Abuse reports open new front in terror war

WASHINGTON -- Increasingly, America is waging two wars.

One is the far-flung fight against terrorism, the other the public-relations battle for the hearts and minds of would-be terrorists. And critics suggest the new headline-grabbing reports of U.S. abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base are threatening both efforts.

"We got ourselves a problem," Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., told military leaders the other day. "We got ourselves a communications problem."

His solution: an independent commission similar to the one for the Sept. 11 attacks that could investigate the legal and ethical issues surrounding those captured in the war against terrorism and chart a new course to repair a tattered U.S. image abroad.

The White House, though, opposes such a move. And the administration and its allies -- from the president to the Pentagon to Capitol Hill -- have launched a coordinated assault to push back, ensuring a harshly partisan debate into the summer.

The controversies have been boiling for months, fueled last year by stark photographs of naked Iraqis stacked in a pyramid at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad and stoked more recently by reports of abuse of detainees -- and the abuse of the Quran -- at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

At first, detainees, largely from Afghanistan, were held incommunicado, cut off from the rest of the world. But later rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court declared they were entitled to essential legal rights. And the more aggressive interrogation techniques approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have since been rescinded.

Still other controversies have swirled around a U.S. practice, called rendition, where some detainees have been dispatched in secret to prisons in other countries, where torture has been suspected.

President Bush denies any such intent to harm detainees. "We do believe in protecting ourselves," he said. "We don't believe in torture."

Nonetheless, persistent reports of U.S. abuse, including recently leaked prison photos of Saddam Hussein in his underwear, have given the United States a black eye abroad and raised questions about its commitment to human rights.

"Guantanamo has undermined our leadership, damaged our credibility . . . (and) drained the world's good will for America at alarming rates," said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has begun hearings on detainee issues. "These are not the policies of a great and just nation."

Amnesty International went even further in its latest worldwide report on human rights, likening Guantanamo to a "gulag" and drawing harsh rebukes from the administration and others.

"Nobody wants to miss the chance to get life-saving intelligence," New York University law professor Stephen Schulhofer told the Senate committee. "But we can't let our actions create dozens of new terrorists for every terrorist we capture -- and that's what now seems to be happening."

But what to do?

The legal issues alone surrounding the detainees are daunting in the new war on terrorism, where the Bush administration insists the detainees are not protected under the Geneva Conventions.

At best, Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., suggested there is a "crazy quilt" of legal opinion on the pressing issues.

He has promised better congressional oversight and, perhaps, new laws to set standards for detention and interrogation. But Congress is hardly racing ahead on the issue. And, in the meantime, there are calls to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

But where to move it?

"You're going to have a need for a place," said a senior administration official dealing with the detainee issues, "because a lot of these people have information, and we need a place to hold them where we can interrogate them and get this information."

Administration officials acknowledge that reports of abuse at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and other places have severely tarnished America's image, particularly in the Arab world.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for one, says even U.S. allies have complained.

"What I try to do when that comes up is to address those concerns," she told reporters at the State Department, to explain that the president has "an obligation, first and foremost, to protect the American people.

"There is an important balance to be met here," she said.

News of the abuses has been carried throughout the Middle East in newspapers and on Al-Jazeera and other Arab television networks, including first-person accounts from detainees who have been released.

And Al-Jazeera's Washington talk show host Hafez al-Mirazi said detailed accounts in the U.S. media have given the stories more visibility and credibility.

The United States has a "terrible" image problem, he said, suggesting it was losing its "high moral ground" in the region.

It's "very damaging," he said.

In an unusually pointed message to military leaders summoned to Capitol Hill, Biden asserted "you cannot win that war by a military response alone."

"We have to dry up those pools where they recruit. We have to deal with the 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. And . . . we're doing real badly on that part of the war. Matter of fact, it's a disaster."

And Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., was just as adamant, urging prompt consideration of the detainee problems by the administration, Congress and the courts.

"If we don't have the buy-in across the country and all three branches of government," he said, "we're going to lose this war, if we don't watch it."

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