Morning Edition

[Transcript]

President Bush has said that the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison do not represent the America he knows. 

I don’t disagree. But that misses a vital point: Americans are as likely to do terrible things as anyone else.

What’s different is that we Americans have a system in which those responsible for the kinds of crimes that took place at Abu Ghraib will be exposed, investigated, prosecuted and punished. 

We have freedom of speech and of the press and the rule of law. 

That wasn’t true in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. It’s not true in neighboring Iran or Syria or Saudi Arabia.

Many political systems – from communism to fascism to radical Islamism – aim to create a perfect society. 

By contrast, America’s founders didn’t design a political system to make bad people good or achieve utopia. They designed a system that takes human nature as they found it. 

What we are seeing today is precisely how the institutions of American democracy work.

Last fall, under pressure from non-governmental organizations, the civilian administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, asked the military to review conditions in Iraqi prisons.

 In January, a member of the Military Police Brigade told his superiors in Baghdad that guards were mistreating detainees in Abu Ghraib.

Within days a report was forwarded to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. A few days later, an investigation began.

Even before the New Yorker magazine and CBS latched on to the story, a criminal investigation had resulted in charges against six soldiers – and that’s sure to be just the beginning.

By contrast, in North Korea, newspaper columnists are not blasting the government for failing to make the railroads safe, despite the recent train explosion that leveled a school.

In Iran, radio talk show hosts are not in a rage over the oppression of religious minorities.

In the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority, there’s no great public debate about whether shooting a pregnant mother and her four daughters at point-blank range might be something other than an act of heroic martyrdom.

Like most Americans, I’m ashamed that Americans took sadistic pleasure in humiliating and abusing prisoners.

It wasn’t like Saddam feeding dissidents into an industrial shredder.

It wasn’t like the butchering of Nick Berg, an American who went to Iraq to help in the reconstruction effort. 

But it was cruel and – let’s hope – unusual punishment. And it was weirdly decadent.

I have the freedom to say that on the radio, and to demand that all those who participated, encouraged or even turned a blind eye to these abuses get the book thrown at them.

Democracy is better than dictatorship.  Freedom is better than oppression.  And prosperity is better than poverty . That’s what most Americans want for Iraqis. And, I’m convinced, it’s what most Iraqis want for themselves.

Not because freedom and democracy are a cure for the failings of human nature. But because they’re the best means anyone has devised to cope with those failings.