Can it only have been a few short years ago that this country was laughing derisively at a president who could not bring himself to acknowledge what the word "sex" meant?

Now we have a much more serious, life and death problem: a president who cannot apparently bring himself, after declaring a war, fighting that war, and taking prisoners in the war, to describe them with the words "prisoners of war."

In Washington, covering up uncomfortable truths with misleading language is an art form--"collateral damage," "daisy cutters," and "USA PATRIOT Act" being only three notable current examples. It is the normal, repugnant first line of defense against accountability.

But Guantanamo raises far more serious issues than mere semantics. From the Bush Administration's standpoint, it has been caught trying to have it both ways: prosecuting a war in response to a crime. Now, it claims it wants to investigate the crime--September 11, and other ongoing Al-Qaida terror operations--by questioning its Guantanamo prisoners. This is its justification for the semantic game.

If the United States had gone into Afghanistan in pursuit of criminals--in a narrowly defined police action--it would have a leg to stand on. But it didn't, and it doesn't. Instead, the United States invaded an entire country, displaced its government, and captured troops employed by that government to defend its country against foreign invaders. The Geneva Convention explicitly states that if there is any ambiguity over whether someone is a prisoner of war, they are. A tribunal must be held to determine otherwise. And in this case, there isn't even any ambiguity.

In any number of ways, America's treatment of these prisoners has violated the Geneva Conventions, absolute minimum accepted conduct in warfare, humanity's most uncivilized behavior. Among other violations the US has freely acknowledged are keeping prisoners outdoors, forbidding inter-prisoner contact, and withholding access to water in the (unaccustomed) tropical heat. And, of course, prisoners of war are required to answer no questions beyond the famed name, rank, and serial number. A country like Afghanistan can claim ignorance or poverty regarding such standards; the US claims, once again, that it plays by different rules.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff and other Pentagon generals (as well, apparently, as Colin Powell) are horrified that the disingenuous creation of a legal term that did not exist last month ("unlawful combatants") will set a precedent other nations, including those the US may some day fight, will rush to emulate.

Lest this seem implausible, it's already happened. By thumbing its nose at internatonal protocol with its unilateral declaration of war after September 11, and its unilateral announcement of the purely invented legal doctrine that any country "harboring" a criminal suspect could be invaded and its government deposed at will, the United States has helped inspire the current tension in Kashmir, where the Indian government has used that previously absurd doctrine to justify sending its military into Pakistani-controlled territory with far more justification than the US ever bothered to demonstrate. Israel has used the same logic to launch a full-scale attack on the legally elected, internationally recognized government of Palestine, a situation that continues to quietly spiral out of control.

In the rest of the world, America's self-justification through word games--there's actually a whole doctrine for it, called "exceptionalism"--is particularly resented because it invariably comes wrapped in lofty, arrogant rhetoric about freedom and democracy and human rights. Can it be that surprising that the United States is now accused, in essence, of torture, when it has trained and supplied and paid torturers for decades in the prison basements of thuggish regimes around the world? Can it be a surprise that we are treating foreign prisoners illegally, when the US already jails more than two million of its own citizens under conditions frequently condemned by human rights groups, and has stripped non-citizens of even the minimal rights still accorded our domestic suspects? Can it be that surprising that the US is holding prisoners illegally for what are essentially political reasons, when it has for months been shoveling new levels of money and arms to dictatorships from Saudi Arabia to Uzbekistan that do precisely the same thing?

In the rest of the world, it is not surprising; only disgusting. But in the US, where we are accustommed to thinking of ourselves as uniquely virtuous and beloved, this fleeting glimpse of America's dark side has produced both some truly pathetic, comical media defenses and surprising amounts of criticism.

It's a start. As a Human Rights Watch report noted last week, some of the United States' new "anti-terrorism" measures could literally be photocopied by any dictator seeking to suppress his people. Almost a century ago Emma Goldman asked, regarding America's World War One rhetoric, "Poor as we are in democracy, how can we give it to the world?" For decades, democracy has mostly not been what we've been exporting. And at Guantanamo, we can see what the rest of the world has also frequently seen more clearly: that we don't practice it very well at home, either. We just say we do.