There really are "two Americas."

Vice presidential candidate John Edwards used the phrase to refer to the growing divide between the haves and have nots. But there is another way to look at the fissure: America as Jekyll and Hyde. We have our truly altruistic, highly principled and virtuous side, and then there is the side of self-dealing, malevolence and hypocrisy.

One side is demonstrated by the American response to the tsunami-devastated regions of the Indian Ocean, where our military helicopters and personnel are rushing food, medicine and other relief supplies to the victims, and the American people are digging deep to keep donations flowing.

The other was played out last week in a Senate hearing room as White House counsel Alberto Gonzales tried to win the job of attorney general by explaining away his part in approving American atrocities. For loyalist Gonzales, even the use of torture could be justified if that was what his president wanted. He refused, despite repeated questioning, to state that the president was bound by the laws barring torture.

With Gonzales at the helm of the Justice Department, this second America - the one that abuses prisoners in defiance of international and domestic law, the one that holds detainees without providing due process, and the one that operates behind a curtain without accountability or a moral compass - will continue to thrive.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration pushes forward on on its repressive path. The Pentagon and CIA are now working on plans for the creation of a permanent American gulag - a place where prisoners could be confined for the rest of their lives without being charged with wrongdoing.

Potentially hundreds of war-on-terror prisoners could be held in this way, if the courts allow it. They would be suspected terrorists - people considered too dangerous to release - for whom the government says there isn't enough evidence to charge or bring before a military tribunal.

But it is hard to trust the Defense Department's claims. How does one explain the 200 people so far released from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, when the Pentagon contended that only the "worst of the worst" were sent there in the first place?

One has to wonder just how many tons of food aid to suffering Sri Lankans and Indonesians it will take to counteract the image of the United States holding hundreds of Muslim men without trial or charge, for life. I doubt any act of humanitarianism will restore the image of America-the-good to the world; the corrosive effect of Bush's second America is just too great.

What galls me is how willing the American people are to let their good name be dragged through the Guantanamo/Abu Ghraib/ghost detainee mud. Is the populace really willing to let the second America win?

The results of the election would suggest so.

Bush has not felt any obligation to punish those closest to the torture scandal. He has instead promoted them. Gonzales, of course, has turned his ruminations on how the Geneva Conventions are "obsolete" into a bid for the nation's chief law enforcement officer.

Jay Bybee, formerly of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, whose August 2002 torture memorandum is at the center of the scandal, is now a federal appellate judge. He was confirmed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals before his controversial writings came to light.

And Bush intends to put another lawyer who helped fashion legal arguments for ignoring the Geneva Conventions into a federal appellate judgeship. William J. Haynes III was nominated by Bush for a seat on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals - the very court that the administration goes to for all its war-on-terrorism cases.

As the Defense Department's general counsel, Haynes was a key architect of the plan to summarily deny prisoners at Guantanamo POW status, and he has been intimately involved in the policies regarding the treatment of detainees.

Haynes' disregard for the rule of law prompted all Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee to refuse to support his confirmation. But Bush says he will renominate him, as he says he will do for 19 other judicial nominees the Democrats in the Senate found too extreme to confirm.

Putting people like this into pivotal positions to determine the ethical and legal course of our nation will only solidify the second-America's grip on the future. I have to believe that even people who voted for Bush would rather see our soldiers deployed delivering food aid than as abusive jailers. But under this president, America is both and Mr. Hyde seems to be growing stronger.

Robyn E. Blumner's column appears Sundays in the Times Perspective section.

© 2005 St. Petersburgh Times

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