"You are doing a superb job and our nation owes you a debt of gratitude". So said President Bush yesterday to his Secretary for Defence, Mr Donald Rumsfeld. "This is a great crisis for the government of our country." So the US ambassador to NATO, Mr Nicholas Burns, told a German audience in Berlin about the scandal surrounding the torture of prisoners in Iraq.
Mr Bush's high profile visit to the Pentagon along with leading members of his administration was clearly intended to put the crisis behind him by restating the overall policy on Iraq and insisting those responsible will be brought to law. But Mr Burns's comments underline the difficulties they face in so doing, not least because of open disagreements within the administration about how the crisis should be handled.
The intensification of reports about how prisoners were ill-treated will make it much more troublesome to draw a line in the sand under the issue. Yesterday the International Committee of the Red Cross issued detailed reports of mistreatment amounting to torture, saying it has been aware of them for at least a year. According to Mr Pierre Kraehenbuehl, its director of operations, there is "a pattern and a system" involved.
His findings are consistent with emerging information that US and British military intelligence personnel have applied well-known techniques of interrogation and fear built up over decades of fighting resistance movements and enemies in wars. Whether this amounts to torture is an open question, subject to investigation under international and national law. It would be naive not to recognise that such things go on in a war; and it should be noted that the officer in charge of the US military intelligence operations in Iraq previously commanded the extra-legal prison in Guantanamo Bay. But whether the shocking techniques of cultural and sexual humiliation are part and parcel of this approach, or a culpable departure from accepted norms, is hotly disputed.
Either way, there can be no doubt that the callous practices revealed in these photographs have lost the US and its fellow-traveller, the United Kingdom, enormous credibility in its claims to represent civilisation against terrorist enemies; the ICRC report estimates that most of the more than 10,000 Iraqi prisoners subject to them have been innocent civilians. It is no wonder that resistance has built up so much against the occupation in such circumstances. Treating prisoners in this way became an egregious substitute for human intelligence on the ground, which did not flow as expected to a grossly under-resourced and increasingly unpopular occupation.
Mr Bush's decision to praise Mr Rumsfeld, not to bury him, is in keeping with his loyalty to his team and determination not to be deflected by the scandal. As the difficulties in Iraq grow, keeping Mr Rumsfeld and his policies in place will appear foolhardy rather than far-seeing.