Senate Armed Service Committee Report: Bush and Co. Authorised Torture

The Senate Armed Service Committee has just released a 263-page report, based on a review of more than 200,000 pages of documents and more than 70 interviews, on the Bush Administration's detention and interrogation policies. The report was completed in May 2007 but held back until now because of political sensitivities.

This is the clear conclusion: "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."

The full report is available via The New York Times website.