From What Really Happened via disinter:

Confused? Having difficulty telling the good guys from the bad guys? Use this handy guide to differences between Terrorists and the U.S. Government:

TERRORISTS: Supposed leader is the spoiled son of a powerful politician, from extremely wealthy oil family
US GOVERNMENT: Supposed leader is the spoiled son of a powerful politician, from extremely wealthy oil family

TERRORISTS: Leader has declared a holy war (‘Jihad’) against his ‘enemies’; believes any nation not with him is against him; believes god is on his side, and that any means are justified.
US GOVERNMENT: Leader has declared a holy war (‘Crusade’) against his ‘enemies’; believes any nation not with him is against him; believes god is on his side, and that any means are justified.

TERRORISTS: Supported by extreme fundamentalist religious leaders who preach hatred, intolerance, subjugation of women, and persecution of non-believers
US GOVERNMENT: Supported by extreme fundamentalist religious leaders who preach hatred, intolerance, subjugation of women, and persecution of non-believers

TERRORISTS: Leadership was not elected by a majority of the people in a free and fair democratic election*
US GOVERNMENT: Leadership was not elected by a majority of the people in a free and fair democratic election*

TERRORISTS: Kills thousands of innocent civilians, some of them children, in cold blooded bombings
US GOVERNMENT: Kills thousands of innocent civilians, some of them children, in cold blooded bombings

TERRORISTS: Operates through clandestine organization (al Qaeda) with agents in many countries; uses bombing, assassination, other terrorist tactics
US GOVERNMENT: Operates through clandestine organization (CIA) with agents in many countries; uses bombing, assassination, other terrorist tactics

TERRORISTS: Supposed leader has extensive financial ties to Supposed leader of US GOVERNMENT
US GOVERNMENT: Supposed leader has extensive financial ties to Supposed leader of TERRORIST

TERRORISTS: Supposed leader invested heavily in US bio-chemical companies
US GOVERNMENT: Supposed leader invested heavily in US bio-chemical companies

TERRORISTS: Using war as pretext to clamp down on dissent and undermine civil liberties
US GOVERNMENT: Using war as pretext to clamp down on dissent and undermine civil liberties

* And that’s right, dear, if they were properly elected, everything would be just fine. Go back to sleep now.

McClatchy yesterday kicked off a series of reports on the people held at the US Guantánamo Bay military prison and elsewhere, saying:

An eight-month McClatchy investigation of the detention system created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has found that the U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad.

"Guantamo Graffiti" by burge5000 @ flickr.com

From Sunday’s article, We got the wrong guys: America’s prison for terrorists often held the wrong men,

Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo’s Camp Four who hissed “infidel” and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn’t: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

And from today’s, ‘I guess you can call it torture’: U.S. abuse of detainees was routine at Afghanistan bases:

American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, the kind that’s used to corral livestock.

The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

[...]

The brutality at Bagram peaked in December 2002, when U.S. soldiers beat two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar, to death as they hung by their wrists.

Dilawar died on Dec. 10, seven days after Habibullah died. He’d been hit in his leg so many times that the tissue was “falling apart” and had “basically been pulpified,” said then-Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the Air Force medical examiner who performed the autopsy on him.

Had Dilawar lived, Rouse said in sworn testimony, “I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation.”