Global impact of the courts-martial

Colonel McShane also advises the defense in the Abu Ghraib case against assuming a jury in the US would be more sympathetic to the accused soldiers, noting that debate over the scandal continues to rage in the US - and that a jury of peers in Iraq "could cut two ways on this."

On the one hand "soldiers on the ground are feeling the fallout of Abu Ghraib, and that might influence them one way," McShane says. "But then again they are living and experiencing the same conditions [as the accused], so they might be more sympathetic because they know the situation."

Such unknowns suggest to some observers the broader disappointments that the US faces if world opinion - and even US public opinion - does not respond immediately and positively to the judicial proceedings. "I'm just afraid that there's this idea that by holding a military show trial where someone cops a plea we can solve our problems, and we can't," says Judy Milestone, an Atlanta media consultant who serves on the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim World, named by Congress last year.

With a number of prominent US senators including Republicans John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina insisting the scandal will not be contained simply by holding a few trials, Ms. Milestone says, "The reality is that we won't get just a positive impact out of this. It's going to be a mixed message."

One example of that may come in the arguments that defense lawyers make in their attempts to shift blame from their clients to either higher authorities or to the training they received. According to several reports, lawyers will argue that the treatment used by the defendants was condoned as a way to humiliate the Iraqi prisoners and thus get more valuable information out of them. But any suggestion that humiliation - and especially sexual humiliation - was an approved tool will get special attention among Arab audiences.

As part of US efforts to respond to the situation, Secretary of State Colin Powell took assurances of America's moral leadership overseas over the weekend. He told Arab business leaders assembled in Jordan that the US would demonstrate through the prisoner case the justice the world admires: "You will see in the weeks ahead that we are a nation of justice."

Yet while Milestone calls the public trials "necessary," she also believes they will do little to quell the global controversy over American actions in Iraq - or to reverse perceptions of the US.

"We shouldn't expect to pick up the Arab press [following the Sivits trial] and find them saying, 'Oh, America is just after all, and the system we have seen is wonderful and transparent,' " she says.

Milestone says her experience on the public diplomacy commission tells her that the US government does not have anyone thinking through how different decisions and events influence global opinion of the US. Echoing a key recommendation of the advisory group, she says, "We need someone in the White House focused on thinking strategically about how we want to present ourselves and about the broader implications of our actions."

While that alone won't solve America's image problem, Milestone says, "We need someone thinking long-term about the fallout of an Abu Ghraib, because it's the kind of story that will resonate for a long time."

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