R. Jeffrey Smith and Dan Eggen's front page article in today's issue of The Washington Post seems to indicate that prisoner abuse in Iraq may have been more widespread than previously known. They lead with this:

The Bush administration is facing a wave of new allegations that the abuse of foreign detainees in U.S. military custody was more widespread, varied and grave in the past three years than the Defense Department has long maintained.

New documents released yesterday detail a series of probes by Army criminal investigators into multiple cases of threatened executions of Iraqi detainees by U.S. soldiers, as well as of thefts of currency and other private property, physical assaults, and deadly shootings of detainees at detention camps in Iraq.

In many of the newly disclosed cases, Army commanders chose noncriminal punishments for those involved in the abuse, or the investigations were so flawed that prosecutions could not go forward, the documents show. Human rights groups said yesterday that, as a result, the penalties imposed were too light to suit the offenses.

This is not the type of news that will improve our image in the Arab world. If America is to succeed in Iraq, it will have to show the Iraqi people that it cares about their inherent rights; today's article indicates America has much more to do on this front.