The horrific photographs released over the last few days that have stunned the entire world mark a new depth to which the reputation of the US has sunk.
With promises of more and worse evidence of systematic abuse, torture and murder to come , it is no exaggeration to say that the war which the US was always struggling to win has now irredeemably been lost..
As if this wasn't bad enough, with all the focus on these dreadful pictures of jubilant US soldiers revelling in their sick humiliation of defenceless people, many people haven't noticed the increasing number of reports that the US army is also using slave labour in Iraq, in particular from India.
There are those that are trying to play down these monstrous events, with claims that 'the US is not the only one' citing other reports circulating that Britain too is involved in prisoner abuse. But while the allegations of abuse by British forces, if true, are also to be abhorred, there is as yet little evidence of the systematic abuse that seems to prevail among the US administered prisons.
Others will claim that the sort of humiliation and torture that the US routinely use is common in many Middle East countries, why all the fuss now?
These two arguments, almost exclusively from US commentators, once more serve to underline the rotting stench that has bceome embedded in the moral fibre of the United States.
To be fair, these people do not represent the US public, and as Bush's plummeting approval ratings demonstrate, the American people are now waking up and reacting with the appropriate disgust that the entire world feels.
But surely this is just confined to the war in Iraq?
It can't be happening elsewhere can it?
But it has and it does.
Evidence of systematic torture is emerging not just from Afghanistan, but from Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. The US has been deliberately sending its detainees to countries known for human rights abuses in order to get the information that they desire, by whatever method, more often than not from totally innocent people.
In short they have been sub-contracting the torture of detainees to private contractors, and this picture is also emerging internally in Iraq where private intelligence contractors have been used to 'interrogate' prisoners.
Back in Afghanistan:
"The United States is setting a terrible example in Afghanistan on detention practices,"
said Brad Adams, executive director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch,
"Civilians are being held in a legal black hole – with no tribunals, no legal counsel, no family visits and no basic legal protections."
It has now become routine for people in countries occupied by US forces to expect the dreaded knocking at or kicking down of the door in the middle of the night.
People are taken away, held without charge for months on end and tortured. Some have died at the hands of their interrogators, Bagram in Afghanistan and Abu Grahib in Iraq.
70% of those held at the Abu Grahib were eventually released and the full horror is underlined; the US had been torturing innocent people, just as Saddam did.
Saddam has been replaced by Uncle Saddam.
Such comparisons don't bear close scrutiny of course, but this is the perception on the streets of Iraq, and elsewhere in the Arab world.
'The torture is not the work of a few American soldiers. It is the result of an official American culture that deliberately insults and humiliates Muslims' (AL-Quds al-Arabi, a Lodon based Arabic daily newspaper).
But how did it come to this?
How could ordinary American men and women treat Iraqi and Afghani prisoners with such cruelty, and worse, laugh at their humiliation at their hands?
The answer I would suggest lies in the Bush's administration low regard for the law, of respecting the law only when convenient.
Over the last few years Bush has stated his view time and again that the law must bend to what the President deems is necessary. And so International law must yield to National Security, the American Constitution to his whimsical curbing of American freedoms.
And nowhere is this more clearly shown than in the showpiece of US flagrant disregard for the law, Guatanamo bay.
Bush decided that he would ignore the Third Geneva convention, declaring all the prisoners there, innocent or guilty, unlawful combatants.
This deliberate violation of the Geneva convention has cost the US reputation dearly in the eyes of the worlds legal communities.
Where once people looked to the US as exemplar in its unswerving commitment to law, they now looked on in disbelief at its unilateral disregard for basic human rights.
This disregard went so far as to refuse to hear claims of torture, as Lord Steyn, one of Britains leading judges points out.
At the time claims of torture were deemed faintly ridiculous against a country as noble as the US. Now we cannot be sure, and indeed must assume the opposite..
A second dark day in American legal history was to follow the shame of Guatanamo.
The Bush administration refused to be subject to the new International Criminal Court., put in place to punish breaches of law such as genocide and war crimes. It is now apparent why the US refused to be bound by its edicts, for by the rules of the International Criminal Court the US is guilty of war crimes.
But those Americans that would reply by sticking two pathetically defiant fingers up to the world should think on.
In the most radical departure from the law that has ever been seen in the US, Bush is now able to declare anyone that he likes an enemy combatant; that person can then be detained in solitary confinement indefinitely, without charges, without a trial and without a right to counsel.
People in the US shoulc now fear the knock at the door by the Secret Police,
These are not the actions of a morally superior, mighty power, these are the actions of the very dictator, Saddam, that the US toppled in Iraq.
In Bush's 2003 State of the Union address he chillingly announced that 3,000 suspected terrorists had been arrested in many different countries. And still more had suffered a more lethal fate,
'Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem for the United States'
Again, something that Saddam would be proud of. No matter if those slaughtered were innocent or guilty, whether murdered at a wedding party in Afghanistan or beaten to death as suspects.
Three quarters of a century ago, Justice Louis Brandeis observed,
'Crime is contagious. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breed contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself'
Nowhere has this become so apparent as in Iraq.
In the next post I will examine further how the US has lost the moral high ground that it once occupied, and the devastating consequences that this has produced for US interests.
yechydda,