CIA tortured terror suspects under 'intense pressure' to link Iraq to Al Qaeda post 9/11 attack

A report has said that the Central Investigative Agency (CIA) tortured Al Qaeda suspects because it was under "intense pressure" to extract evidence that's proved Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11 attack in order to justify United States' invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The agency was being pressurized by the Bush administration to extract confessions that confirmed cooperation between Iraq and Al Qaeda, reported The Independent.

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Major Charles Burney, who had been stationed at Guantanamo Bay, said that when interrogators failed to do this, there was "more and more pressure to resort to measures that would provide more immediate results."

This explanation was also corroborated by an unnamed former senior U.S. intelligence officer familiar with the agency's interrogation programme.

The CIA has defended its conduct by claiming that the relationship between torture and results was "unknowable," a claim rejected by the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, who maintained that torture produced nothing of value.