"The Abu Ghraib prison scandal now implicates the highest levels of the Bush Administration in violating federal law and in war crimes....(White House counsel) Gonzales was urging--and the President adopted as policy--an end run around federal laws. The War Crimes Act, passed by Congress in 1996, allows criminal prosecution of Americans for actions that violate the rights granted prisoners and civilians by the Geneva Conventions...Thus the scandal is not what George W. Bush referred to as the 'failures of character' of a few soldiers at Abu Ghraib. The scandal is that the Whie House wanted to torture prisoners and get away with it."

The Nation editors go on to argue that Bush has violated the high crimes and misdemeanor clause of the Constitution and should be impeached. Of course, that's unlikely this election year, so they suggest we voters act instead:

The evidence emerging from Abu Ghraib reveals high crimes and misdemeanors in the precise sense of the Constitution's impeachment clause. In an election year and with the GOP controlling Congress, that course is foreclosed, for now. But two years of willful subversion of law and human rights, which began in the Oval Office and led to Abu Ghraib, demands far more vigorous investigation than the queasy Congressional inquiries thus far conducted, as well as criminal prosecutions independent of this Attorney General. Such subversion demands, too, that Americans, bewildered and demoralized by the scenes from Abu Ghraib and the failed Iraq war, recover their sense of outrage--and exercise that outrage in the street and in the voting booth.