For many Muslims, Guantánamo stands as a confirmation of the low regard in which they believe the United States holds them. For many non-Muslims, regardless of their feelings toward the United States, it has emerged as a symbol of American hypocrisy.
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The Bush administration's response to the Newsweek article - a general condemnation of prison abuses, coupled with an attack on the magazine - apparently did little to allay the concerns of many Muslims. Then on Thursday, the International Committee of the Red Cross issued a report detailing the many complaints from detainees at Guantánamo about desecrations of the Koran between early 2002 and mid-2003.
In India, a secular country by law whose people and government are growing increasingly close to the United States, a cartoon appeared in Midday, an afternoon tabloid, on Friday showing a panic-stricken Uncle Sam flushing copies of Newsweek magazine down a toilet.
To the cartoonist, Hemant Morparia, it appeared as though the Bush administration's answer to the problem was to bury the truth. [This is exactly the impression that I have been given over the past week.]
"People suspect American intentions," Mr. Morparia, a Mumbai-based radiologist who doubles as a cartoonist, said. "It has nothing to do with being Muslim."
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In Europe, accusations of abuse at Guantánamo, as much as the war in Iraq, have become a symbol of what many see as America's dangerous drift away from the ideals that made it a moral beacon in the post-World War II era. There is a persistent and uneasy sense that the United States fundamentally changed after September 11, and not for the better.
"The simple truth is that America's leaders have constructed at Guantánamo Bay a legal monster," the French daily, Le Monde, said in a January editorial.
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On many Arab streets, there was as much conspiracy seen in the retraction of the Newsweek story as in the story itself.
"People already expect the U.S. to deny it, because it already has no credibility in the region," said Mustafa al-Ani, director of the Security and Terrorism Studies Program at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. "So the initial story will have an impact, and the response simply will not."
Or as a Jordanian pharmacist, Farouk Shoubaki, said of the original report, "It is something the Americans would do."
As Mr. Shoubaki's remark reflects, Guantánamo offers disconcerting testimony that for many Muslims, the America they used to admire has sunk to the level of their own repressive governments.
Najam Sethi, editor of The Daily Times, an English-language newspaper in Pakistan, said the Guantánamo accusations were seen in his country as "further proof" of hypocrisy and anti-Islamic sentiment in the government of the United States. To many, he said, it was taken "as evidence of how America and the West makes the war against terrorism synonymous with the war against Islam."
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In Britain, Guantánamo has entered the political lexicon along with Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad as an emblem of American injustice and abuse. During the London marathon in April this year, David Nicholl, a neurologist, ran the race in an orange jumpsuit to protest the detention of five former British residents at Guantánamo.
"We are all against terrorism but we are not obliged to close our eyes to the excesses of our allies," Chris Mullin, a former British Foreign Office minister told Parliament on Wednesday.
In India, one human rights advocate who routinely takes the Indian military to task for its alleged abuses against insurgents in Kashmir and the northeast, said the United States stance on things like torture and interrogation of suspects at Guantánamo signaled what he called "a human rights disaster" for everyone.
On Friday afternoon in an Islamabad bookshop, Maheen Asif, 33, leafed through a women's magazine, and paused for only a moment when asked for her impression of Guantánamo Bay.
"Torture," she said, as her daughters, 8 and 5, scampered through the stalls. "The first word that comes to my mind is 'torture' - a place where Americans lock up and torture Muslims in the name of terrorism."
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