You can tell what someone is REALLY like by finding out what they do when (1) they're really scared, and (2) they think no one can see them.

Bob Herbert describes it well:

New York Times, July 13, 2006

Could it be? Will the Bush administration, under pressure from the Supreme Court, actually make an attempt to emerge from the Middle Ages? Is the post-9/11 American Inquisition beginning to come undone?

Here’s the way it has been. The administration has rounded up people at various points on the globe and dumped them like animals (sometimes literally in cages) at the U.S. prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Top officials have insisted not only that these were terrorists, but that they were, as Donald Rumsfeld loudly proclaimed, the “worst of the worst.”

Dick Cheney told Fox News: “They are very dangerous. They are devoted to killing millions of Americans, innocent Americans, if they can.”

In the administration’s view, these prisoners had no rights. They could be kept in a state of permanent degradation. They had no right to a lawyer, or even to see the evidence against them. They could be sentenced to life in prison or even death in what could only be called a kangaroo court.

The entire system was rigged. Hearsay evidence would be allowed. Witnesses could be concealed. Information obtained through abuse and even torture could be used.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, in a new report documenting myriad abuses at Guantánamo, noted that a prisoner named Hadj Boudella was told by military intelligence officers: “You are in a place where there is no law. We are the law.”

Lawyers from the center, a public-interest organization in New York, have fought long and heroically to bring even the most minimal legal protections to the prisoners. Along the way it was learned that the inmates at Guantánamo were far from the worst of the worst. Many of them, it turned out, were no danger to the United States at all...

The article continues here:

There's an Irish expression James Joyce used: "Who is he when he's at home?" It asks the question, for all the public posturing, for all the aristo titles, who is the person REALLY?

Guantanamo shows us, when you scrape the eggs off the pan and get down to the metal, who these chickenshit swaggering rec-room patriots of the Bush-league Administration really -- Monkey Boy, Dumfuck, and Cheney (and their sonderkommando sidekicks -- Gonzalez, Rove, Addison, etc).

Terrified little sadists. Mean little boys. Junior versions of Heinrich Himmler. Scum.

We (actual Americans) will be a long time making up for their crimes.