An LA Times story brings up the troubling possibility — nay, near-certainty— that we aren’t the global good guys our right wing brethren keep telling us we are. I know, it’s hard to believe, since we are so obviously the good guys in all that we do, but sometimes, there are trivial little incidents that make a fellow worry. Like when we have doctors doing experiments in torture. That’s the sort of Ming-the-Merciless kind of thing that baddies do.

A prominent human rights group accused the CIA of conducting illegal human experiments and unethical medical research during interrogations of high-profile terrorism suspects under the George W. Bush administration.

Physicians for Human Rights charged Monday that CIA doctors and other medical personnel collected data to study and calibrate the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, severe pain and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, but did so under the guise of trying to protect the detainees’ health.

Well, at least we don’t have elite military units prancing about with skulls on their uniforms, reveling in death imagery.

Oh, crap.