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.

In other words, the push from Cheney, Rumsfeld, and even Condi Rice, was not about preventing an imminent attack, or, as Joe Scarborough keeps insisting, a matter of political differences between the old and new administrations. The torture programs devised by Rumsfeld, largely, via reverse-engineering the SERE program was being used in much the same way the Maoist Chinese used it against our soldiers during the Korean War: to produce false confessions that would justify an invasion of Iraq that President Bush was at the time claiming he wasn't even considering... More from McClatchy:

"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, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.

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."

This is damning new information, and you'd think it would have made it into the discussion this morning. Instead, Chuck, Joe and company ignored this point altogether, and argued the torture question as if the Levin report didn't even exist. In the end, it hardly matters what the Morning Joe cast chats about -- but the fact that the show takes place on the same network that covered the Iraq-torture connection extensively just last night, is strange, to say the least.

A fundamental shift has occurred in this debate. If torture was used, not to avert an imminent attack (the "ticking time bomb" scenario still being sold by Republicans to justify the unthinkable) but rather to gin up false evidence to justify an illegal attack on a country that posed no threat to us, essentially further politicizing 9/11, and trashing everything America stands for, all in the quest to fulfill the neocon dream of Iraq conquest, then there's no "looking forward." What we have, it seems to me, is a criminal conspiracy to lie, distort, and even torture us into war.

Somebody please brief the MSNBC morning crew.