Iraqi prisoners hooded, naked and posed. American soldiers laughing, pointing and mocking.

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The recent photographs of U.S. military personnel humiliating and abusing Iraqi captives in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison have appalled political and military leaders. Court martial proceedings already are under way, and President Bush yesterday expressed his sorrow at the abuse to Iraq and the Arab world on satellite TV.

The complicity of the American soldiers in those abuses as well as in the deaths of 10 Iraqi prisoners has led to soul-searching questions. Was it a breakdown in training and leadership or a lack of morality? Are these war crimes or just an example of the measures societies must be willing to accept in the course of war?

"The rules of war and the rules of captivity are the same," said Gary Solis, an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center who teaches a course called "The Law of War."

Solis, who served two tours of duty in Vietnam as a Marine, said he could "appreciate the need for intel gathering, of wringing from POWs every bit of information one can without resorting to physical violence.

"But as an academician, I know they can't do that."

The reason, he said, is the Third Geneva Convention, which was ratified in 1929 and adopted in 1950 as part of the Geneva Conventions. The third convention regards the treatment of prisoners of war. Two of its articles are applicable to the current situation in Iraq.

Among the many prohibitions in Article 3 concerning treatment of prisoners of war are "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment."

Article 13 stipulates that "prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated."

And, Solis said, it doesn't matter that Iraqis were responsible for the gruesome killing of four American contract workers in March. After they were killed, Iraqis burned the bodies, dragged them behind vehicles through downtown Fallujah and then hung at least two corpses from a bridge.

"You can't justify our wrongdoing by the fact that they did it," he said. "We don't judge events by comparing them to other events."

Steven R. Ratner, a professor of international law at the University of Texas at Austin, called the American abuse of Iraqi prisoners "a war crime."

"It's a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions," he said. "There's no question that these actions are a violation of that convention. The obligations could not be clearer.

"This inhumane treatment and this kind of humiliation is a war crime."

But a military interrogator says that using methods that make people queasy is not more outrageous than killing or maiming them in the course of war.

Mike Ritz, a former U.S. Army interrogator, said that what appears to have taken place at Abu Ghraib prison indicates a breakdown in command that resulted in poor procedures, but that the broader question of what measures societies are willing to accept in the course of war is being lost in the chorus of angry responses.

"I don't think society is ready for it: If we abuse this person, we're going to save lives," said Ritz, who now runs Team Delta, a Philadelphia-based firm that trains interrogators.

"We're all upset with the idea of prisoners being stripped naked and humiliated, but if we have true confidence that it will save lives, why is that? Don't we at the same time accept that we bomb and kill people to save lives?"

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a prisoner of war for five years in Vietnam, said that the humane treatment of prisoners is fundamental for both ethical and practical reasons.

"It's one thing to have people fighting in combat in relatively equal terms and it's another to deal with people who are defenseless," McCain said. "In addition, we can't hope our soldiers will be treated fairly as prisoners of war if we don't treat prisoners well."

McCain said that during his captivity he was not treated according to the Geneva Conventions.

"More of my comrades would have returned from prison had we been treated that way," he said.

Richard Godlewski was an 18-year-old U.S. Army private when he was captured by Chinese troops in February 1951 near Hongsong, South Korea. When he asked to be treated according to the Geneva Conventions, a guard hit him in the mouth with a rifle butt, breaking several teeth.

"They're throwing the Geneva Conventions around like it was something great," said Godlewski, now 71 and living in Carteret, N.J. "I was in Korea and they didn't follow the Geneva Conventions. I didn't hear the American public make a big hullabaloo about that."

During his 30 months of captivity, Godlewski lost 70 pounds and, after a failed escape, was forced to live for stretches of time in a 4-by-4-by-4 enclosure. Desperate for food, he ate meat from a maggot-infested dead mule and drank his own urine.

Ritz said interrogations can be improved through the use of what he called "effective" torture.

"There are forms of mild torture that are effective," he said. "The problem is, if you're not good at questioning, you'll get answers you're looking for, not the truth."

A skilled interrogator rarely has to resort to violence, Ritz said, but he certainly uses deceit and psychological warfare to get information.

Becoming a skilled interrogator takes years of training, he said, but many Army interrogators receive only about a year's worth of basic training. Military police have no training in interrogating prisoners, since their role is to be "passive" gatherers of information.

"The MP is your eyes and ears," Ritz said. "He's listening to the prisoners, he lives with them practically. By no means should the MP be actively involved in interrogation."

The MP can tell interrogators who appears to be the leader, who's talkative, who's depressed, he said.

"But without good training and supervision, a situation can get out of hand quickly. Those people on the bottom rung, those lower-rank soldiers, they're young, immature, frightened. You start to lose sight of the fact that in front of us are human beings."

A famous experiment at Stanford University showed how quickly it can happen. In 1971, a group of young men who had agreed to participate in a psychology experiment were randomly divided into two groups -- one was given uniforms and told that they would be the guards; the others were the prisoners.

"In a few days, the role dominated the person," said Philip Zimbardo, the professor who designed and ran the experiment, in an interview for The Stanford Report.

"They became guards and prisoners," he said. The guards became so sadistic and the prisoners so depressed that Zimbardo called off the experiment after six days.