But not before the agency doctors had explored whether “drug-based interviews” would make for a less harsh alternative to the brutal interrogation practices like sleep deprivation, small-space confinement and waterboarding that the CIA employed in the years after 9/11, tactics that have come to be widely referred to as torture.

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The report noted the agency’s previous forays into the field of truth serums, citing a 1961 report that concluded that individuals who could withstand interrogations would probably still be able to hold out in altered mental states. It also cited the CIA’s use of LSD and other drugs during its notorious MK-ULTRA project in the 1950s and ’60s, when the agency conducted 149 experiments in mind control, including the use of 25 unwitting subjects.

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A drug called Versed, known by its generic name, midazolam, was identified by the report as the preferred drug for truth inducement. A benzodiazepine, a class of drugs normally used to treat anxiety, the drug did have a drawback for interrogation purposes, the report noted: It had to be administered by a physician intravenously, compared to LSD, which could be administered without a subject’s knowledge.

“Ambivalently, Versed was considered possibly worth a trial if unequivocal legal sanction first were obtained,” the report noted.

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But the report noted that any use of such a drug would probably bump up against legal obstacles: those that banned conducting medical experiments on prisoners, as well the use of mind-altering drugs in interrogations. The CIA never asked the Justice Department to look at the issue, effectively shelving it.

Ordered released by a judge as part of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the report sheds more light on a contentious aspect of President George W. Bush’s legacy: the CIA’s use of brutal interrogation techniques after 9/11. It details the tactics used against suspects, including slapping, being thrown against a wall, waterboarding and being confined in a cramped box.

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And it shows the complicated legal and moral arguments employed by agency officials, including those in the medical world, to justify such ethically challenging decisions.

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Though the harsh interrogation methods have been widely condemned since, including by President Barack Obama, and outlined in a public Senate report that noted that the techniques were “in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values,” no CIA officers were ever prosecuted for their roles.

“Perhaps the most striking element of the document is the CIA doctors’ willful blindness to the truth of what they were doing,” ACLU staff attorney Dror Ladin wrote about the report. “CIA doctors decided that waterboarding actually ‘provided periodic relief’ to a prisoner because it was a break from days of standing sleep deprivation. Similarly, CIA doctors decided that when a different prisoner was stuffed into a coffin-sized box, this provided a ‘relatively benign sanctuary’ from other torture methods.”

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The involvement of doctors and psychologists in the CIA’s interrogation programs has drawn wide outcry from the medical community.

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The CIA declined to comment but pointed to statements made by one of its legal officers in a court case that said the report was a working draft that had never been finalized.

The report was titled “Summary and Reflections of Chief of Medical Services,” on participation in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program.

The ACLU had been working for more than two years to get the report released, as the government has fought the disclosure, the Associated Press reported. But a federal judge in New York ordered it released in September 2017, and it was eventually given to the ACLU in August.