Ethics

Senate Committee Releases Report on Torture

By Ed Brayton

The Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, has released its final report (PDF) tracing the development of the Bush administration's policies and practices of abusing and torturing detainees after 2001. The report is based on over 200,000 classified and unclassified documents, memos and communications from within the Bush administration and interviews with more than 70 people with direct involvement in the matter. The report begins by asserting:

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.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on April 23, 2009 (boomark / email).