The release of Senate findings on the post-9/11 U.S. torture program has sparked shock and outrage over the CIA’s abuses, and renewed calls for the prosecution of the officials who authorized and carried them out. The Senate report details a list of torture methods used on prisoners: waterboarding, sexual abuse with broomsticks, “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration.” Prisoners were threatened with buzzing power drills. Some captives were deprived of sleep for up to 180 hours, at times with their hands shackled above their heads. The torture was carried out at black sites in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Thailand, and a secret site on the Guantánamo Naval Base known as Strawberry Fields. Speaking on the Senate floor, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, said the report forces the United States to say “never again.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein: “There are those who will seize upon the report and say, 'See what the Americans did?' And they will try to use it to justify evil actions or incite more violence. We can’t prevent that. But history will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say 'never again.'”

The report concludes the CIA failed to disrupt a single plot despite torturing al-Qaeda and other captives in secret prisons worldwide between 2002 and 2006. CIA officials were also found to have routinely misled the media, Congress and the White House on the torture methods and their ineffectiveness.