The scourge of Abu Ghraib: it's easier to identify with a tortured Christ than a tortured Iraqi prisoner. But when Americans are playing the role of Roman soldiers, it's time to remember whose passion this is.

BETWEEN ASH WEDNESDAY AND EASTER SUNDAY this year Americans bought nearly 50 million tickets to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, making his agonizing and gruesome portrayal of the torture and execution of Christ one of the seven highest grossing films of all time. The following weekend, as our national appetite for tortured flesh began to wane and Gibson's film fell back into the pack of alsorans, the Sunday gospel told of Thomas inserting his fingers and hand into his master's wounds, reminding us that the resurrected Body of Christ bears the scars of torturers and executioners and that our God stands with the world's tortured, executed, and disappeared.

Christ's solidarity with torture victims did not bother us when we were watching Gibson's film or listening to the gospel, but it became deeply troubling 10 days later when the first images of Abu Ghraib prison appeared on 60 Minutes II. Our discomfort grew as a rising tide of photos and videos flooded into our homes and the halls of Congress in spite of White House and Pentagon efforts to stanch the bloody flow.

It is one thing to watch enthralled as strangers muttering or screaming in ancient tongues brutalize, humiliate, and execute our precious Savior. Gibson's cutout villains do not look or sound like us or subscribe to the same democratic ideals. Gibson's Christ may have died for all our sins, but sitting in the darkened theater, we can still whisper to ourselves, "Thank God we are not like these people." As our president told the High Commissioner for Human Rights last year, we do not torture people.

But the photos from Abu Ghraib have made that assertion a lie. The jubilant and sadistic torturers in these photos are our own sons and daughters. The swaggering brutes posing before naked, cowering, and sometimes dead prisoners are homegrown GIs from America's heartland, young men and women from small towns a stone's throw from the birthplaces of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison.

Gibson's film serves up bloodthirsty Jews and Romans stripping, mocking, scourging, and beating Christ, mutilating his flesh until it is nearly unrecognizable and then parading him triumphantly before a half-crazed mob. The photos, videos, and reports from Abu Ghraib may not match The Passion's physical violence stripe for stripe, but they introduce us to American soldiers and intelligence officers who practice their craft with the same barbarity and who revel in inventing fresh tortures with which to shred the souls and psyches of their captives.

Men and women were stripped, forced into painful positions, kept from sleeping for days, and put in isolation for over a month. Some prisoners were punched or beaten with broom handles or chairs. Others were cuffed, blindfolded, and dragged about like sacks of meat. A number were threatened or set upon by attack dogs. Some detainees were threatened with rape, and still others were sodomized with broomsticks or other objects.

Many photographs have grinning male and female soldiers posing before or on top of naked prisoners stacked like cordwood into human pyramids. In several shots the same GIs mug it up in front of naked and hooded prisoners forced to simulate or engage in degrading sexual acts. Still other pictures show naked detainees with women's underwear, sometimes on their heads. One shot has a female soldier with a leash around the neck of a naked male detainee. Two pictures show dead prisoners, one covered with bags of ice.

IN GIBSON'S REVISIONIST FILM, CHRIST'S TORTURE AND EXECUtion take place on Pontius Pilates watch, but the morally scrupulous Roman governor abhors and resists the barbarity of the bloodthirsty mob and takes no pleasure in the savage cruelty of his soldiers. It is the lowly Roman noncoms who go at Christ's flesh with hammer and tong, stripping, scourging, and beating him with sadistic glee. The official White House script offers a similar fiction about the torture at Abu Ghraib. This was the work of a handful of rogue soldiers, a half dozen enlisted personnel who ignored and violated established policies. Senior military and government officials were without blame.

But human rights activist and torture expert Abdallah Mansour argues that "what the history of torture tells us is that torture is almost always systematic, high officials are always implicated." The Army's internal investigation into Abu Ghraib bears this out.

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba reported that the six soldiers now facing court martial were instructed by Army intelligence officers, CIA operatives, and civilian interrogators to "soften up" detainees with techniques the lowly GIs found disturbing. Taguba recommended disciplinary action against the brigadier general in charge of the prison, two colonels in military intelligence, and a number of civilian contractors.

One thing that is clear from the hundreds of photos these soldiers took of themselves torturing and abusing detainees is that they did not think they needed to hide their crimes from anyone. They believed their superiors knew about and approved of this abuse.

President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denounced the photos from Abu Ghraib and offered apologies (of sorts) for the offenses that had taken place on their watch. Rumsfeld told the Senate that these crimes were "inconsistent with the values of our nation ... [and] fundamentally un-American." Appearing at his side, Gen. Richard P. Meyers, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, added that this abuse was doubly offensive because it goes against the "rule of law that we're trying to teach and instill in places like Iraq and Afghanistan."

But were these acts so fundamentally un-American or inconsistent with current U.S. policy? Was it so surprising that some American soldiers would think they could abuse and torture detainees?

SINCE 9/11 WASHINGTON HAS PROSEcuted the War on Terror with increasing disregard for constitutional and international rules governing the rights of prisoners. After Afghanistan the White House declared that Al Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were not "prisoners of war" but "enemy combatants," and so not protected by the Geneva Conventions, which a widely circulated memo by the president's attorney described as "quaint" and "outdated." Imprisoned in this offshore gulag, these detainees also lacked the protection of our courts and Constitution, and last year Rumsfeld permitted interrogators there to bend the military rules on the questioning of prisoners.

This May Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker that Rumsfeld also authorized expanding a secret program that would allow interrogators in Iraq to use physical coercion and sexual humiliation on detainees at Abu Ghraib. And on the very day 60 Minutes II was releasing pictures of Abu Ghraib, the White House was informing the Supreme Court that the president has an unfettered right to designate certain American citizens as "enemy combatants," depriving them of the right of habeas corpus. Why were Bush and Rumsfeld shocked that some soldiers in Abu Ghraib thought Iraqi prisoners had no rights?

GERMAN THEOLOGIAN JOHANN BAPtist Metz has called the Passion and death of Christ a "dangerous memory" because it reveals that God is on the side of the world's tortured and disappeared, because it forces us to remember that the in-breaking of God's reign will be good news for the dispossessed and oppressed.

Many in Washington and the Pentagon are painfully aware that the pictures of Abu Ghraib will be used to burn a dangerous memory of another sort into the hearts and minds of thousands if not millions of young Arabs. Photos of American female soldiers sexually humiliating Arab men could fuel anti-American hatred in the region for years to come and will doubtless serve as recruitment posters for future terrorists and suicide bombers.

But for Christian Americans the pictures of Abu Ghraib should serve as one of Metz's dangerous memories, a memory fueling repentance, not rage and revenge. As members of the Body of Christ, we are joined to a resurrected flesh scarred by torturers and executioners and called to repent of our torture and wounding of Christ. The pictures from Abu Ghraib should remind us that whatever we do to the least of these detainees, we do to Christ.

PATRICK McCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.