Maddow and Olbermann have presented umpteen experts to explain that information extracted by torture is "unreliable". We've heard an endless mantra of "they will say whatever their captors want to hear, whether it is true or not". But I've yet to hear the obvious inference.
The Bush administration did not engage in torture in spite of the fact that it was as likely to elicit lies as truth; the administration engaged in torture because of that fact. The Bush administration wanted what could pass for evidence of a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda (something more than both having received arms from the Reagan administration). What better way to get that "information" than from torture?
Invading Iraq was a key goal of the Bush administration even before 9/11. The invasion of Iraq and access to its oil was probably a central (if not the central) tenet of the Cheney energy plan. 9/11 provided a rationale for an attack, and the administration needed only two things. First, an American population largely unaware that Baghdad is about a thousand miles away from the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Second, some shred of proof that the 9/11 attacks had something to do with Iraq. America's school system and gutless mass media took care of the first. Torture, it was hoped, would take care of the second.
Sadly, a polity willing and able to demand the truth about the Bush administration's ruthless agenda wouldn't have been deceived by it in the first place.