If they hate the Torture Report, they’re going to loathe the fact that the report indicates the Bush Administration initially considered holding terrorists captured in accordance with established federal law including the federal rules of criminal procedure, the Army Field Manual, and other guidance that prohibited what amounts to torture.

The problem then became that the military didn’t want to be responsible for the detention facilities. Rumsfeld didn’t want military bases to become facilities for CIA detainees.

Instead, we got black sites, and far worse actions by the CIA. A turf war that then morphed into turning a willful blindness to what the CIA was doing.

“Rumsfeld took military bases off the table, so we started looking around at what became the black sites,” Mr. Rizzo recalled in an interview. “We brainstormed. Do we put them on ships? We considered a deserted island. It was born out of necessity. It wasn’t some diabolical plot.”

At the time, the C.I.A.’s operational handbook declared that the agency did not engage in “torture, cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment or punishment, or prolonged detention without charges or trial,” according to the Senate report. But agency lawyers also began exploring a different approach, though it is not clear why. A Nov. 26, 2001, draft memo lists several tactics — extreme cold, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, and humiliation — and began discussing possible legal justifications. Such measures are prohibited in federal and military prisons.

The C.I.A. had a corps of experts that specialized in getting people to talk by building rapport with their subjects. In interviews known as “fireside chats,” they extracted information and determined whether it was reliable. Coercive interrogation, the agency’s experts believed, led to unreliable information. After 9/11, there is no evidence that the C.I.A. conducted much research into how to conduct interrogations or reviewed its own history with harsh interrogation techniques during the early days of the Cold War, according to the Senate report.

That’s when they turned to the pair of hired sociopaths to come up with the harsh interrogation methods - torture.