Since they've said nothing I'm going to continue to use Occam's Razor and believe that they did it either as a form of revenge or because they mistakenly believed in cargo cult of that being how stuff was done (likely thanks to Hollywood).
The torture program had much more to do with long-term engineering of a prisoner's environment with the goal of breaking down his humanity and spirit over a period of months and years: stress positions, sleep deprivation, loud music, extreme temperatures, and repeated fruitless water-boarding.
I don't think we get to blame Hollywood for this. More like the techniques that our "advisors" were refining and teaching to repressive anti-communist regimes throughout the 20th century, finally applied by us instead of by proxy.
When I was a child/teen, it was popular to wonder about the effects of TV violence, and now we know. It appears many people are unable to distinguish between TV and reality. Monkey see, monkey do.
I've never been entirely clear about the information being searched for among supposed terrorists. Operating without state sponsors, terrorist cells are pretty threadbare, and don't have many valuable secrets. The secrets they might have are limited in use, and have a short shelf life.
Then we read in the article:
Given that the government has a monopoly on violence, maybe the entire goal all along was to conduct exactly this research as a non-survival experiment in humans, under an opportunistic pretense such that the subjects being expended would be considered despicable enough to waste on such exploration?Maybe doing so would fill in such knowlege gaps, and provide answers in the only way possible.