JOHN MCCAIN, the senior Republican senator from Arizona, spent time in a Hanoi prison camp after fighting for his country in the 1960s and early 1970s. His speech, which followed the publication earlier today of the Senate intelligence committee’s report into torture by the CIA in the years after September 11th 2001, is thus worth paying attention to. Torture, he said, “compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies”; the CIA agents who used it “stained our national honor”.

That is a bold statement, but not necessarily a hyperbolic one. The Senate’s report, which looks into the use of torture roughly between the 9/11 attacks and the end of the Bush presidency in 2008, is devastating stuff for the agency. What is shocking is not only the sorts of things that CIA officers were apparently getting up to, but also the brazen way in which they recorded it, with limited oversight from either the Senate or the executive branch of government.

According to the report, which is based on thousands of internal CIA documents, the “enhanced interrogation techniques” (a particularly Orwellian term for torture) that the agency used included not just waterboarding, but tactics such as forced “rectal feeding”; placing detainees in ice baths; leaving them on cold concrete floors; and simply hitting them. A footnote suggests that one officer played Russian roulette with prisoners; other interrogators had apparently admitted to sexual assault. Some detainees were held simply to gain leverage over family members; others were told that their family members, even their children, would be harmed.

Bad things happen in war. But the report also alleges that these brutal techniques generated little useful intelligence. According to the study, “multiple CIA detainees fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence.” Worse, the CIA apparently deliberately misled Congress, the president and other parts of the executive branch about the use and usefulness of torture. Says the report: “According to CIA records, no CIA officer, up to and including CIA Directors George Tenet and Porter Goss, briefed the president on the specific CIA enhanced interrogation techniques before April 2006.” Some information produced by the CIA appears to have been simply false: for example, the Senate committee has obtained a picture of a man being waterboarded in a prison in Afghanistan where the agency had claimed never to have used the technique.