THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

One of the most difficult points to reconcile in the ever more visible torture scandal was why a group of evil minded but otherwise intelligent people would try to gain intelligence using techniques only good for producing false confessions. And now it is clear that the purpose was to illicit false confessions to bolster an idea that had no other leg to stand on, the attack on Iraq.

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney and others who advocated the use of sleep deprivation, isolation and stress positions and waterboarding, which simulates drowning, insist that they were legal.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.

To give them a public confession of the link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Waterboarding up to six times a day or more and they still couldn't get it to work. And they didn't need to do it because of their most effective "shuck and jive" that totally snowballed otherwise intelligent people into believing we needed to attack a toothless old lion who was no longer useful to the evil bastards. We believed their lies, they did not need the confessions they never got. But they kept on torturing anyway.

After World War II we hung people for a lot less.