By Jim White Oxdown Gazette

The Senate Armed Services Committee report does a very good job of describing the process by which Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld drove prisoner interrogation techniques into the realm of torture. The report also provides us with confirmation that one of the underlying reasons for torture was to provide a link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein just prior to the invasion of Iraq.
A former psychiatrist in the US Army, Major Charles Burney, provided very clear evidence to the Senate investigators on the reasons for torture and on the intentional disregard for warnings from SERE trainers that torture would not work.
McClatchy found this from Burney regarding the information being sought during torture:
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.
"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."
Later in the report, on its page 47, we have additional information from Burney concerning a "training" trip that interrogators took to Fort Bragg in September, 2002:
Despite the apparent instruction on physical pressures, MAJ Burney told the Army IG that instructors at Fort Bragg believed that the techniques used in SERE training should not be brought back for use at GTMO and that "interrogation tactics that rely on physical pressures or torture, while they do get you information, do not tend to get you accurate information or reliable information.,,344 In a written statement provided to the Committee, MAJ Burney reiterated that point, stating that "[i]t was stressed time and time again that psychological investigations have proven that harsh interrogations do not work. At best it will get you information that a prisoner thinks you want to hear to make the interrogation stop, but that information is strongly likely to be false.345"
So, when interrogators went to Fort Bragg to learn about SERE, they were told "time and again" that these techniques provide false information and should not be used, and yet they went directly into the approved methods for interrogation. In fact, Jay Bybee had already approved them in his August 1, 2002 OLC memo just a few weeks before the trip.
Summarizing Burney's information provided to Senate investigators:
1. SERE instructors told interrogators that torture produces false information.2. Torture was carried out to get an Iraq-al Qaeda link.
Putting the two pieces of information together, it becomes clear that torture was carried out with the intention of getting a false connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.