David Cole teaches constitutional law at Georgetown University and is the legal affairs correspondent for the Nation. He is the author of "The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable."

When then-CIA Director Michael Hayden appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in April 2007 to testify about the CIA's coercive interrogation program, he should have felt pretty comfortable.

The program, after all, had been blessed repeatedly by the Justice Department, which by then had written multiple secret memos explaining why slamming people into walls, depriving them of sleep for up to 10 days and waterboarding them was perfectly legal. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Attorney General John Ashcroft, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and other Cabinet officials had all personally approved of the program. Bush had declared a few months earlier, in fact, that the program had "saved innocent lives." The Senate committee, whose leaders had been briefed on the program as early as September 2002 and had done nothing to halt it, had a reputation for coddling as much as overseeing the intelligence community. This was hardly a hostile audience. Hayden was talking to the home team.

Why, then, did Hayden misrepresent virtually every aspect of the program to the committee?

His misstatements are carefully catalogued in a damning appendix to the committee's report, released Tuesday. According to the appendix, Hayden made false or unsupported statements about the genesis of the program; the interrogation of Abu Zubaida, the CIA's first disappeared detainee; the qualifications and training of the interrogators; the ability of interrogators and observers to halt interrogations at any time; the number of detainees held; the intelligence allegedly obtained from coercive tactics; abusive and illegal conduct by interrogators; and the effectiveness of waterboarding. Hayden has objected that the committee took some of his statements out of context, and he has noted that, in any event, the program preceded his tenure as CIA director. But the evidence of false and unsupported testimony is overwhelming.

Consider just three examples. Hayden claimed that all of those conducting the program were "carefully chosen and carefully screened" and underwent more than 250 hours of specialized training. In fact, the CIA's records show that it chose interrogators who "had engaged in inappropriate detainee interrogations, had workplace anger management issues, and had reportedly admitted to sexual assault," according to the Senate report. Some interrogators were given no training at all; others had 65 hours — not 250.

Hayden also claimed that all interrogations were observed by nonparticipants and that "any observer can call 'knock it off' at any time." He said no one expressed any reservations. In fact, CIA records show that many involved did object to the procedures, to no avail. When one team member questioned the legality of the techniques being applied to Abu Zubaida, for example, CIA supervisor Jose Rodriguez instructed the team member to stop using "speculative language as to the legality of given activities" in agency cables. During the interrogation of Abu Zubaida, CIA cables report that several team members were "to the point of tears and choking up," and that two or three said they would seek transfers if the abuse continued. (And it did continue.)

Hayden also denied that any interrogators ever punched anyone or threatened family members of detainees, and assured the committee that any abuse would be reported. In fact, CIA records disclose the use of a "hard takedown" method, in which about five team members jumped a detainee, hooded him, cut away his clothes, punched him and dragged him down a hallway. Other records show that interrogators threatened to kill, capture or assault family members if suspects did not talk. Some of the most notorious abuses, including the use of a gun and an electric drill to threaten one detainee, were never reported, because the supervisor assumed the tactic had been approved.

Hayden was following a well-trod path. The CIA gave false information about Abu Zubaida to the Justice Department when seeking initial approval to use waterboarding and other torture tactics, asserting that he was uncooperative when in fact he had been providing a great deal of information to FBI agents using lawful interrogation methods. The CIA later claimed that the waterboarding of Abu Zubaida had produced critical intelligence about other al-Qaeda members, but the agency's records show that Abu Zubaida provided that information before being subjected to coercive tactics.

The CIA stonewalled Intelligence Committee requests for information about the program, and it falsely told the White House, the Justice Department and the intelligence panel that its coercive tactics had elicited critical intelligence that disrupted plots and led to the capture of many al-Qaeda members. On Thursday, CIA Director John Brennan admitted that the agency does not actually know whether any of its coercive tactics led directly to useful information — and indeed that it is "unknowable."

There is a simple reason Hayden and the CIA would misrepresent so much about a put