“Intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress. A time-consuming delay results, while investigation is conducted and the admissions are proven untrue. During this respite the interrogatee can pull himself together. He may even use the time to think up new, more complex “admissions” that take still longer to disprove.” CIA Training Manual, KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation (July 1965), p. 94

A new report was released yesterday from the Senate Armed Services Committee entitled “Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody” (read the whole report here).

The report traces the genesis of the Bush administration’s torture program to late 2001 and uncovers unsettling new details about why the Bush administration was so intent on torturing people.

As it turns out, the main reason they were torturing people so rapaciously was to desperately establish some tangible link between Iraq and al-Qaeda:

The Bush administration has argued publicly that it got tough on detainees to prevent another al-Qaida attack. The Senate report describes another possible motive, and a sobering example of how torture can produce bad intelligence.

In September, the Army dispatched a team of psychiatrists and psychologists to Fort Bragg, N.C., to learn how to reverse-engineer the so-called SERE tactics for interrogations on real detainees at Guantánamo. One member of the team sent to Fort Bragg described a specific reason for the pressure from above to get tough on detainees at Guantánamo: Iraq.

“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Army psychiatrist Maj. Paul Burney is quoted in the Senate report as saying about Guantánamo. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

Here’s Radley Balko’s reaction (h/t Gherald):

So they tortured Gitmo detainees to get information, which turned out to be false, to build support for a war they had already made up their mind they would wage.

And keep in mind, these decisions were made by political appointees. Not JAGs, not military generals, not even veteran CIA agents (most people in all three positions actually opposed these policies). They were made by neocon warmongers with little to no actual military or interrogation experience who hadn’t the slightest idea what they were doing.

These people belong in a prison cell. To excuse them is to say that no abuse of power should be punishable so long as you can come up with some tortured justification about how you were only trying to protect the country.

Just when I think the news coming out of Washington couldn’t be any worse, a report like this drops out of the sky.

We now have tangible evidence that political operatives in the Bush White House were putting the screws to the CIA to squeeze any possible justification to invade Iraq out of the detainees in their custody. Read and repeat the quote at the start of this post to yourself the next time you hear someone tell you that torture works. Torture doesn’t give you good intelligence, it gives you whatever the desperate person being tortured wants the torturer to hear.

This is another dark day, in a string of dark days, for our country. The Obama Department of Justice absolutely must appoint an independent special prosecutor to bring these war criminals to justice.

Update: One thing that I think gets lost in all the news about the Bush torture program is the turf war that went on between the CIA and the FBI. As it turns out, this is the first war in which the torture/interrogation of the high-value detainees in our custody was handled by the CIA. Here’s how Jane Mayer describes the FBI’s reaction to the CIA’s proposed techniques:

On April 16, 2002—a couple weeks after Zubaydah’s capture, and three and a half months before the Bybee memo—a military psychologist named Dr. Bruce Jessen was already circulating a blueprint for cruelly coercive interrogations based on torture methods used by Chinese Communist forces during the Korean War. The report describes Jessen’s blueprint as a “draft exploitation plan” for U.S.-held captives. (I wrote about Dr. Jessen’s partner, James Mitchel, in the July 11, 2005, issue of The New Yorker.)…

By June 2002—again, months before the Department of Justice gave the legal green light for interrogations—an F.B.I. special agent on the scene of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah refused to participate in what he called “borderline torture,” according to a D.O.J. investigation cited in the Levin report. Soon after, F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller commanded his personnel to stay away from the C.I.A.’s coercive interrogations.

What did the F.B.I. see in the spring of 2002?

Update 2: Here’s how McClatchy reports on the Bush administration’s push to link al-Qaeda to Iraq:

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that intelligence agencies and interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”…

“Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”

Senior administration officials, however, “blew that off and kept insisting that we’d overlooked something, that the interrogators weren’t pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information,” he said.

Update 3: I missed this bit earlier. Senator Carl Levin had said this about what should happen based on the report:

“There is still the question, however, of whether high level officials who approved and authorized those policies should be held accountable. I have recommended to Attorney General Holder that he select a distinguished individual or individuals – either inside or outside the Justice Department, such as retired federal judges – to look at the volumes of evidence relating to treatment of detainees, including evidence in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report, and to recommend what steps, if any, should be taken to establish accountability of high-level officials – including lawyers.”