Dec 11, 2014 4 min read

If you heard about a country where its detainees were stripped naked, deprived of sleep for a week, confined to a coffin-style box for 11 days, subjected to “rectal rehydration,” and doused over and over again with ice water, you would likely assume it’s one of those authoritarian police states in some remote corner of the world where the wise dare not venture.

Well, as you’ve probably heard by now, those were the practices authorized by leaders of the United States’ intelligence apparatus in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. A Senate Intelligence Committee report released Tuesday outlined in detail – sometimes to a stomach-churning degree – the brutal treatment of terrorism suspects when they were being interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency.

That the United States resorted to torture in the years after 9/11 is not news; it’s been known and understood for years. What the Senate Intelligence Committee report does is fully illuminate the horrific scale of it and, ultimately, just how unproductive it was.

Take, for instance, the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 atrocities. Among the “enhanced interrogation techniques” applied to Mohammed were waterboarding. A medical officer standing by said Mohammed experienced a series of “near drownings” throughout the process. He also provided information that turned out to simply be false – for instance, Mohammed told interrogators that he had been trying to recruit African-American Muslims in Montana to blow up gas stations. He was doing no such thing, but Mohammed told his questioners what they wanted to hear so that they would relent.

According to the magazine National Journal, “Throughout Mohammed’s interrogation, faulty intelligence led the CIA to press him for information on operations that later turned out not to exist, and to punish him when he could not produce the information.”

Torture had its defenders when it was practiced, and they’re still attempting to justify it. Former Vice President Dick Cheney dismissed the report as “deeply flawed” and “full of crap,” while former CIA director Michael Hayden, a former head of the CIA and the National Security Agency, explained in a truculent interview with Brian Williams of “NBC Nightly News” Tuesday that no one ever told him, or anybody else, not to overreact to the threat of terrorism – a falsehood that’s easy to refute. Hayden also blithely remarked that if a member of his own family were being tortured, his concern would be muted “if my family member had just killed 3,000 of my citizens.”

Since Tuesday, there has not been an outbreak of violence anywhere in the world against the United States because of the report’s findings. Some observers thought it would happen, and we can take comfort in the fact that all, as far as we can tell, has been quiet on that front. But the full depth of America’s involvement in torture has eroded our moral authority. When we lecture the leaders of other nations on human rights and the rule of law, they might well be justified in rolling their eyes.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, who has firsthand experience with torture after having been a prisoner of war in Vietnam for five years, said in the Senate Tuesday that “the use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights.”

In 2007, just a few years after the first revelations of torture came to light, a book called “Legacy of Ashes” was published. A widely hailed best-seller by journalist Tim Weiner, it details CIA missteps dating to its inception in the years after World War II. With this report, Weiner will have to add a new, lengthy chapter. The ash pile that is the CIA’s legacy has just grown considerably larger.