The Scandal's Growing Stain

Throughout official Washington, there is little agreement about whether the malfeasance at Abu Ghraib was isolated or is symptomatic of a broad breakdown of interrogation standards. A senior White House aide says the abuse had nothing to do with interrogations but was the work of a handful of bad hats egged on by a ringleader who was doing it for kicks. "It was the night shift," he says. Military officers tell TIME that reserve Brigadier General Karpinski was responsible for the wrong-doing. "When a commander says, 'I didn't know,' that in itself is an indictment," says a senior officer serving in Iraq.

But the practices employed at Abu Ghraib may be more widespread than the U.S. has acknowledged. Human rights groups and many military experts say the Administration's approach to prosecuting the war on terrorism, including open-ended detention of captives, denial of due process and intense pressure to come up with "productive" interrogations, may have created a climate that fosters abuse. One U.S. official says that some FBI agents were well aware that the military was using "very aggressive" interrogation methods that would not be condoned in the U.S. An Army officer seems to confirm that. Among Arab men, he tells TIME, sexual insecurity is a powerful lever: fear of homosexuality and, almost as significant, female domination, are particular issues. "We don't like to talk about it," says the officer, "but it is working." If so, success has come at a staggering cost.

Losing the War

Once all the apologies were spoken, a battered Administration was searching for more tangible ways to repair the damage. Major General Miller has been hustled back to Baghdad to fix the prison system. He promised to halve the number of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and end the practice of hooding captives. But he refused to entirely rule out the use of other tactics, like sleep deprivation and "stress positions," if they were approved by a senior officer. A senior Pentagon official says Rumsfeld has taken a personal interest in coming up with a dollar figure to compensate Iraqis who have been wronged. Abizaid tells TIME that he thinks the outrage will fade as the U.S. demonstrates its willingness to take action against the perpetrators. "Our openness about it," he says, "is a lesson about the rule of law." As the President told Arab interviewers, "A dictator wouldn't be answering questions about this."

Nevertheless, the scandal has made it exceedingly difficult for the U.S. to build support for its faltering project in Iraq by pointing to good intentions. Bush has always seemed his most impassioned when he railed against Saddam's "torture chambers" and "rape rooms." As other rationales for invasion — like Iraq's alleged store of weapons of mass destruction — evaporated, the purpose of human liberation had remained. Even last week Bush was telling an audience in Michigan, "Because we acted, the torture rooms are closed." The newest inhuman prison scenes struck at the very heart of his claim that the U.S. was in Iraq to promote freedom and liberty. "This is our greatest strength," says Republican Representative Christopher Shays, "and we've blown it." For many Iraqis, no amount of U.S. generosity or contrition will ever erase the taste of humiliation conveyed by the photographs, especially given the symbolic importance of Abu Ghraib. It was Saddam's torture chamber, and now it's ours.

— Reported by Timothy J. Burger, James Carney, Sally B. Donnelly, Michael Duffy, Elaine Shannon, Viveca Novak, Douglas Waller, Michael Weisskopf and Adam Zagorin/Washington; Mark Thompson/Doha; Brian Bennett, Paul Quinn-Judge, Simon Robinson and Vivienne Walt/Baghdad; Helen Gibson/London; Simon Crittle/New York; and Scott MacLeod/Cairo