The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.

-- From the Executive Summary of the Senate Armed Services Committee Armed Services Committee Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody.

The report on abuse of captured terrorist suspects that the Senate Armed Services Committee completed last November has now been declassified. All 263 pages with light redacting can be read on-line here. (Warning: pdf.)

As Committee Chairman Senator Carl Levin said in a press release, the report "connects the dots." It points out, among other things, that the Defense Department was involved in developing CIA interrogation methods.

Mark Benjamin, who has long covered torture and related issues for Salon.com, writes:

The Senate Armed Services Committee has just released an exhaustive review of torture under the Bush administration that, among other revelations, torpedoes the notion that the administration only chose torture as a last resort. Bush officials have long argued that they turned to coercive interrogations in 2002 only after captured al-Qaida suspects wouldn't talk, but the report shows the administration set the wheels in motion soon after 9/11. The Bush White House began planning for torture in December 2001, set up a program to develop the interrogation techniques by the next month, and the military and the CIA began training interrogators in coercive practices in early 2002, before they had any high-value al-Qaida suspects or any trouble eliciting information from detainees. As the report puts it, "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees." The report undercuts the Obama administration's case for leniency against the CIA, since the agency was pursuing abusive techniques even before Department of Justice lawyers had issued their supposed legal justification for the techniques in August 2002.

In another piece at Salon, Mike Madden reports:

"The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply a result of a few soldiers acting on their own," the Senate report says. "Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at [Guantánamo] ... Rumsfeld's authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officers conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely." The Bush administration, including Rumsfeld, all treated Abu Ghraib as the actions of a few rogue soldiers. Eleven enlisted personnel were convicted of crimes because of the way they treated Iraqis held there; the longest sentence, 10 years, went to former Cpl. Charles Graner. (One officer, Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, was convicted of disobeying an order not to discuss the case, but acquitted on more serious charges.) But the Senate investigation, completed last fall but only released this week, found the abuses there -- forcing prisoners into "stress positions," stripping them naked, menacing them with dogs -- were directly inspired by similar behavior top administration officials had already approved elsewhere. "Rumsfeld's authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantánamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there," the report says. The approval from the defense secretary "influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques, including military working dogs, forced nudity and stress positions, in Afghanistan and Iraq." Salon reported on Rumsfeld's early involvement in the development of the interrogation programs in 2006. A matter-of-fact narrative with a clinical tone, the Senate report runs through exactly when various military and civilian officials knew about and authorized what kinds of behavior. And it adds a bitter irony to Rumsfeld's claims that he only learned about Abu Ghraib after the worst abuses had already happened (he later called the day he heard about the prison scandal "the worst day" of his tenure at the Pentagon).

SASC also takes on the use of psychologists in devising, implementing and participating in torture. As was reported by Katherine Eban in the July 17, 2007, issue of Vanity Fair, two psychologists, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, "reverse-engineered" a program the Pentagon uses to prepare American pilots and others in the military for the torture they may face if captured by the enemy. That is, the two men used techniques employed to help Americans endure captivity to create a torture regimen for use against prisoners at Guantánamo and secret CIA prisons scattered across the globe. Other psychologists also participated in torture as part a Behavioral Science Consultation Team, including torture of at least one juvenile.

Six months after Eban’s story appeared, a public affairs officer at Joint Task Force Guantánamo "interviewed" Army Col. Larry James, director of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team:

Since the guards here are so well trained and motivated before they arrive in Guantanamo Bay, James said BSCT training serves as a refresher for skills already ingrained in many of these Troopers. "When I walk through the camps, I can’t tell you that I have stumbled across a lot of things that are wrong. During my time here, I am proud to say that I have not seen a guard or interrogator abuse anyone in any shape or form," said James.

As a consequence of the psychologists’ participation in torture, the American Psychological Association underwent a three-year-long internal rebellion as the old leadership sought to give its imprimatur to psychologists working with the military and a large majority of the membership eventually voting in a referendum to stop it.

The SASC report released tonight spurred Physicians for Human Rights, the advocacy organization that has been in the forefront in the fight against torture for years, to call for

...the psychologists who justified, designed, and implemented torture for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Department of Defense (DoD), to lose their professional licenses and to face criminal prosecution. "Long before Justice Department lawyers were tasked to justify torture, US psychologists were busy actually perpetrating it," said Stephen Reisner, PhD, Advisor on Psychological Ethics at PHR. "These individuals must not only face prosecution for breaking the law, they must lose their licenses for shaming their profession’s ethics." ... "The Senate Armed Services Committee confirms what we have long known—health professionals were the agents that spread the virus of torture," said Nathaniel Raymond, Director of PHR’s Campaign Against Torture which brings together thousands of health professionals who oppose torture in all circumstances. "Now is the time for those who violated our laws and our values to be held to account." PHR is renewing its call to Congress and the White House to immediately create a non-partisan commission to investigate the Bush Administration’s use of torture, with a specific focus on the role that psychologists and medical professionals played in its design, justification, supervision, and use.

PHR has produced three horrifying reports on torture, Break Them Down: Systematic Use of Psychological Torture by U.S. Forces, Leave No Marks: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality, and Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by the US.

Senator Levin said Tuesday night:

In my judgment, the report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse – such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Afghanistan – to low ranking soldiers. Claims, such as that made by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz that detainee abuses could be chalked up to the unauthorized acts of a "few bad apples," were simply false. The truth is that, early on, it was senior civilian leaders who set the tone.

Other stories about the declassified report can be read at Time – Report Details Pentagon Role in Torture Tactics; The Atlantic – Military's Interrogation Techniques: A History; the Washington Post – Harsh Tactics Readied Before Their Approval, and McClatchy - Report: Abusive tactics were used to find Iraq-al Qaida link.