Within the context of post 9/11 torture, one might wonder about the actual goal of such torture programs.

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:

  Here we have no direct data - after all,
  there have never been controlled torture 
  trials that we know of...

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.