Up to the end, they wanted to keep it secret.

And the vicious psychopaths and sadists that ran the CIA’s torture centres “on our behalf” must be protected, even praised by the Bushies for keeping our civilisation safe. Their lies – to us as well as their victims – were all in the cause of freedom, so let’s have no more talk of Muslims standing on broken feet, bubbling through the mouth after 82 rounds of waterboarding or being fed hummus through the rectum.

CIA 'torture' report: Timeline from 9/11 to Dianne Feinstein's findings Show all 12 1 /12 CIA 'torture' report: Timeline from 9/11 to Dianne Feinstein's findings CIA 'torture' report: Timeline from 9/11 to Dianne Feinstein's findings September 2001 Following the 9/11 hijackings by Al-Qaida, US President George Bush signs a Memorandum of Notification that authorises the CIA to capture, detain, and interrogate figures associated with terrorist organisations. CIA 'torture' report: Timeline from 9/11 to Dianne Feinstein's findings October 2001 The Office of Legal Counsel authorises the use of military force to combat terrorist activities within the United States. CIA 'torture' report: Timeline from 9/11 to Dianne Feinstein's findings January 2002 Military guards take first 20 detainees to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, located in south-eastern Cuba. The prisoners are classed as “enemy combatants” and therefore not subject to the same legal rights as prisoners held under the Geneva Convention. CIA 'torture' report: Timeline from 9/11 to Dianne Feinstein's findings 2002 and 2003 Al-Qaida suspects Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubayda and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri are all waterboarded. EPA CIA 'torture' report: Timeline from 9/11 to Dianne Feinstein's findings June 2004 The Supreme Court makes a ruling that reverses a decision saying that Guantanamo Bay lies outside the jurisdiction of the US courts. Detainees now have the right to legally challenge their imprisonment. CIA 'torture' report: Timeline from 9/11 to Dianne Feinstein's findings May 2005 Amnesty International brands Guantanamo Bay the “gulag of our times” in its international report. CIA 'torture' report: Timeline from 9/11 to Dianne Feinstein's findings December 2005 The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 is passed. CIA 'torture' report: Timeline from 9/11 to Dianne Feinstein's findings February 2006 The United Nations calls unsuccessfully for Guantanamo Bay to be closed. It claims some aspects of the detainees’ treatment amount to torture. CIA 'torture' report: Timeline from 9/11 to Dianne Feinstein's findings December 2007 The CIA admits that it destroyed videotapes made in 2002 that evidenced treatment of Guantanamo Bay detainees. Getty Images CIA 'torture' report: Timeline from 9/11 to Dianne Feinstein's findings January 2009 Newly-elected US president Barack Obama pledges to close Guantanamo Bay within 12 months. He later renegades on the bid. GETTY IMAGES CIA 'torture' report: Timeline from 9/11 to Dianne Feinstein's findings December 2013 The Report of the Detainee Inquiry is published. Chairman Sir Peter Gibson concludes that British intelligence officers were aware of detainees’ mistreatment. CIA 'torture' report: Timeline from 9/11 to Dianne Feinstein's findings December 2014 The Justice Department asks the US appeals court to overturn a decision to allow the release 32 videos that depict Guantanamo guards forcibly removing a Syrian detainee from his cell and subjecting him to forced feedings. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Dianne Feinstein, releases its report.

All nonsense. The CIA’s depravities are not going to infuriate the Muslim world – because the Muslim world has been enraged about these crimes for years. They were the victims, for heaven’s sake. They were the witnesses. They knew the truth long before our masters admitted the truth to us. These poor men – and women, if we include the female victims of rape at Abu Ghraib, whose pictures we were never allowed to see – came home, most of them, years ago, and told their families and friends all about the iniquities we inflicted upon them. Theirs was the only testament that counted. It was true.

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The fear of our masters – of the Pentagon, the Bushies, the CIA – is not that the Arabs will be shocked by these revelations. Their anxiety is that we will be so ashamed at what they have done in our name that we will consider them war criminals (which, of course, they are) and perhaps lock them up in – and here, I love the American phrase for prison – “a correctional institution”. Indeed, some may argue that many of these criminal men (and, alas, women) need psychological help to “deradicalise” them. For yes, while we waffle on and on about the “radicalisation” of our young people who go to join the criminals of Isis, we pay no attention to the equally frightful “radicalisation” of the thugs and misfits (or perhaps not misfits at all) in the CIA – and the smarmy acceptance of their methods by our own security services, in so far as they accepted information gained under torture – who were “radicalised” (oddly, the word makes more sense in this context) by the desire to inflict suffering in the torture chambers of the state.

A detainee with wires attached to him in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad in 2003 (AP)

Yes, it is our fury and surprise and anger at these revelations which leads the Republicans – thankfully, not all of them – to denounce the CIA report, even though it is a highly censored version of the original, just as the Abu Ghraib photos were a highly censored collection of the pictures that were available. It is we who are saying: Did we do this? Did our public servants perform these acts in the torture chambers? In our name?

But we should have realised all this when Dick Cheney started talking of the “dark side”, when the CIA denied those black prisons in Poland and Romania, when the first detainees came home and told us of their suffering. It was all “propaganda”. I remember our masters reassuring us that this was Baathist propaganda or rebel propaganda or terrorist propaganda or Islamist propaganda – the British used the same stuff (IRA or terrorist propaganda) when they were in conflict in Northern Ireland. So did the French in Algeria. And the moment you allow the sleek young men of the CIA – actively encouraged by the most recent American television serials promoting brutality and assassination – to torture against “terror”, you’re in the same basket as the bad guys. We are the bad guys, too. That’s what the US Senate Intelligence Committee report told us this week.

As for poor old Obama, well, you can read his own statement any way you like. “I will continue to use my authority as President to make sure we never resort to those methods again.” Just like he was going to close Guantanamo forever. Just like he’s using more drones than the Bushies ever contemplated sending against their enemies – and civilians. Well, at least we’re not as bad as Isis. We don’t cut throats or enslave women (although the rapes at Abu Ghraib come a close second). As a former British Prime Minister used to remind us when the mass graves were filling up in Iraq, at least we’re not as bad as Saddam.