No easy explanations for prisoner mistreatment

There is nothing easy about the scandal that has erupted over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison at the hands of American soldiers and interrogators.
Certainly it is not easy to look at the picture that have been broadcast. Hooded prisoners remind Americans of images of another day, the blindfolded American hostages who were paraded around the American Embassy in Teheran when young Iranian fundamentalists took their hostages. Those images of a quarter century ago inflamed the American public.
People instinctively understand that being deprived of sight while being herded from place to place by hostile handlers is frighteningly cruel.
Add to the hoods the nakedness, the piling of bodies on top of bodies, the smiling images of the uniformed guards, the accusations of sexual assault and it is difficult to predict the anger that Iraqis would feel in seeing the those images.
It is not easy , either, to understand how this scandal could have been allowed to fester for months, until an American television network finally exposed it last week.
How could the 53-page report outlining an initial investigation sit on the desks of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers for months without being read. Did no one recognize the explosive implications of this breakdown of discipline at the prison? The damage that has been done to the U.S. image abroad is clearly incalculable, yet no one felt the investigation rose to the level of giving the White House a heads-up until after the images appeared on "Sixty Minutes II" last Wednesday. Even then, as of Sunday, both Rumsfeld and Myers said they hadn't yet read the report.
The Pentagon's own investigation showed that Abu Ghraib was a prison out of control, with military superiors "directly or indirectly" authorizing "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" of prisoners. "Military intelligence interrogators and other U.S. government agency interrogators actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses," says the report.
It isn't easy to understand how the situation at Abu Ghraib was allowed to deteriorate. Where was the breakdown in training, preparation and chain of command? Why are private contractors, who are apparently answerable only to their corporate employers, doing the work of the army and CIA, giving U.S. regular and reserve troops instructions on how to soften up prisoners for them? Why were complaints and warnings from the international Red Cross and Amnesty International ignored?
President Bush attempted, with questionable success, to diffuse the situation by going on two Arab television networks to assure the people of Iraq and their Middle Eastern neighbors that those who abused the prisoners will be brought to justice.
Clearly the soldiers who were foolish enough to pose for the incriminating photos will be punished, and their supervisors will see their military careers end. But punishing the shadowy private contractors will not be easy. To date none have been charged or publicly identified.
The questions that have been raised in the week since this story broke must be answered fully and as quickly as possible. The only way that is going to happen is through a thorough congressional inquiry.
The image of the United States has been severely damaged. The ramifications of the abuse at Abu Ghraib and, possibly, other detention sites will be enormous.
There can be no making excuses for what happened. Neither justice nor America's interests will be served by rationalizations. Only the truth about what happened, punishment of those involved and a public explanation of what is being done to assure no such future abuse will do.