By Jefferson Morley
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Thursday, May 6, 2004; 9:30 AM

Hours after yesterday afternoon’s interview with two Arab television networks, President Bush found himself dealing with new revelations about photos at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison while several major U.S. media outlets were analyzing the future of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Overseas, the online media are gauging the generally skeptical reaction to the Bush interviews. When the American President told the Arab world Tuesday that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners "does not represent the America I know," he sailed into a powerful current of thinking in the Middle East and around the world that holds exactly the opposite view: torture and humiliation of others is the American way.

While Bush said, "people in Iraq must understand that I view those practices as abhorrent," online commentators in the region were saying that American expressions of contrition are meaningless and that the Arab response will be violent.

"Didn't the American president repeat that Iraq will be a model for the region?" asked columnist Abdulwahab Badrakhan in the London-based Dar al Hayat.

"This is the model in his American-Israeli formula," Badrakhan said. "Thousands of prisoners without due process or investigations, the revenge of angry soldiers, military agencies allowing the abuse of prisoners, wars between the occupation forces and civil groups."

In a front page column for the Iran Daily, a reformist newspaper in Tehran, columnist Mohammad T. Roghaniha wrote, "What is unfolding in [Paul] Bremer's Iraq more or less resembles the black days when U.S.-backed military dictators ruled in Latin America."

"Is this region supposed to enjoy democracy by using similar paradigms?" he asked. "People in our part of the world are aware and watching how the U.S. is discrediting the theory and thesis of freedom and democracy."

"The repugnant scenes of torture of Iraqi prisoners show that U.S.-style 'democracy' has spread from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Palestine," declared the Tehran Times. "This is just what Bush promised last year when the occupation of Iraq began."

Distrust of U.S. motives runs deep in the Middle East. Bush's assertion that those responsible for the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison will be punished rings hollow in the Arab world and many believe exposure of the abuses is merely another aspect of American treachery.

"The people of Iraq believe that the U.S. is trying to foster sympathy for the prisoners, who are mostly elements from the former Baath regime, so that Iraqis will not feel inclined to retaliate against them after they are released," the Tehran Times editorial said.

"As the U.S. presidential election approaches, Bush is trying to depict himself as a champion of human rights in an attempt to promote his reelection campaign and appease the international community, which is seething about U.S. occupation forces' inhumane treatment of Iraqis."

Aljazeera.net, the Web site of the Arab cable news station, reported that Muthana Harith Dhari, editor-in-chief of the Iraqi weekly al-Basaer (Visions), believes the U.S. government released the pictures to distract attention from its withdrawal from Fallujah.

"If we look at the pictures, what's new in them? ... Nothing," Dhari is quoted as saying. "We know that such savage acts have been going on, and have protested against them to US occupation authorities. But of course the American people did not know, so they released the pictures to divert their people's attention from the Fallujah defeat."

U.S. offers of financial compensation for the victims are "sickening," say the editors of the Egyptian Gazette, a state-controlled daily in Cairo.

"It seems that those in power in Washington are unaware of the fact that the Arab pride and dignity are something very precious and that only bloody revenge will bring the victims peace. Accordingly, the day of reckoning will be a hard one... the US must brace itself for more violent acts of retaliation. Families and relatives of the humiliated victims will not rest until they get their revenge on the culprits and their associates."

In a survey of Islamic Web sites, South Africa's News24 said anger over the Abu Ghraib photos is fueling calls for revenge.

"The Crusaders are back. Where are you Saladin?" Khaled Hammam from Chechnya asked on the site al-ansar, referring to the 12th century Iraqi Kurdish warrior who defeated Europe's Christian invaders.

News24 reported these sites are displaying the photos from Abu Ghraib with "fiery remarks calling for 'cleansing the honour' of Muslims."

"The new conservatives, and particularly the gang of Bush, are enjoying the humiliation of the Muslims," wrote Kuwaiti Islamist Sheikh Hamed ben Abdallah Ali on the Castle (in Arabic).

One Internet user, presenting himself on Alsaha (in Arabic), as a "resistance" fighter in Iraq, said "our anger and revenge will not be appeased until we pierce the eyes which saw the sexual organs of the Iraqis and until the Americans, British and Israelis are castrated on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers."

"This is the face of freedom. The face of righteousness," said columnist Firas Atraqchi, a Canadian-Iraqi journalist for Islam Online.

"Next time someone asks you the most idiotic of questions -- 'why do they hate us' -- ask them to see the pictures in question. Next time someone asks you how Iraqis could have cut US and South African mercenaries to pieces, ask them to see the pictures in question. Next time someone asks you why Iraqis are taking up arms, tell them to shut up."

Never has the difference between the way Arabs see the United States and the way Americans see their country been so stark.