Abu Ghraib, American Values, and the Bush Administration.

This is a letter I had published in the Laredo Morning Times yesterday (May 20).

Tom Teepen's column Thursday argued that there is no moral equivalence between the torture and humiliation of Arab prisoners at Abu Ghraib by U.S. soldiers and contractors and the execution of Nicholas Berg by Iraqis. And he's right. The atrocities of Abu Ghraib were much worse and much less forgivable.

Every excuse you can make for Abu Ghraib can also be made for the Berg execution. It was performed by a relatively small number of individuals. It had no official sanction. The great mass of ordinary Iraqis were probably horrified and would have stopped it if they could. One could argue that the Berg execution was the logical result of a culture that has grown out of anti-American rhetoric, but it becomes increasingly clear that the Abu Ghraib atrocities grew out of a Pentagon culture that devalues Arab humanity and Arab life.

Nicholas Berg was killed. Investigations have already revealed that many prisoners at Abu Ghraib were also killed under U.S. authority. Also, intergender nudity outside of marriage is blasphemous under Islamic law, and homosexual acts, even simulated ones, are punishable by death. These were not just "fraternity hijinks," and the Abu Ghraib interrogators knew it.

Abu Ghraib is a case of flagrant and shocking abuse of power and authority. The Berg execution is a case of people who have no power or authority hitting back any way they can. I'm sure the Iraqi insurgents would prefer to take the world's most powerful air and land military and attack the United States, conquer Washington, and kill thousands of Americans "off camera." I'm sure they'd love to be able to embed and control the media, and call Americans defending their homeland and their capital city "terrorists" and "outside agitators." But they can't, so they have to settle. To say that the military killing of thousands is justified and the videotaped execution of one is not is to say that might makes right, a morally bankrupt philosophy.

It is worth remembering that we invaded Iraq without provocation and with no justification. It has been proven over and over again that neither Saddam Hussein nor the Iraqi people had anything to do with 9/11. Hussein was in full compliance with U.N. resolutions before the invasion. He was allowing weapons inspectors to go anywhere and everywhere - it wasn't his fault that there was nothing for them to find. Having controlled Iraq for more than a year, we now know that the WMDs Colin Powell describe to the U.N. simply did not exist.

Saddam Hussein was a dictator and a bad man. The world is full of those. He was no threat to the U.S. or the region. He had no military capability under the sanctions and could not so much as put an airplane in the sky. Of course, if other nations had the right to invade any country with dysfunctional leaders who were seen as a threat to world peace, the U.S. might have to watch out. But we are secure in our possession of the world's most powerful military, and might continues to make right for us. The morality of the situation become clear only after we get past the idea that Americans are always the good guys.

President Kennedy once said that the United States would never start a war. American treatment of POWs during World War II was a model for the world and led to the Geneva Convention. Those were our values once. Now we have an administration that has made political use of the national tragedy of 9/11 to make indiscriminate war on the Arab/Islamic world, attempting to create an American world empire as described in the Project for a New American Century (www.newamericancentury.org). It is frequently pointed out that unlike Iraqis, Americans can demand accountability through the courts and at the ballot box for Abu Ghraib and similar atrocities. But that is just a measure of our good fortune, not our good values, unless we do something about it.

The call goes out for moderate Arabs of good conscience to reject and repudiate Al Qaida, 9/11, the Berg execution, and other such violations of human decency and humane values. By the same logic, the U.S. has a responsibility to reject and repudiate the administration that invaded Iraq and brought us Abu Ghraib, if those atrocities really do not reflect our nation's values and beliefs.