Since 2004, when the world saw photographs of the pain and degradation inflicted by U.S. soldiers on prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration has sought to justify adopting brutal interrogation techniques that most people can define in a single word -- torture.

Indeed, the shreds of President Bush's discredited "we don't torture" mantra were picked up again last week by Vice President Dick Cheney, days after the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a unanimous, bipartisan report condemning U.S. treatment of captives in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"On the question of so-called torture, we don't do torture. We never have," Cheney told ABC News. "It's not something that this administration subscribes to."

The new report is the most comprehensive congressional examination to date of the inhumane interrogation methods, including waterboarding, that the administration adopted after the 9/11 attacks. The report said the departure from "minimum standards of humane treatment" grew out a 2002 memo signed by President Bush that said the Geneva Conventions did not apply to suspected al-Qaida or Taliban detainees.

The Senate committee said former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top administration officials were directly responsible for implementing the regime of beatings, temperature extremes, use of police dogs, forced nudity, sleep deprivation and so-called "stress positions" that can only be defined as torture.

In fact, many of the techniques mirror those used to train U.S. personnel to resist interrogations in captivity. Some are based on methods used by the Chinese during the Korean War to extract false confessions for propaganda purposes.

The study concluded that detainee abuse could not be blamed on "a few bad apples," but on senior U.S. officials who adopted inhumane methods of interrogation and incarceration, redefined the law to make them appear legal, and then authorized their use. Not only did the abuses hamper efforts to gain life-saving intelligence, they actually swelled the ranks of terrorist groups and compromised America's moral authority, the report said.

The new Congress and the Obama administration must make public the still-secret details of America's journey into darkness and adopt laws and procedures to make sure that an America president can truthfully say this nation doesn't torture anyone.