A prison, a symbol and a culture that must be ended

It is one year now since the American CBS network made public the first shocking pictures of abuse at Abu Ghraib. Shameful evidence of the human capacity for cruelty, the images sped around the world. But they did not just shock. They seemed also to confirm the covert and sordid aspects of the occupation that had until then remained concealed. They demolished at a stroke the US claim to moral superiority in its intervention in Iraq.

It is one year now since the American CBS network made public the first shocking pictures of abuse at Abu Ghraib. Shameful evidence of the human capacity for cruelty, the images sped around the world. But they did not just shock. They seemed also to confirm the covert and sordid aspects of the occupation that had until then remained concealed. They demolished at a stroke the US claim to moral superiority in its intervention in Iraq.

Twelve months on, the images of humiliated and hooded prisoners remain seared in the memory. The US military and civilian authorities have conducted numerous inquiries. And what has been the outcome? Seven US soldiers have been convicted in connection with the abuses. They include the presumed ringleader, Charles Graner. Two more, including Lynndie England, the soldier notoriously pictured holding a prisoner on a dog-lead, await trial next month. These are the individuals, it should be noted, who could not duck the blame, because their guilt was recorded in photographs.

Of the five officers in charge, only the latest arrival and most junior in rank, General Janis Karpinski, was found in any way culpable. She was relieved of her command and given a written reprimand. No one in the Pentagon or the White House has been held to account. The White House counsel who reportedly advised on the legality of a tougher interrogation regime for prisoners has been promoted to Attorney General. President Bush's promise to have Abu Ghraib torn down, which would have been the simplest show of contrition, has not been honoured.

Saddam Hussein's grim edifice stands, and it is still a prison. But Abu Ghraib has come to signify much more than this building and the crimes perpetrated within its walls. It stands for the whole complex pattern of cruelty, humiliation and, yes, torture, that agents of the US administration have visited upon their captives. From Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay and back to Iraq, the US has flouted every international safeguard in the book. When even the flimsy cover of US law was deemed too protective, prisoners were handed over to regimes less discriminating about the methods of interrogation they use.

Any distinction between the post-11 September "war on terror" and the efforts to pacify Iraq has long since been erased. And if George Bush has begun his second term by trying to show a friendlier and more co-operative face to the world, the message seems not to have reached the Pentagon. The US inquiry into the killing of Italy's head of intelligence in Iraq, Nicola Calipari, is said to exonerate the US Army. According to the freed Italian hostage whom Mr Calipari died trying to protect, the findings bear little resemblance to the events as she recalls them.

Whatever fatal errors were made that evening, for whatever reason, the very least that Italy could have expected was an admission of responsibility and an abject apology. The US has fallen short on both counts. The damage to the Italian government's credibility from its involvement in Iraq was evident from the local election results two weeks ago and the subsequent collapse of Italy's longest-lasting coalition since the Second World War.

US forces are hardly unique in committing excesses and errors in foreign wars. Nor have the - many fewer - British troops deployed in Iraq been entirely without reproach. But the "war on terror", as waged by the US, seems to have fostered a very particular culture of power, fear and insecurity in which almost anything goes so long as it is deemed to serve this single cause. This is where the abuse at Abu Ghraib had its origins - and we have yet to see it thoroughly renounced.