The new report offers Amnesty's comprehensive evaluation of U.S. practices. It quotes a decades-old report, one that remains relevant today, post 9/11:
Apologists for torture generally concentrate on the classical argument of expediency: the authorities are obliged to defeat terrorists or insurgents who have put innocent lives at risk and who endanger both civil society and the state itself... The accumulated evidence also gives a clear picture of the 'preconditions' for torture... Incommunicado detention, secret detention and 'disappearance' increase the latitude of security agents over the lives and well-being of people in custody.
Amnesty International, Torture in the Eighties, 1984