We broadcast from Spokane, Washington, less than three miles from the headquarters of a secretive CIA contractor that played a key role in developing the Bush administration’s interrogation methods. The firm, Mitchell Jessen & Associates, is named after the two military psychologists who founded the company, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Beginning in 2002, the CIA hired the psychologists to train interrogators in brutal techniques, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and pain. We speak with three journalists who have closely followed the story.

April 22, 2009 | WASHINGTON -- The Senate Armed Services Committee has just released an exhaustive review of torture under the Bush administration that, among other revelations, torpedoes the notion that the administration only chose torture as a last resort. Bush officials have long argued that they turned to coercive interrogations in 2002 only after captured al-Qaida suspects wouldn't talk, but the report shows the administration set the wheels in motion soon after 9/11. The Bush White House began planning for torture in December 2001, set up a program to develop the interrogation techniques by the next month, and the military and the CIA began training interrogators in coercive practices in early 2002, before they had any high-value al-Qaida suspects or any trouble eliciting information from detainees.

force detainees at Guantánamo Bay to stand for hours on end, in order to soften them up and make them talk to U.S. interrogators, he made a joke about it. "I stand for 8-10 hours a day," the then-defense secretary wrote on Dec. 2, 2002, at the bottom of a memo authorizing military officials to use extreme techniques against prisoners. "Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"

WASHINGTON — A newly declassified Congressional report released Tuesday outlined the most detailed evidence yet that the military’s use of harsh interrogation methods on terrorism suspects was approved at high levels of the Bush administration.

The report on abuse of captured terrorist suspects that the Senate Armed Services Committee completed last November has now been declassified. All 263 pages with light redacting can be read on-line here. (Warning: pdf.)

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

In the wake of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s (SASC) report on detainee abuse, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) is calling for the psychologists who justified, designed, and implemented torture for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Department of Defense (DoD), to lose their professional licenses and to face criminal prosecution.

Today we’re releasing the declassified report [PDF] of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s investigation into the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. The report was approved by the Committee on November 20, 2008, and has, in the intervening period, been under review at the Department of Defense for declassification.

President Obama has thrown a kind of protective, legal “invisibility cloak” over C.I.A. officers who may have participated in torture or other war crimes, but whose actions were authorized by lawyers in the Bush Administration. The reasoning goes that, if they were acting in good faith on the orders of superiors, it’s unfair to hold them to a different standard. But the unredacted report (pdf) from the Senate Armed Services Committee, released tonight by Chairman Carl Levin, raises questions about whether the C.I.A. was always operating with legal authorization.