Late last month, Israeli police raided the Beit Hanina campus of Al-Quds University looking for Palestinians without valid work permits. They flushed out four construction workers, who fled to the administration building.

Sari Nusseibeh, the president of the university, strode out of his office and approached the police.

"I am responsible for these men," he said.

The police cuffed him, hauled him to jail and held him there for five hours.

I am responsible. The current administration could take lessons from Nusseibeh.

Not, "I take full responsibility, but you do realize, of course, that the facilities director hires the workers and you can't expect a busy and important man like me to check the work permits of every contractor and, by the way, we do have an official policy to hire only legal workers and, and, and ..."

I am responsible.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's statements regarding the torture at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq were full of ifs, ands and buts. Yes, he apologized. Yes, he said that he took responsibility. But in his statement to Congress and in a recent town hall meeting at the Pentagon, he waffled.

He blamed the media for blowing it out of proportion. He said he didn't appreciate the full extent of the crimes until he saw the photographs — after the Pentagon knew that both CBS and the New Yorker were ready to break the story.

He said he did not want to "reach down" into an active criminal investigation and potentially hurt the outcome. He said he was blindsided. He said the criticism was political.

I am responsible — but ...

He said there are 18,000 military judicial proceedings every year, and he can't be expected to know the details of all of them. Where does a 600-pound gorilla sit? Wherever he wants. What does the secretary of defense know? Whatever he wants to know.

If Rumsfeld had decreed, "Let me know instantly if there are any accusations of human rights abuses by our troops," there would have been 10 lawyers with a sheaf of photos still wet from the developing tray camping outside his office at dawn.

But Rumsfeld has tossed out the Geneva Conventions and other laws and treaties that could have prevented such abuse. He didn't want to know.

The detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Rumsfeld claims, are not prisoners of war but rather "unlawful combatants" and therefore not subject to the Geneva Conventions. Human rights groups have protested their treatment, from the refusal to give them access to lawyers to photographing them kneeling, in chains, wearing hoods.

The term "unlawful combatants," according to Professor Michael Byers, who teaches international law at Duke University, is not found in any international treaty. Under Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention, only military tribunals can determine which prisoners should be prosecuted as criminals and which should be afforded prisoner of war status.

At the end of April, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was running the Guantanamo prison, was transferred to Iraq to head the prison system. His mission is to clean up the mess in Iraq — by "Guantanamo-izing" it.

The incidents of torture and perversion at Abu Ghraib have monopolized prime time because they are so graphic, so grotesque, so titillating. But despite Rumsfeld's assertion that these are isolated incidents carried out by a few depraved individuals, they are, in fact, the inevitable link in a chain of human rights violations.

Human rights organizations have reported that prisoners throughout Iraq have been struck, kicked and deprived of food, sleep and water. One man told Salon Magazine in March that "one of his interrogators threatened to take pictures of his wife, mother and sister naked and show them on satellite as a sex film."

I agree with Rumsfeld. He is responsible.

He is responsible for creating a climate where international law is disposed when it becomes inconvenient, where there are no rules and where the greatest crime is getting caught and attracting media attention.

Say it, Donald. I am responsible. No ifs, and or buts.

Susan Ives can be reached at suives@texas.net.