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.

Can this be true?  Is Harry Reid wrong?

Less than a year after his agency warned of new threats from a resurgent al-Qaeda, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden now portrays the terrorist movement as essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world, including in its presumed haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

That’s WaPo today, citing “major gains . . . an increasingly successful campaign.” 

Al Q has lost its mojo in the Islamic world, two years after The CIA reported “a propaganda and marketing bonanza [in Iraq] for al-Qaeda, generating cash donations and legions of volunteers.”

Thing is, things happen.  Let’s hear it for Bush policies — from the honest people.

Right, Al Qaeda was not in Iraq in 2003, concedes Ralph Peters in NY Post.  “But it’s 2008, not 2003. And our next president will take office in 2009. It’s today’s reality that matters.”

To argue the 2003 scenario is “as if, in June 1944, critics had argued from facts frozen in June 1939. (‘Why invade Normandy? Hitler’s content with Czechoslovakia.’)”

War’s not like that, says Peters.

[T]he situation changes, enemies evolve and goals shift. A war to preserve the Union becomes a war to end slavery; a war to defeat one set of totalitarian systems empowers a new network of tyrannies. It’s a rare war whose end can be forecast neatly at its outset.

How many newsies are saying that?

To date, not one “mainstream media” journalist has pressed the leading advocates of unconditional surrender to describe in detail what might happen after we “bring the troops home now.”

There’s plenty of unchallenged sloganeering, but no serious debate. This selective political softball and pep-rally journalism serves neither our country nor our political process well.

Consider these items that contribute to today’s lay of the land:

* After our troops reached Baghdad, al Qaeda’s leaders made a colossal strategic miscalculation and publicly declared that Iraq was now the central front in their jihad against us. Matter of record, in the enemy’s own words.

Some Sunnis “rallied to the terrorists,” at which point:

Al Qaeda in Iraq and its affiliates then embarked on a campaign of widespread atrocities: videotaped beheadings, mass bombings of civilians, assassinations, widespread rape (of boys and girls, as well as of women), kidnappings and brutal efforts to dictate the intimate details of Iraqi lives.

. . . .  Suddenly, those American “occupiers” looked like saviors.

Millions turned against al Qaeda, U.S. and Iraqi forces defeated them,

At present, the terror organization’s own Web masters admit that al Qaeda is nearing final collapse in Iraq.

So now we quit?