Suskind, of course, is referring to the Senate report issued yesterday as well as his own research which traced the timeline of the policy making in the White House to the actual spread of torture techniques passing through both State and the Pentagon. The timeline shows that one of the key--if not the key--impetus for the instigation of torture was to help the Administration "save face" in light of the increasingly obvious evidence that its claims of WMD's as a basis for the Iraq invasion were utterly bogus. An analysis of the report and the issues raised in it appears here:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/...

The report itself is here:

http://armed-services.senate.gov/...

The import of Suskind's conclusions is that political considerations--not national security concerns--were driving the torture policy. That is the key point that should allow the Democrats to pursue this without being overly concerned about blowback. Suskind even notes that this distinction is "important in framing" the issue.

The public still holds the decision to invade Iraq in disrepute, despite its acknowledgement of recent "success" in achieving a lessening of the violence via the Surge and the tactics employed in the Sunni Awakening. An argument that torture was instigated as a means to justify the underlying lie--a lie that most Americans recognize--is an attractive frame for the Democrats as this issue continues to percolate. Because every time a Republican protests that torture was justified to prevent another 9/11, the inquiry automatically circles back to the invasion of Iraq, which most Americans now agree was a grotesque mistake.

The Senate Report and the McClatchy article are based in part on statements and interviews of Senior intelligence officials and a former Army psychiatrist.

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."

For the Democrats, the way to frame this going forward is to show that it was in fact the other way around.

Update: Now that I'm in the nosebleed section, please allow me to add Paul Krugman's take:

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link. There’s a word for this: it’s evil.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/...