat. Their fanaticism and dedication to the destruction of all who stand in their way ought swiftly to have been tried in a court of law. Yet any crimes these people may have committed are now of secondary importance. The focus has been refracted on to the way that their US captors are treating them.

The appalling revelations of the brutality at Abu Ghraib have spawned credible allegations of similar treatment at other detention centers in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan. Now two former British detainees from Guantanamo Bay have claimed in an open letter to President Bush that they were subjected to brutal and illegal treatment before being released after two years without charge. The already steady flow of protest at detainee mistreatment seems set to become a torrent. Observers especially in the Middle East will be predisposed to disbelieve the Americans. There has been too much duplicity behind the US invasion of Iraq and too great a betrayal of promises made to the Palestinians.

Washington made so much of saving Iraqis from the savage injustices of Saddam. That was indeed, once the WMD lie lay in tatters, the last excuse for the invasion. Though no one would claim that the coalition has behaved with the murderous savagery which saw the Baathists butcher 2,000 prisoners at Abu Ghraib in a single day, those abhorrent trophy photographs from the jail render every US serviceman guilty of contemptuous and racist mistreatment in Arab eyes.

Some of these detainees are innocent, others have probably committed the crimes for which they have been arrested. Yet Washington’s fudging of its own much-vaunted legal norms at Guantanamo Bay, since followed by what looks increasingly like institutionalized maltreatment of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, is proving a disaster. It is diverting attention from what the prisoners have done to what has been done to them, and rightly so.

The United States finds itself living up to its Al-Qaeda billing as an evil and unjust state. Every new claim of mistreatment is now going to be believed, no matter what the Americans do to try to disprove it. They have lost what little trust the world still had in them, they have forfeited every claim they may have had to be bringing the rule of law to a lawless part of the world. Only a truly extraordinary gesture can even begin to restore them.