(CNN) -- Senior Bush administration officials authorized aggressive interrogation techniques -- including forced nudity and waterboarding -- on suspected terrorists, despite concerns from military psychologists and attorneys, according to a Senate report released Tuesday.





The Senate report focuses on the authorization to use aggressive techniques to interrogate detainees.





"The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees," said the report, which reveals new details about prisoner treatment at U.S. military prisons in Cuba, Afghanistan and Iraq.





"Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies and compromised our moral authority," the report said.





The full report on the Senate Armed Services Committee investigation was declassified Tuesday by the Defense Department, less than a week after the Obama administration released several Bush-era memos detailing the use of such techniques.





"In my judgment, the report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration's interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse ... to low-ranking soldiers," Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, chairman of the Senate committee, said Tuesday.





"Claims, such as that made by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz that detainee abuses could be chalked up to the unauthorized acts of a 'few bad apples,' were simply false."





The Senate report said that in December 2001 the Defense Department's General Counsel's Office solicited information on the "exploitation" of detainees from the federal agency charged with training U.S. troops on how to withstand enemy interrogation techniques considered illegal by the Geneva Conventions.





The inquiry to that agency, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, was submitted more than a month before then-President George Bush signed a memo stating that U.S. military personnel "shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of the Geneva Conventions."





The Senate committee's investigation was largely focused on the influence of a Joint Personnel program called "Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape." The program is used to train U.S. soldiers how to resist enemy interrogation, and employs harsh techniques such as forced nudity, use of fear, sleep deprivation and -- until last year -- waterboarding.





The Senate report said Bush administration officials green lighted the use of Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape techniques on detainees -- despite warnings from military psychologists against doing so.





The report includes an e-mail from an Army psychologist.





"[T]he use of physical pressures brings with it a large number of potential negative side effects ... If individuals are put under enough discomfort, i.e. pain, they will eventually do whatever it takes to stop the pain," said Lt. Col. Morgan Banks, the senior Army Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape psychologist, in an October 2, 2002, e-mail to personnel at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.





Levin said the program is supposed to prepare troops in the event they are captured and subjected to abusive interrogations, and that it was "never intended to be used in the interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody."





In a section titled, "The Department of Justice Changes the Rules," the Senate report noted that less than a week after the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency sent the Defense Department information about the interrogation techniques, the Justice Department issued two legal opinions signed by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee.





The first opinion "presented a narrow interpretation of what constituted torture under U.S. law," the report said. The memo said that to constitute torture, physical pain would have to match the intensity of that accompanying "serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions or even death."





The opinion said the administration could defend itself against the federal anti-torture statute by arguing necessity or self-defense.





The second opinion concerned the interrogation of a specific detainee, al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydeh, and concluded that 10
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