The more we learn about the Bush administration torture regime the worse it gets. The Senate intelligence committee report released Wednesday outlines specific torture techniques that were in place long before lawyers in the Justice Department had given the program its legal imprimatur. The Bush administration layered one faulty assumption on top of another to reach a staggering level of incompetence. But stupidity alone cannot sufficiently explain how the United States became a torturing nation. Rather, an enthusiasm for brutality led the US to emulate Mao and Pol Pot. We became our enemies.

We already knew the Bush administration borrowed techniques from the military training program called SERE, for “survival, evasion, resistance and escape”, first designed to give American pilots and special forces troops a sample of the torture methods used by Chinese and North Korean communists during the Korean War. What we didn’t know was just how quickly the Americans turned to the Chinese communists for help devising their torture regime.

As soon as US forces began capturing Al-Qaeda and Taleban prisoners in Afghanistan the Bush administration began developing plans to torture them. By January 2002, before George Bush declared the Geneva Conventions would not apply and before the Justice Department had declared the program legal, Pentagon officials had crafted a plan to hide detainees from the Red Cross in secret facilities and torture them through waterboarding, sleep deprivation, physical violence and psychological pressure.

The SERE trainers, according to the Senate report, warned the Bush administration of “several major downfalls” of torture, including that it was not as effective as other means of interrogation, that it produced information that was less reliable, that accidental injury was virtually guaranteed and that there would be intolerable backlash should the torture program be discovered. This should not be surprising given that the SERE program was based on techniques and methods used to extract false confessions from American prisoners during the Korean and Vietnam wars.

False confessions were not a big concern for the Bush administration, however, because the Senate report revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were pushing to torture Al-Qaeda captives to uncover the nonexistent link between the terrorist organization and Saddam Hussein.

A former US Army psychiatrist involved in interrogations at Guantánamo is quoted in the Senate report telling investigators: “While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al-Qaeda and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between Al-Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

Cheney and Rumsfeld knew that there was a link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam and the failure of traditional interrogations to find it was justification for torture. The failure of torture to produce the required information was ... justification for more torture. A Pentagon analyst said of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s 183 waterboarding sessions: “KSM produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.”

The level of incompetence is extremely disturbing, but also completely irrelevant to the big picture.