Last June, President Bush issued a statement in which he vowed that the United States would lead the way in the "worldwide elimination of torture." Has the president done enough to try to prevent the sort of abuses that occurred at Abu Ghraib, or has he created a culture that encouraged them?

There has been a culture of permissiveness with respect to interrogations that goes all the way to the top, including to Donald Rumsfeld. You see it first of all at Guantánamo, where the Bush administration basically ripped up the Geneva Conventions -- simply refused to apply absolutely straightforward provisions of the Geneva Convention with respect to who is a prisoner of war, what kind of hearing are they entitled to, things that were followed in other wars with enemies who were comparably hated.

The Bush administration just refused to apply these straightforward provisions. That automatically sends a signal that international law is not going to bind the United States in fighting its war on terrorism.

Second, [the administration has been slow to act] even in cases where there clearly has been abuse in the interrogation process. For example, in the cases of the two people who died in U.S. custody at Bagram Air Base about two years ago now, who were declared by the U.S. military [medical] examiner to be cases of homicide, still to this day there is no public accounting of what happened to the people who were responsible for those homicides.

What should Bush do now to send a different message -- or do you think he cares?

The President seems to care in the sense that this is a public relations disaster in the Arab world and elsewhere, so he seems determined to at least use a P.R. strategy here.

In a television interview aimed at Arab viewers, he said Wednesday that the photographs from Abu Ghraib do not reflect "the America I know."

Well, fair enough, but that's not enough. The issue is, why did this happen? It's not enough to say it's a few bad apples, or for Rumsfeld to say that this isn't torture. Until the Bush administration recognizes that there are systemic causes of this abuse, and indeed that the abuse itself may be systemic, they're not going to tackle the problem.

Is there any way of knowing how widespread the problem really is? Do we know, for example, what the conditions are like for detainees being held by the U.S. military at Guantánamo Bay?

There are serious concerns about Guantánamo. The people who are leaving, who we have been able to interview, tend to be the low-level people. One huge gap we have in our knowledge about the entire detention system -- whether it's Guantánamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib or the miscellaneous undisclosed detention facilities that supposedly exist -- is that we have no idea how the so-called high-value detainees are being treated. When the low-level people -- the nobodies who are released because they're of no value to the United States -- when they complain of treatment that clearly crosses the line into prohibited areas, you can only imagine how the high-value detainees are being treated.

What is known about where they are and the conditions under which they're being held?

For the most part, they seem not to be at Guantánamo. Whether they are at Bagram or at other facilities, we just don't know. One of the things we're pushing the Bush administration to do is to admit where all of its detention facilities are. The Red Cross has access to Guantánamo. But if there are undisclosed detention facilities where the Red Cross doesn't have access, that's an absolute invitation to the worst form of abuse.

One thing we've learned in looking at dictatorships around the world is that, when people disappear, that's when the worst atrocities are committed. And in effect, we have a system of disappearance that the United States is running today, where people are picked up, sent off to detention facilities, and nobody even knows where they are. Their detention may not even be acknowledged unless it happens to be picked up by the press.

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