The Senate Armed Services Committee– that is all 25 members of the committee, including 12 Republicans– signed on to a report that said Donald Rumsfeld, in his post as Secretary of Defense, authorized, and even pushed for, "enhanced interrogation techniques" against "enemy combatants" in the "war on terror." What Rumsfeld did, the Senators unanimously concurred, was use the war on terror as a cloak to torture prisoners with forced nudity, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures, among other techniques. 

The Washington Post’s Joby Warrick and Karen DeYoung report that the Senators concluded that Rumsfeld "disgraced the nation and undermined U.S. security." And once the torture was revealed– at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo– Rumsfeld then lead the charge to cover up the Pentagon’s legal work that justified the torture and instead blamed low-level officers.

The Senate Armed Services Committee, which is chaired by Carl Levin (D-Mich.), has done a lot of crucial work in laying out the origins of the torture policy. Hopefully this authoritative document will force the incoming Obama administration to hold Rumsfeld and the other Bush administration torture architects accountable.

The Bush White House, predictably, had no comment about the memo. Rumsfeld, though, is still fighting. An aide of his said the committee’s report wasted taxpayer dollars to make allegations against people who have served the U.S.-MB

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