The public was told by Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials that Guantanamo was needed because the men who were sent there were the “worst of the worst,” the “sort of people who would chew through a hydraulics cable to bring a C-17 [transport plane] down.”

But according to a new report, there was an ulterior motive for setting up Guantanamo: It was the ideal long-term interrogation facility, a “battle lab” where detainees would be subjected to untested interrogation methods and “exploited” for their intelligence value in what turned out to be a massive “experiment.”

“Although the government continues to mislead the public by touting that [Guantanamo] houses the ‘worst of the worst,’ the facts revealed by the Center unveil a different, more disturbing story,” the report says, adding that Guantanamo “served as the heart of worldwide interrogation testing and training.”

Bush administration officials have long disputed such characterizations, and have said any mistreatment of detainees was the work of a “few bad apples.” However, one former top military official told the Armed Services Committee that Guantanamo was described to him a “battle lab.” Army Colonel Britt Mallow, the commander of the Criminal Investigative Task Force, said Guantanamo officials Major General Mike Dunleavy and Major General Geoffrey Miller used the term “battle lab,” meaning “interrogations and other procedures there were to some degree experimental, and their lessons would benefit [the Department of Defense] in other places.”