The terror/shame of America.

(Illustration found here).

Similar to peeling the layers off one rotten-assed onion, the horrors of the last presidential administration continues to strike nausea and shame into the very hearts of any US peoples who have any heart left to smell the shit — in the last few weeks bad odorous news has spewed forth from DC about just how corrupt and vile were the years 2001 to 2009.

If the current trend continues, George Jr. and Dick Cheney will be viewed as monsters.

Via antiwar.com on the inquiry by Spain into US “enhanced” techniques:

The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred “under the authority of American military personnel” and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.
More significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad deployed by the U.S. Military to retaliate with excessive violence to the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guantánamo.
The force is officially known as the the Immediate Reaction Force or Emergency Reaction Force, but inside the walls of Guantánamo, it is known to the prisoners as the Extreme Repression Force.
Despite President Barack Obama’s publicized pledge to close the prison camp and end torture — and analysis from human rights lawyers who call these forces’ actions illegal — IRFs remain very much active at Guantánamo.
…
So notorious are these teams that a new lexicon was created and used by prisoners and guards alike to describe the beatings: “IRF-ing” prisoners or to be “IRF-ed.”
Former Guantánamo Army Chaplain James Yee, who witnessed IRFings, described “the seemingly harmless behaviors that brought it on [like] not responding when a guard spoke.”
Yee said he believed that during daily cell sweeps, guards would intentionally do invasive searches of the Muslim prisoners’ “private areas” and Korans to “rile the detainees,” saying it “seemed like harassment for the sake of harassment, and the prisoners fought it.
“Those who did were always IRFed.”

The above-mentioned James Yee is the same guy who was harassed out of the military on all sorts of trumped-up bullshit because of his concern for the well-being of other human beings at Guantánamo.
All the charges were eventually dropped.

And while all these “blows to [the] testicles;” “detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;” being “inoculated … through injection with ‘a disease for dog cysts;’” the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding… was going on, US defense chief at the time, the dastardedly Don Rumsfeld was dispatching daily the ultra-top secret Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update to George Jr. with Bibical quotes smeared on them.
See some of this creepy, weird and hypocritical shit here at GQ.
Rumsfeld might a backstabbing criminal, but he knew George Jr.
Some background on this craziness can be found at Think Progress.

This particular aspect of the Rumsfeld/Cheney era will be a hot topic right now — there seems to be no end to the uncovering of the workings of the most-corrupt adminstration in this nation’s history.

Frank Rich, once again in the New York Times this morning nails it.
President Obama has to open the can of worms to clean-up US history.

I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch.
If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.

Amen, brother!