Most Americans, opponents and supporters of the war alike, have been surprised by the stories of prisoner abuse that are now flooding the media. But I don't think that we ought to have been surprised. War breeds sadism, and prisoner of war camps are one of the prime breeding grounds. It's not only the heat of battle, the fear and anger produced by combat, that is morally dangerous, but also the unchallenged power that comes with victory. Only a steady effort to maintain discipline and to train soldiers in the rules of war and the rights of prisoners will prevent abuse and atrocity. But that requires the commitment of political and military leaders, and our current leaders are visibly uncommitted. In fact, I think that most regular army officers believe in the rules; they are professionals, and their code of honor, as well as the legal and ethical code of jus in bello, excludes the mistreatment of prisoners. And they understand the reciprocity of the codes; they know that one day they may be prisoners themselves.

But the present government in Washington seems to operate without moral awareness and without any sense of the meaning of reciprocity. Rumsfield's Pentagon put Iraqi prisoners into the hands of reservists who were told nothing at all about the Geneva Convention, and of intelligence operatives committed only to the extraction of information, and of private contractors some of whom, apparently, were already experienced in both prison management and the abuse of prisoners. And the message communicated to these people was one of callous indifference or worse--for some of them concluded from the orders they were given that the humiliation of captured Iraqi men was part of their job. They were supposed to do what was necessary to weaken the men's resistance to future interrogations. All this is shameful, but I am afraid that it fits all-too-well alongside other attitudes and policies of the Bush administration. Consider two examples.

First, this administration is committed to privatization on a scale that far exceeds anything the country has so far seen. The privatization of prisons began, I believe, in the Reagan years, but the privatization of military prisons, of military occupation, maybe even of war itself--this is an innovation of Bush II. Partly, it's a way of hiding the costs of the war (also, probably, of increasing them), and so it undermines the structures of fiscal accountability. We have only begun to learn how many contract workers there are in Iraq today and how much they are being paid. But what is far more important is that these people are not accountable under US military law, and they have been granted exemption from any future Iraqi jurisdiction. If they commit crimes in Iraq, they have to be prosecuted in the US, and such prosecutions are very difficult. So the workers are effectively responsible only to their contractors, and the contractors are responsible only to the Defense Department (and only within the limits of their contracts), and the Defense Department is responsible to Congress and the people-except that Congress and the people are hardpressed to find out from Defense Department bureaucrats how many contractors there are and what they are doing. These successive responsibilities are the very opposite of transparent, and at this moment they don't seem to be democratically enforceable.

Second, Bush and his colleagues are contemptuous not only of the international enforcement of human rights, but of the rights themselves, whenever they conflict with the administration's political or military aims. In wartime, rights do have to be balanced against security, but there isn't much evidence of balancing in the last few years. The Attorney General seems committed to the establishment of a category of persons, "illegal enemy combatants," who are literally without any rights at all, who can be held incommunicado, indefinitely. The prisoners in Iraq presumably don't fall into that category; at least, most of them don't. But they certainly have not been treated as if they are rights-bearing beneficiaries of the Geneva Convention. A casual attitude toward the Convention is very much in the style of this administration. The same style is reflected in the fact that its members are much less worried about the violation of rights than about the photographs of the violations. Months of protests from the Red Cross brought no response; the frank and detailed (and, I suspect, very brave) report from General Antonio Taguba wasn't even read in the Pentagon-until the photos began to circulate.

All this shouldn't be surprising. We should be ashamed of ourselves for being surprised, for that is a sign that we have been hiding or repressing what we really know-that is, how authoritarian our government has become. We have to read in those awful pictures of young Americans humiliating and torturing young Iraqis the moral physiognomy of older Americans, who are running the show in Washington. The US government will now, I am sure, proceed to punish the young prison guards who appear in the pictures-and perhaps their immediate superiors. There will be military trials in Baghdad. But there is another kind of justice, political justice, that must be done in Washington. The leaders who fostered the climate of casualness about and contempt for international conventions and human rights must be forced to resign or defeated in the upcoming elections. What the courts do is very important; but what the people do is much more important.