A Justice Dept. report released earlier this week revealed that terror suspect Khalid Sheik Muhammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003, the month that Bush invaded Iraq — and that another suspect, Abu Zubaydah, had been waterboarded 83 times seven months earlier, in August 2002.

The motive for the intense regimen applied to Khalid Sheik Muhammed was revealed yesterday in a report (PDF) from the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. According the Levin report, Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered the torture of Muhammed in an attempt to extract confirmation from him that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001:

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…

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

…”There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.

“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.”

Despite the intense torture regimen, Muhammed refused to admit that Saddam was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.