The scandal surrounding Abu Ghraib has less to do with soldiers abusing prisoners, or the fact that the higher-ups transparently responsible will get away, than with the astonishing lack of indignation at the defense arguments.

Presented with photographs of Army Spc. Charles Graner giving a thumbs-up over a pile of naked and humiliated Iraqis, and another of Pfc. Lynndie England walking a naked prisoner on a leash, Graner's lawyer, former Marine and onetime deputy federal prosecutor Guy Womack, reached into the sump pump of rhetoric and produced these explanations.

About those pyramids of skin: "Cheerleaders all across America form human pyramids."

About that picture of England walking her pet Iraqi: "You've probably seen parents with their children on a tether in a mall or at the airport so they don't get away. It's a control technique. It's not abuse."

I have attended cheerleading contests and have seen children appended to tethers in shopping malls. In neither case was nudity observable and it's a thin bet that any of the family albums in which these folks were recorded include people giving a thumbs-up next to a corpse on ice, nor would their videotape collections include footage of bound men being forced to masturbate for the entertainment of onlookers.

This sort of evidence was sufficient to convict Graner, who on Friday was found guilty on all counts by a military jury. But the absence of widespread amazement at his defense lawyer's logic, the seeming acceptance that there was some sort of defense to mount, leaves one worried about the moral future of his nation.

Sexual humiliation is a form of entertainment as old as pagan Rome, and dismissing it as an act analogous to cheerleading contests and child-rearing probably reaches about as deeply into the dysfunction of the national psyche as a probe can go without poking out on the far side.

It would have required that these captors dress in the garb of Centurions and their captives to wail in Aramaic for people in this nation to finally understand what we have become: an occupying power whose agents conduct themselves with the arrogance of Imperial Rome, to whom a captive was little more than an available source of labor or, absent that, amusement.

But the airy dismissal Womack offered for these images speaks less to Graner's attitude than what Womack doubtless reads to be the current American capacity for accepting the suffering of others as a matter of course. The day after one prisoner described being forced to consume pork and alcohol -- a sort of assault on the Muslim soul -- a radio talk show host groaned and mocked the idea that the man had been put through anything worse than one might expect from the headwaiter at a particularly snooty restaurant. Americans have reached the point of becoming insensate to what they do to others and, by extension, to themselves.

Consider that the current nominee for attorney general is on record before the Senate Judiciary Committee as personally opposing the use of torture. This assurance, which would have been jarring at best in any other era, was offered because the current nominee has been tied to a memorandum that seemed to allow the use of torture.

When it becomes necessary to get a future attorney general to clarify his position on the use of techniques once thought largely the province of horror movies and obscure dictators, one must wonder if Guy Womack hasn't figured out a plausible defense for his torturing client, or at the very least, shares a level of delusion current with the bulk of his fellow citizens.

Following an especially damning videotaped testimony by a Syrian who crossed into Iraq to fight for the insurgency, Womack professed to be pleased. The prisoner, Ameen Said Al-Sheikh, testified that Graner had beaten him on his legs after both of them had been broken in an armed escape attempt.

"That was very helpful testimony," Womack said. "It's the face of the enemy and it's very clear he hates America."

That a man tortured in custody hates the nation of his captors seems to come as a surprise only to Americans.

It is not enough for public officials to state that they oppose torture and are shocked to find it being practiced by men and women they govern. It is necessary to diagnose the flaw in the culture that transformed torture, sexual humiliation and thuggery into administrative tools for American jailers. Two of the men brought before courts-martial for the Abu Ghraib torture, Ivan Frederick and Graner, were employed as prison guards in civilian life.

One witness at Graner's court-martial, Sgt. Joseph Darby, testified about the time Graner showed him a photograph of a naked detainee, handcuffed to a cell with his arms raised and a puddle at his feet.

"The Christian in me says this is wrong," Darby recalled Graner saying. "But the corrections officer in me can't help making a grown man piss himself."

The states of Pennsylvania and Virginia have yet to announce investigations into whether Graner or Frederick might have drawn on anything they learned within their correctional systems. That Graner was a guard at the State Correctional Institution in Greene County, home to the commonwealth's most hardened prisoners, should give rise to a legislative inquiry into whether it is also home to its most hardened correctional officers.

But the truth is that our culture expects our prisons to be horrible places and our impulse is to treat malefactors horribly.

That we object strenuously when our own are treated horribly in return is a prime symptom of the imperial flaw. In a Roman household, when a slave killed a free citizen, all that household's slaves were put to death. But after 240 A.D., some progress was made. They weren't allowed to torture them anymore. The Romans obeyed their own laws. Perhaps progress can be expected here as well.