Washington Post: One Army lieutenant colonel who reviewed the program warned in 2002 that coercion 'usually decreases the reliability of the information because the person will say whatever he believes will stop the pain.' A second official, briefed on plans to use aggressive techniques on detainees, was quoted the same year as asking: 'Wouldn't that be illegal?'...
By late 2001, counterterrorism officials were becoming frustrated by the paucity of useful leads coming from interrogations -- a meager showing that was linked, according to one Army major, to interrogator's insistence on 'establishing a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq.'...
[Attorney] Brent Mickum... said he believes the Justice Department's Aug. 1, 2002, memo retroactively approved coercive tactics that had already been used. 'If torture occurred before the memo was written... the writing of the memo is potentially criminal.'
Mc Clatchy: 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...
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...
According to a newly released Justice Department document, 'Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA... and by others, that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.'...
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., called Burney's statement 'very significant.' I think it's obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link. They made out links where they didn't exist.'
Paul Woodward, War in Context: Interrogation is used for extracting information. Torture is used to force confessions. It's not about getting the victim to tell you something you don't yet know; it's about getting the victim to say what you want to hear.
The New York Times refers to Dr. James E. Mitchell as a mastermind of the torture program. In a telling quote that sounds like an account straight from the Spanish Inquisition -- whose purpose was to force confessions -- we learn: 'Jim believed that people of this ilk would confess for only one reason; sheer terror.'...
There you have it: this was about forcing confessions. Waterboarding someone dozens of times in order to gain new information makes no sense. Repeated application in order to force a confession makes perfect sense.
Downing Street Memo, 23 July 2002 recording the views of the head of MI6 after a meeting in Washington: 'Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.'
