I know, we'll torture our way into Iraq.

Frank Rich has a great oped in Sunday's NYTimes on the Bush admin's torture campaign. He does a nice job of showing how and why the admin turned to torture when it did - to try to come up with a link between AQ and Iraq to bolster the sale of the Iraq war to the public.

The Senate Armed Services Committee (which includes Lindsay Graham, John McCain and torture lover Joe Lieberman) released findgins to support this claim in their report last week. Quoting Maj. Paul Burney: "A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between AQ and Iraq and we were not being successful."

It's just to much of a coincidence how the dates line up: when torture memos were written, when Zubaydah and Khalid ere tortured, when the Bush admin was int heir most intense salesman stage - ie Cheney false statements on Meet the Press. (His memorable appearance was only a month of Bybee's memo.)

Also torture was used even after traditional methods (not torture) had been effective in revealing certain details about AQ...but that wasn't enough for the admin in their struggle to use a link between AQ and Iraq to justify their already planned war on that country.