SINCE THE END of April, the entire world has known what many of us have suspected for more than two years: The United States is turning a blind eye to the 1949 Geneva Convention, treating its prisoners of war (POWs) in whatever manner it sees as expedient.

The result? Americas politicians and electorate alike are starting to wake up to the fact that much of the rest of the world already unfriendly to the United States since the Bush administrations adoption of a bullying foreign policy is turning against America. Where it was once possible even in the Arab world to talk about liking America but hating its foreign policy, the currents of anger now run deeper.

Pictures, as US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was forced to admit before the US Congress in early May, speak louder than a thousand words. And with the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs photos of tortured, abused, humiliated and even murdered Iraqi prisoners the Bush administrations policy is now off the rails before the entire world.

George W. Bush has only one way of regaining a lasting measure of credibility after the exposure of the intolerable acts of inhumanity at Abu Ghraib: He must submit the entire US armed forces to international law and institutions. And he must withdraw his troops from the Middle East entirely as power transitions to Iraqis on June 30.

The world can forgive the latest American insanity only if the United States is able to signal convincingly that it is no longer a threat and a force for intolerance and this signaling must be done with deeds, not with lukewarm verbal apologies like those offered by Msrs. Bush, Rumsfeld and Powell.

The world reacted with an outcry of outrage over the latest evidence of US war crimes, but why are we so upset about a now-proven fact when there had been suspicion (even evidence) for nearly two years that America was not living up abroad to the principles it swears by at home? Did the United States not start operating its special prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for detainees from Afghanistan and beyond in November-December 2001?

Ron Edmonds/Associated Press Donald Rumsfeld feels the heat over the Abu Ghraib scandal.

And would public opinion the world over have been as outraged if the same type of pictures had shown Russians torturing Chechens? Or Iraqi insurgents humiliating US soldiers? Probably not, because much of the Western world believes Russians and Arabs hold human rights in low esteem in the first place.

Indeed, the level of outcry (particularly in Europe) shows the other side of the coin: The West, led by a self-confident America, is convinced of its superiority, particularly in respect to human rights. Now proven wrong, the West is shocked as are even the same Europeans and Arabs who stood against the unilateral Anglo-American invasion in the first place.

But why should we be? War is never a pretty thing. Atrocities are committed by every side in every conflict. That is what led Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States of America in the late 18th century, to declare There never was a good war or a bad peace. War is an ugly, barbarian enterprise, and no matter how it is justified, we should all know by now that it is never a clean operation easily controlled at whim from behind a desk.

Yet the entire world remains upset. After all, even many of those who oppose Bush and his politics have long held the notion in their hearts that Americans will always adhere to what they cherish most: freedom and respect for the basics of human rights for all even prisoners of war.

Virtually all of the American war crimes so far discovered are known to the public because they were revealed by the Americans themselves.

If nothing else, Abu Ghraib has proven to us that Americans are human beings, no different from citizens of any other nation in the world. There are good guys and bad guys, no matter what race, religion or nationality they hold. This is a fact that, first and foremost, Americas 280 million citizens must learn to accept. Only then might America cease to speak and act as it has since 9/11 as a nation that is somehow special or exceptional, superior to every other on the face of the earth Gods own country.

Journalist Tom Goeller

The simple fact is that American atrocities against POWs are nothing now. One could almost go so far as to say they are a tradition. Even in the Second World War, the US military failed to comply with the rules of the 1929 Geneva Convention, making exactly the same illegal distinction as today between regular POWs and special ones. This, despite the fact that the 1929 convention, like the 1949 treaty currently in force, does not differentiate between types of POWs. Under their terms, one is either a prisoner of war entitled to full protection under the law, or one is not.

In a harbinger of Abu Ghraib, the US military in 1943 opened a secret at Fort Hunt, Virginia, 17 miles south of Washington, DC. In a book written 50 years later, historian Tim Mulligan of the US National Archives revealed that only personnel assigned to Fort Hunt knew the facility was actually a specialized interrogation center for selected German prisoners of war.

At Fort Hunt, prisoners were isolated, interrogated and monitored for intelligence information. To take one particularly pointed example: German submarine commander Werner Henke was killed on June 15, 1944, after more than a year of intensive interrogation. He had to die, it appears, because he refused to reveal his boats technical secrets. Fort Hunts official version of Henkes death: He was shot while trying to escape but not at Fort Hunt. Instead, the death certificate claims Henke was at the official POW camp at Fort Meade in Maryland.

And why wouldnt it? The Fort Hunt interrogation camp didnt officially exist it was a black operation, one rather like Abu Ghraib, which like its predecessor, was the result of a program authorized at the highest levels of government, as renowned New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh suggested in a story last month.

Since 1947, Fort Hunt has been a park where it is more than pleasant to walk dogs.

There are similar allegations of atrocities planned and unplanned committed by US troops in more recent conflicts. In 1950, many historians say, a frustrated platoon of US troops massacred hundreds of refugees near the Korean village of No Gun Ri. In 1968, a platoon under the command of one Lt. Calley massacred villagers at My Lai in Vietnam.

But unlike the Fort Hunt example, No Gun Ri and My Lai (among others) are well-known and well-documented. Why? Because American soldiers had both the courage and consciences to speak out and make the atrocities public. In fact, virtually all of the American war crimes so far discovered are known to the public because they were revealed by the Americans themselves in a manner similar to what is now happening in the case of Abu Ghraib.

This fact must be kept in mind when we judge the Americans. They are alone in regularly revealing their own wrongdoings to the world. No other nation in history has proven to have the same courage. Even when their institutions fail, individuals stand up. Not all soldiers, they have proven, are sadists and criminals. Instead, there are men of courage who had the guts to stand up for justice and report suspected war crimes to their superiors. When that hasnt worked, many of them have gone to the press to make it all public.

I cannot imagine any other army in the world where brave acts like this could have happened with such regularity. In this aspect, at least, the US is certainly unique and exemplary.

But more important than an individual having the courage to right a wrong is that the entire nation summons up the courage to make it less likely that similar things can happen again. How should they do this?

First, the US military and the White House must give up the notion that there is a distinction between good POWs (those graciously granted their rights under the Geneva Convention) and bad POWs (the ones branded detainees who enjoy no rights at all).

Second, there is no justification for distinguishing between abuse and torture, as Rumsfeld did on May 5, somehow implying that one is less criminal than the other. To take it to the extreme: How would he feel if Congress had ordered him to strip naked before testifying? Would that have been abuse or torture?

Third and most important on the political level in the long run the United States must submit its own behavior to the oversight of international institutions. In 1998 in Rome, 120 member states of the United Nations adopted a treaty to establish for the first time in history a permanent international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague. The United States did not sign the treaty, and we now know why. The US military to say nothing of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush obviously feared they had something terrible to hide.

Speaking about the establishment of the ICC, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared, Our hope is that, by punishing the guilty, the ICC will bring some comfort to the surviving victims and to the communities that have been targeted. More important, we hope it will deter future war criminals, and bring nearer the day when no ruler, no state, no junta and no army anywhere will be able to abuse human rights with impunity.

The United States must be included. et

Tom Goeller is Washington Bureau Chief for the German weekly Das Parlament.