Last week, the news media was all abuzz with news that President Bush apologized for the torture of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of American troops.

Did I miss something? I must have blinked and missed it. When I heard Bush's actual words on the news that night, I did NOT hear the part where he publicly apologized for anything.

Reporter: “President Bush, what did you say to King Abdullah?”

Bush: “I told him I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners, and the humiliation suffered by their families. I told him I was equally sorry that people who have been seeing those pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America.”

Now, I am a computer science major and not an English major, but Bush's apology isn't really a blanket, unqualified apology, is it? It's a heavily-qualified indirect apology, and a pretty weak one at that.

Now, he did say the word “sorry” twice, and that's what the news media is concentrating on. It was a brilliant move by Bush's PR people -- find a way for Bush to say the actual worry “sorry” (twice!) without giving his opponents a bad sound-bite to include in election campaign ads. Let's look at the two sentences above in more detail to see what it is I'm talking about.

First, let's address the last half of that apology. “I told him I was equally sorry that people who have been seeing those pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America.” OK, when you think about it for a second, that whole sentence means nothing. That's like saying “I'm sorry you feel that way.” That's not apologizing for the actions, or apologizing for being wrong, or taking any sort of responsibility for anything. “I'm sorry people don't understand.” That statement means nothing -- political double-speak.

And the first half of the apology is no better. “I told him I was sorry for the humiliation...”. Oddly, President Bush was not apologizing to the Iraqis or to the American people. He did not give a direct apology, such as “To the Iraqi people, I am sorry for what my country has done to you.” Bush basically apologized to ONE PERSON -- the King of Jordan, who really has nothing to do with this at all. Why apologize to the King of Jordan? And of all the things that the military report said that was wrong (such as torture, murder, rape, sodomy, electrocution, etc.), he picked the easiest thing to apologize for - humiliation. All in all, he barely met the minimum criteria for any level of apology.

When it comes right down to it, we all know this was not a scandal until there were pictures. The Bush administration is really, really sorry that there were pictures. “Darn, we just tip-toed over the line there by abusing those prisoners. If only we hadn't photographed them.” Hey, you didn't just tip-toe over the line there. You blew right past the line. The line is just a tiny spec along the horizon to you.

It's fairly clear that: a) as much torture as we have seen in pictures so far, the actual number of occurances of abuse must have been many, many times greater. Whenever I see a single bad picture, I think “What about the stuff that there are no pictures of?”. For every prisoner that was abused on camera, there had to be 100 that were abused without cameras.

And b) some of those pictures show abuse taking place out in the open, where everyone inside the prison can see. That means the abusers were not a bit worried about being caught by their superiors, which means they thought what they were doing was allowed. Everyone who worked at the prison must have been in on it! If not directly, then seeing it or hearing it and doing nothing. It's hard to believe that, not once during all of this abuse over 2 or 3 months, someone in a position of authority (the warden) didn't walk along and catch this going on?

Let's be honest here, people. This type of torture and abuse had to have been encouraged by top military officers at the prison. I do believe, however, that Bush and Rumsfeld and most people at the Pentagon did not know about what was happening that these prisons.

And perhaps the second worst thing here, besides the actual abuse, is the cowardly actions by the administration since October 2003, when they apparently first received these pictures. There's the abuse, and then there's the attempt to hide the abuse from the public. They really tried to sweep this scandal under the rug.

I'm gald to see that there are at least a few more people who noticed this lack of an apology, even if the news media missed it.