Noting the torture methods employed by the U.S. for the past decade make peoples shudder, the article disclosed that the general goal of its torture plan is to get false confessions.

The article went on:

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.

For most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq.

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.

When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder, he continued. Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly by CIA and by others that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam.

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

Levin recalled Cheney's assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the September 11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.

In other words, top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create such a false linkage.

The Washington Post reported the same year:

Despite what you've seen on TV, torture is really only good at one thing: eliciting false confessions.

So as shocking as the latest revelation in a new Senate Armed Services Committee report may be, it actually makes sense in a nauseating way. The White House started pushing the use of torture not when faced with a "ticking time bomb" scenario from terrorists, but when officials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the September 11 attacks in order to strengthen their public case for invading a country that had nothing to do with the September 11 at all.

Gordon Trowbridge writes for the Detroit News: "Senior Bush administration officials pushed for the use of abusive interrogations of terrorism detainees in part to seek evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq, according to newly declassified information discovered in a congressional probe."

Indeed, one of the two senior instructors from the Air Force team which taught U.S. servicemen how to resist torture by foreign governments when used to extract false confessions has blown the whistle on the true purpose behind the U.S. torture program.

As Truthout reported:

Jessen's notes were provided to Truthout by retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a "master" SERE instructor and decorated veteran who has previously held high-ranking positions within the Air Force Headquarters Staff and Department of Defense (DoD).

The Jessen notes clearly state the totality of what was being reverse-engineered was not just enhanced interrogation techniques but an entire program of exploitation of prisoners using torture as a central pillar.

In a subsequent report, Truthout notes:

Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, a career military intelligence officer recognized as one of the DoD's most effective interrogators, said he immediately knew the true value of the PREAL manual if employed as part of an interrogation program.

"This is the guidebook to getting false confessions, a system that was used to generate propaganda rather than intelligence," Kleinman said in an interview. "If your goal is to obtain useful and reliable information this is not the source book you should be using."

Interrogators also forced detainees to take drugs and false confessions were, in fact, extracted.

For example:

A humanitarian aid worker said: torture only stopped when I pretended I was in Al Qaeda

Under torture, Libyan Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi falsely claimed there was a link between Saddam Hussein, al-Qaida and WMD.

President Bush mentioned Abu Zubaydah as a success story, where torture saved lives. Zubaydah was suspected of being a high-ranking al-Qaida leader. Bush administration officials claimed Zubaydah told them that al-Qaida had links with Saddam Hussein. He also claimed there was a plot to attack Washington with a "dirty bomb". Both claims are now recognized to be false, even by the CIA, which also admits he was never a member of al-Qaida.

One of the main sources for the 9/11 Commission Report was tortured until he agreed to sign a confession that he was not even allowed to read.

The so-called 9/11 mastermind said: "During my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear" (the self-confessed September 11 "mastermind" falsely confessed to crimes he didn't commit.)

And the 9/11 Commission Report was largely based on a third-hand account of what tortured detainees said, with two of the three parties in the communication being government employees. And the government went to great lengths to obstruct justice and hide unflattering facts from the Commission.

According to NBC News:

Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured.

At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being "tortured."

The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves.