Oh, jeez, I guess we do, after all

We all knew it happened, regardless of what Bush said - now there's independent proof that yes, indeed, we tortured:

The Massachusetts-based Physicians for Human Rights reached that conclusion after two-day clinical evaluations of 11 former detainees, who had been held at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan.

The detainees were never charged with crimes.

*sigh* And now I suppose that the wingnuts will tell us that yeah, so we tortured, big deal, these were bad, bad people anyway.

Except, of course, for the ones who wouldn't be militants except for their stay in the Gitmo Hilton:

U.S. troops detained him in 2002, although he had no clear ties to the Taliban or al Qaida. By the time Farouq was released from Guantanamo the next year, however — after more than 12 months of what he described as abuse and humiliation at the hands of American soldiers — he'd made connections to high-level militants.

In fact, he'd become a Taliban leader. When the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency released a stack of 20 "most wanted" playing cards in 2006 identifying militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan — with Osama bin Laden at the top — Farouq was 16 cards into the deck.

Isn't that lovely. We grab people off the street in Iraq and Afghanistan who had nothing to do with terrorism, torture and abuse them for several months, and *bingo* look, more terrorists, therefore the policy of grabbing people off the street needs to continue. Wheee!

Shame those in power didn't listen to us - we've been saying all along this is the kind of thing that was going to happen. But we're all very unserious, those of us who aren't just DFHs, so who listens?