"Falaqa" and "Farruj"

Once again our national reputation is being drug through the mud compliments of possible actions of the current Republican administration. The Washington Post is reporting about accusations of our outsourcing torture to Jordan. (Thanks to the Moderate Voice for the heads up.)

Former prisoners have reported that their captors were expert in two practices in particular: falaqa, or beating suspects on the soles of their feet with a truncheon and then, often, forcing them to walk barefoot and bloodied across a salt-covered floor; and farruj, or the "grilled chicken," in which prisoners are handcuffed behind their legs, hung upside down by a rod placed behind their knees, and beaten.

I do not know if the reports of torture are true or not. The sad thing is that, given the history of the last seven years, such a scenario is not out of the question for the administration of the current successor to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Eisenhower, et al.