In Standard Operating Procedure, a definitive account of what happened at Abu Ghraib published by Penguin Press, author Philip Gourevitch writes of the American interrogators who so degraded the humanity of prisoners:

"Even as they sank into a routine of depravity, [the interrogators] showed by their picture taking that they did not accept it as normal. They never fully got with the program. Is it not to their credit that they were profoundly demoralized?"

The much more compelling question—in view of the extent to which Abu Ghraib and other American war crimes have degraded us around the world—is whether the president and all the others at the top of the chain of command ever felt themselves in the least demoralized by the results of their orders.

And, even more important, will these perpetrators ever be put on trial as a deterrent to future presidents, Defense Department and CIA heads, and their eager lawyer-accomplices in these crimes?

General Ricardo Sanchez, former commander of the coalition forces in Iraq, in his recent memoir Wiser in Battle, writes that George W. Bush's 2002 memorandum—that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to our "detainees" suspected of terrorist ties—"constituted a watershed event in U.S. military history. . . . And that guidance set America on a path to torture." (Emphasis added.)

Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, signed by the United States and thereby part of our law, guarantees that any detained person has the right to be free from "cruel treatment and torture; outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment."

This right applies whether the detainee is a prisoner of war, an "unprivileged" belligerent, a terrorist, or a noncombatant. Moreover, this right is in effect "in all circumstances" and "at any time and in any place whatsoever." (Emphasis added.)

In last week's column, "The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal,' " I detailed the undeniable and direct involvement of George W. Bush and others at the highest levels of the executive branch in these criminal violations of the Geneva Conventions, and of our own laws.

Was Bush demoralized when he first saw the disgusting Abu Ghraib photographs? He publicly expressed sorrow for the humiliation suffered by the prisoners and their families, but added, wearing his American-flag pin, that he was "equally sorry that the people who had been seeing those pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America."

There is a hole in the soul of this faith-based commander in chief.

But on what legal basis can Bush and his confederates be charged in an American court for these war crimes? It's called "command responsibility," codified for the first time as an international doctrine in the 1977 Additional Protocol to the 1949 Geneva Conventions:

"The fact that a breach of the Conventions . . . was committed by a subordinate does not absolve his superiors from . . . responsibility . . . if they knew, or had information which should have enabled them to conclude, in the circumstances at the time, that [the subordinate] was committing or about to commit such a breach and if they did not take all feasible measures within their power to prevent or repress the breach."