Docs find torture

There’s a “gotcha” quality to this AP story about torture in Iraq and Gitmo, and they may have got us with it:

“Some of these men really are, several years later, very severely scarred,” said Barry Rosenfeld, a psychology professor at Fordham University who conducted psychological tests on six of the 11 detainees covered by the study. “It’s a testimony to how bad those conditions were and how personal the abuse was.”

But there are also qualifications:

One Iraqi prisoner, identified only as Yasser, reported being subjected to electric shocks three times and being sodomized with a stick. His thumbs bore round scars consistent with shocking, according to the report obtained by The Associated Press. He would not allow a full rectal exam.

Why wouldn’t he?

President Bush said in 2004, when the prison abuse was revealed, that it was the work of “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values.” Bush and other U.S. officials have consistently denied that the U.S. tortures its detainees.

Gotcha.  However:

Because the medical examiners did not have access to the 11 patients’ medical histories prior to their imprisonment, it was not possible to know whether any of the prisoners’ ailments, disabilities and scars pre-dated their confinement. The U.S. military says an al-Qaida training manual instructs members, if captured, to assert they were tortured during interrogation.

The U.S. military, yes.  Can we trust it (them)?  In any case,

Most former detainees are out of reach of Western doctors because they are either in Iraq or have been returned to their home countries from Guantanamo.

Which left the examining docs with the Abu G.-Gitmo Eleven here discussed.  Docs are with Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group based in Cambridge, Mass. 

[Their] report came [at the same time?] as the [Democrat-controlled] Senate Armed Services Committee revealed documents showing military lawyers warned the Pentagon that methods it was using post-9/11 violated military, U.S. and international law.

Is there a skeptic in the house?  Raise your hand.