The Mainstream Media is Not Even Coming Close to Reporting The Worst of It

On the May 19th edition of Democracy Now! Jeremy Scahill reports on prisoner abuse at Gitmo:

"And while much of the focus has been on the tactical use of torture at Guantanamo, almost no attention had been paid to a parallel force that was torturing prisoners in a variety of ways, including waterboarding them, and that is this riot squad of sorts that you referred to called the Immediate Reaction Force. The prisoners and their lawyers at Guantanamo call it the “Extreme Repression Force.”
And basically what this is is a thug squad that is used to mercilessly punish prisoners who show the slightest bit of resistance or who do things that technically they’re not supposed to do, infractions like having two Styrofoam cups in their cell instead of one.
Guards will call in this goon squad. They come in with their Darth Vader outfits, and they literally gang-beat prisoners. There are five men, generally, that are sent in. Each of them is assigned to one body part of the prisoner: the head, the left arm, the right arm, the left leg, the right leg. They go in, and they hogtie the prisoner, sometimes leaving them hogtied for hours on end. They douse them with chemical agents. They have put their heads in toilets and flushed the toilets repeatedly. They have urinated on the heads of prisoners. They’ve squeezed their testicles in the course of restraining them. They’ve taken the feces from one prisoner and smeared it in the face of another prisoner."

Left-Wing Wacko commentary:
If you only paid attention to reports in the corporate mainstream media, then you would likely think that the whole torture controversy is only about the water-boarding of a few high-level Al-Qaeda detainees that ended years ago. But of course it goes much deeper than that. There have been numerous incidents of torture, some resulting in death, in POW camps in Afghanistan, Iraq, and probably other places. Lets not forget about the extraordinary renditions to secret prisons run by repressive regimes and a whole host of other torture and extra-legal repression techniques that periodically come to light and then disappear down the memory hole. Kudos to Jeremy Scahill for dragging this scary shit into the light!