Whether Bush, Cheney and their associates were seeking real or fabricated intelligence, they knowingly employed methods that were certain to produce the latter -- as American officials well knew because those same techniques, especially water torture, had been used to elicit false confessions from captured Americans as long ago as World War II and the Korean conflict.
They were absolutely seeking false information. However insane, the Cheney people aren't idiots. That had to have known that these torture techniques were specifically designed to elicit false confessions. There's no other way to explain why they would've wheeled out the coffins and waterboards when legal techniques were working nicely.