It may appear that everything already has been said about the revelations of despicable abuse of Iraqi prisoners by United States forces, both service and contract personnel. For weeks, the debate has raged, although in predictable directions: Administration officials in damage control and seeking to deflect fingers pointing up the chain of command, Congressional hearings attempting to get to the bottom of something, progressives declaring another failure of American policy and purpose in Iraq, conservatives seeking to isolate the events and to suggest that these prisoners are no different than others throughout the countryside firing rocket propelled grenades at United States troops, and the Muslim community enraged by another example of Western callousness. Calls for Administration resignations or impeachments, and so on. Beltway banter.

These all-too-expected reactions have only added layers of response to the pitiable actions themselves, one layer upon another, preventing rather than permitting the deeper lessons from coming forth. There are deeper messages. They are about a failure of the human spirit, a reminder of pervasiveness of evil in an atmosphere of war, and a mirror held up the abuse of prisoners around the world, including here.

Taking the last message first, it must be said more often than so far, that the Iraqi prisoner abuse story is a story played out daily in prisons around the world. If the concern about this prisoner abuse is truly a concern about that rather than about the tarnished image of American foreign policy, and if the demand for reform of abuse is truly a demand about that rather than avoiding uncomfortable images on the evening news, then attention must be paid to prisoner abuse in every prison right here in the United States.

Americans must recognize that abuse of prisoners in American prisons is not the faded image of a black-and-white Hollywood film noir about Alcatraz. Each day prisoners are humiliated, beated, raped, humiliated, diminished, squeezed. There are 23 hour lockdowns, deprivations of every imagination, the absence of any positive human contact, the mindlessness of routine, and every effort made to crush independence and to kill hope.

American prisons might be cleaner, visits might be more available, the food might not have as much insects, as elsewhere. Maybe the television works once in awhile. There might be a library with books published since 1970. But prison is not an enlightened approach to punishment for crime, because we have no enlightened approach to punishment for crime. It is a system of violence that will only beget more violence because that is all that the system knows. There is nothing about the warehousing of prisoners that encourages the emergence of a better person when the sentence is over. The entire process is an abuse of a human being.

America has a greater percentage of its population incarcerated than any other nation. We lock them away and forget about them. And there are no digital camera photos, no statements, no Congressional hearings. If we are to care about prisoner abuse, we need look no farther than our local detention center or state penitentiary. If we seek reform from prisoner abuse, our contact cannot only be to the commander of US forces in Iraq.

The abuse of prisoners is also a daily reality around the world. International groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch year after year document such abuse. Some is done with the excuse of interrogation, some out of spite, some for reasons even darker. To the extent it is done in countries receiving American political and economic support, and has gone on for years, then greater indeed is our shame over that as well as what is happening in Iraq. To the extent that we deliberately export these tactics, permit their use, teach them in the School of the Americas, or look aside while the are still applied with vigor to keep "communists" from gaining a "foothold" in "our backyard," that shame is so much doubled.

It is a shame that the Arab world should share. More than one observer has noted that the Arab world was not nearly as incensed over prisoner abuse in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was in power, and there have been precious few stories on Arab television networks over the years about prisoner abuse in places like Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Indonesia, or Morrocco. If the Arab world is concerned about prisoner abuse, it could have spoken out sooner and louder, and it not be directing its anger only at US forces in Iraq.

The second message is about war. The dehumanization of the enemy, so much a part of the warfighting mentality, begins with name calling (remember "gook" and now "rag head"?). It never ends there. Bit by bit, one convinces oneself, with the full support of the military mentality one is steeped in, and the encouragement of one's combat peers, that the enemy deserves every occasion of pain and suffering to be inflicted upon them. So once the enemy becomes a prisoner, and that mentality mixes with the domination dynamic which studies and experiments have shown is a byproduct of the prison system--along with a pervasive 9-11 revenge that has afflicted too many Americans--prisoner abuse is a foregone conclusion. So we have abuse of these prisoners, in this prison, by these troops.

Americans thought they were better than that--although we have forgotten images of 30 years ago or even more recently. We are not. No one is. And so the need for extreme care and attention to prisoner treatment, with clear policies and rigorous monitoring. The failure of those safeguards is among the greatest failures in this story of prisoner abuse.

The third and most difficult message is contained in the first two: we have not progressed as far as we believe. Despite the trappings of a plugged-in civilization and luxurious lifestyle (compared to the rest of the world), American troops still belong to greater humanity, vulnerable, susceptible, with civilization a thin veneer, and sadism below the surface. The human spirit itself remains fragile, not far from greater brutalities of the not so distant past, where unspeakable torture methods were a fact of life--employed even in our own early Colonial history. We surely would like to forget that it was the "civilized" nations of England and France and Spain which developed and perfected a chamber of horrors used regularly to dispatch enemies of the state and to ensure the political and religious status quo. Care indeed should be taken where we place blame, when that shadow crosses our history again.

Finally, the prisoner abuse story is the fall of the last domino of American justification for the war upon Iraq. The deceit of weapons of mass destruction has been revealed for what it was. The excuse of ridding the world of a dictator and his regime rang hollow when compared to dictators America has supported--including this one. The bringing of election-style democracy remains a sham in a country not ready, willing, or able to hold a single election anywhere--surely in part due to the malaise and chaos generated by two devastating wars separated by 10 years of malicious economic sanctions, all of which brought by or supported by the United States. The last excuse was bringing American style justice and freedom to a people lacking both and needing both. And with these revelations, that is gone, too.

Now, it is more clear that the reasons are what they always were: power, greed, arrogance, domination, and vengance. Over this, a shadow we still cannot banish. The sorrow of it will be with us for a long time.

C. William Michaels is an attorney living in Baltimore. He is the author of "No Greater Threat: America After September 11 and the Rise of a National Security State" (Algora, 2002) about the USA PATRIOT Act and the development of a national security culture. See www.nogreaterthreat.com. He can be reached at cwmichaels-AT-igc.org.