The most disturbing revelations to date about torture under the Bush administration are contained in the Senate Armed Services Committee report released last night:

It's not that the Bush administration adopted torture tactics without any serious examination of their origins, usefulness, or past use.  That sounds like pretty much every other project of the Bush administration: undertaken with lots of ideology, little factual basis, and arrogance.  Iraq, anyone?

Nor is it that the torture techniques were planned and readied, perhaps even used, before the Justice Department memos declared them legal.  The memos were so obviously an attempt to legalize certain techniques, not an independent assessment, that one assumed those particular techniques were already in use, or at the very least on deck.

Rather, it's the evidence referenced in the WaPo article linked above:

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 interrogators' insistence on "establishing a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq," the report said.

Mark Benjamin at Salon fleshes that out:

In September, the Army dispatched a team of psychiatrists and psychologists to Fort Bragg, N.C., to learn how to reverse-engineer the so-called SERE tactics for interrogations on real detainees at Guantánamo. One member of the team sent to Fort Bragg described a specific reason for the pressure from above to get tough on detainees at Guantánamo: 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 being successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Army psychiatrist Maj. Paul Burney is quoted in the Senate report as saying about Guantánamo. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

I have to say that this allegation is darker than any that had crossed even my suspicious mind.  No justification for torture coming out of the Bush administration was acceptable...but there's something particularly horrifying about the idea that they may have pushed harsh tactics specifically to make their fanciful link between Iraq and al-Qaeda and thereby push the case for war with Iraq.  They needn't have believed these would be false confessions - perhaps they had all genuinely convinced themselves that there was a link and these detainees must know about it.

But this also calls into question in my mind one of the most prevalent defenses of the Bush administration's actions.  In the words of the Times,

Whether the same information could have been acquired using the traditional, noncoercive methods that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military have long used is impossible to say, and former Bush administration officials say they did not have the luxury of time to develop a more patient approach, given that they had intelligence warnings of further attacks.

The defense ("We were being barraged with terror warnings!  We didn't have the luxury of following the rules!") is invalid on its face - the rules are for precisely such times.  But the evidence about looking for an Iraq-Qaeda link suggests that a) fear of an attack might not have been the only, or even primary, reason for engaging in the tactics, and b)some of that fear may have in fact have been generated by the information garnered by the torture itself.

Consider this from a piece by Daily News Washington reporter James Gordon Meek:

Another retired counterterrorism official who read reports when they arrived in Washington detailing the confessions of [Khalid Shaik] Mohammed, known as "KSM," said most of the information he coughed up during the waterboarding sessions involved things he thought his CIA-contract interrogators already knew, or were just his ideas for mayhem.

"Most of the (cables) were reports of actions that KSM was only remotely thinking of undertaking - they didn't even reach the planning stage," the retired counterterrorism official said. "So it's a bit of a stretch for Bush administration officials to say these were attacks they had disrupted."
...
A third senior former counterterrorism official who worked at the CIA and read the reports of KSM's grilling said there was "a lot of speculation" at Langley about possible plots, based on what the Al Qaeda "military commander" said during the waterboarding sessions.

"Just after he was caught, I remember the warning that came out about flights to and from the Pacific rim," the former operative recalled.

One wonders if we're looking at something of a self-perpetuating feedback loop: we torture people to get information about al Qaeda and Iraq, they cough up all kinds of dubious stuff under torture - plots they'd vaguely hatched in their own heads, say - which makes its way back to Washington, upping the fear of more terror attacks, and then more torture is ordered.  This would seem to be yet another argument against using torture: it's not just that information given under duress is often false - but that information then has repercussions when officials treat it as a genuine threat.

In any case, this all suggests that the timeline we got from the Armed Services report on interrogation ought to be compared to a timeline of threats and responses to those threats in late 2001/early 2002.  How much of the "intelligence" that formed the justification for so many drastic Bush administration actions, and fueled the culture of fearthat allowed those actions, was the result of torture?