This morning the US Senate Intelligence Committee released a 525-page report on their five-year investigation into the CIA's post-9/11 "interrogation" (this word in this context really means "torture") tactics. (You can read the full report here, and here's a basic timeline of findings in the report.) And guess what? It turns out, everything is even worse than we originally thought. Zach Wener-Fligner's brief summation of the report at Quartz includes "sleep deprivation of up to 180 hours, dragging naked detainees up and down corridors while slapping and punching them, waterboarding that turned into a 'series of near drownings,' and 'rectal feeding' or 'rectal hydration' of detainees." Further, the CIA reportedly misled Congress and the White House about the program.

Time's Massimo Calabresi lists specific findings including "a detainee dying from exposure to extreme cold shackled to the floor in what government observers later described as a dungeon," allowing patients' medical conditions to stagnate and worsen as part of the torture process, and the fact that "the CIA at times lost detainees and discovered them only after days of neglect." In what might be the understatement of the year, CIA Director John Brennan responded to the report by issuing a statement that the agency “acknowledge[s] that the detention and interrogation program had shortcomings and that the Agency made mistakes." But, hey! At least the torture led to the death of Osama bin Laden, right? Uh, no. The report finds that torture played no part in finding bin Laden. Further, the report concludes that torture does not work as an interrogation technique.

President Bush, the report claims, didn't even know about specific torture techniques until 2006. And when he did learn about it, he expressed "discomfort" at the “image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper, and forced to go to the bathroom on himself.” That "discomfort" wasn't enough for Bush to pull back on the program, though. In March of 2008, Bush vetoed "the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, which would have limited CIA interrogations to techniques authorized by the Army Field Manual." (President Obama issued an executive order on his second full day in office that did limit interrogation techniques to the Army Field Manual.)

As reporters dig through the report, even more terrible insights will undoubtedly come to light. So what do we do with this information? Senator Diane Feinstein of California calls the events in this report a “stain on our values and on our history.” President Obama issued a statement reading, in part, "these harsh methods were not only inconsistent with our values as nation, they did not serve our broader counterterrorism efforts or our national security interests." Obama also says "I hope that today’s report can help us leave these techniques where they belong—in the past. Today is also a reminder that upholding the values we profess doesn’t make us weaker, it makes us stronger and that the United States of America will remain the greatest force for freedom and human dignity that the world has ever known." This is a generic statement from Obama; he's been saying stuff like this in his speeches for six or seven years. And it's frankly a little daring of him to refer to us as "the greatest force for freedom and human dignity" on the day that a report featuring his predecessor being sickened by CIA agents forcing a grown man to shit himself was released to the public. Maybe table the rhetoric for one afternoon and come back to it tomorrow?

The surprising thing about this report, to me, is that people are pretending to be surprised. We've known about waterboarding and sleep deprivation for years. We've known about most of this stuff, and at the very least we've suspected the rest. We are exactly the monsters we've always suspected ourselves to be. So what can we possibly do now?