shock and anal probe...,

guardian |  The Senate’s report confirms what we’ve long known: the United States systematically tortured detainees, sometimes to the point of death, and relied on the complicity of health professionals to commit and conceal these crimes.

Psychologists developed and actively participated in the CIA’s torture methods, and both psychologists and doctors were used to create a fiction of “safe, legal, and effective” interrogation practices. In reality, health professionals monitored and calibrated the infliction of severe physical and mental pain, withheld medical treatment, and failed to document medical evidence of intentional harm.

Torture is always illegal and immoral and, as the report shows, it provided little to no actionable intelligence. It compromised everything the United States stands for as a country based on the rule of law, but torture betrayed the core tenet of the healing professions – to do no harm.

The report is a critical step in establishing a public record of the nature and extent of CIA torture, but the question remains: Will those responsible for the authorization and implementation of torture be held accountable to ensure that these crimes never happen again? —Dr Vincent Iacopino, senior medical advisor, Physicians for Human Rights

While the torture report provides many new horrifying details, the saddest part is that even those who championed this much-needed report have failed to respond to its lessons going forward. Consider how casually the report describes that Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri – the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing – went on a hunger strike. 

As if the response to a hunger strike should ever be to feed someone rectally!

Indeed, the comment – and the evidence such “rectal feeding” left on his body, suggests that Nashiri was anally probed as punishment for hunger-striking. Indeed, a doctor who recently testified about Nashiri’s torture as part of his military commission testified that he had the kind of “anal-rectal complaints” that “survivors of sexual assault experience”.

After 10 years of working on CIA abuses, I didn’t know it was possible to be shocked but not surprised.

We already knew of the brutal stress positions, forced standing, waterboarding and extended sleep deprivation with light and noise; now we know about the use of punitive “anal feeding” or “anal rehydration”, about forcing detainees with broken leg bones to stand shackled against a wall. Now we know about all the lies.