The revelations about the torture and abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are a stain on the honor and reputation of the United States that will not soon be washed away. According to the available evidence, the mistreatment of prisoners at this American-run facility was not the work of a few “bad apples,” as the Bush administration would have us believe, but rather a systematic and widespread practice sanctioned at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

The majority of those incarcerated at Abu Ghraib — some 70 to 90 percent, according to one source — were in fact innocent of any wrongdoing. Yet these hapless individuals were subjected to a litany of horrors, including “physical abuse, sexual humiliation, physical and psychological torture, and rape.” The abuses were not limited to Abu Ghraib, but were part of a “wider pattern of torture and brutal treatment at American overseas detention centers, including those in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay.”