I'm waiting for his book deal to be announced.  It's clear that he's not doing this to help the Bush administration; the very last thing they need is for one of their agents to plaster their face all over TV at the very same time the Bush administration is trying to argue that, really, really, we needed to destroy the interview tapes despite court orders not to do so, and this isn't obstruction of justice because it was necessary so that the agents' identities not be revealed.

No, he's trying to set himself up as the good guy.  I used to torture people, he says, but now I'm against it.  And when I did, I got good information in just seconds which saved many lives.  But torture is still wrong.  And the administration's stonewalling efforts on torture make him look like a whistleblower even though he doesn't have much new information.

He has every reason to play up the importance of the information the got and the success of the torture, because they make him more important.  General Wayne Downing's comments were

"The interrogations of Abu Zubaydah drove me nuts at times...He and some of the others are very clever guys. At times I felt we were in a classic counter-interrogation class: They were telling us what they think we already knew. Then, what they thought we wanted to know. As they did that, they fabricated and weaved in threads that went nowhere. But, even with these ploys, we still get valuable information and they are off the street, unable to plot and coordinate future attacks."

To translate the religious language, "Allah told me to" simply means, "I decided it was the proper (just) thing to do."  This could of course be a lie, but unlike our liar in chief, terrorists as a whole (and maybe not their leaders) tend to be a bunch of remarkably unsubtle, honest guys who like to shout "Death to America" at their own detainee status hearings.  At Abu Zubaida's own detainee status hearing, he spent much of the time railing about how mad he was at Bin Laden for going after civilians, instead of, presumably, going after military installation and anyone nearby, or anyone who helped Israel, or other targets valid under his version of Islamic law.  Perhaps he decided that the terrorist movement would be better off without Bin Laden and his followers for this reason.  Maybe he was just jealous of him.   With so much information classified or destroyed it's hard to judge probabilities.

The CIA tortured quite a lot of people and he's the only one they claim to have gotten good information out of.  If you interrogate enough people about their brother in law, eventually you find one who hates their brother in law.

As far as success goes, I don't think you can count merely getting useful information as success.  The first question would be, was the information useful enough to make up for the additional enemies that you created as a result of obtaining it.  In this case, we must ask whether we really did enough damage to Al Quaida to be worth giving them and other anti-American groups Abu Graib as a recruiting poster.  The second question would be whether it is useful to make up for the damage to the will to continue in counter-terrorism activity caused by the torture of innocents which inevitably accompanies any widespread torture-based counter-terrorism program.  The third question is, even if successful, does it do enough good to make up for the damage to our democratic institutions.

As far as I can tell from historical precedents, considering the Phillipine-American War, the Vietnam War, Iraq under Saddam, the "Dirty War" in Argentina, Vichy France, Turkey, Chechnya, and Spain, it seems to be that the answer to the first question is generally yes, where it expands to retaliatory attacks on likely sympathizer populations, with little effect otherwise.  The answer to the second is generally no in post-WWII democracies, at least to torture activities widespread enough to suppress terrorism.  This leads those in power to disapprove of democracy, with the consequence that the answer is generally no to the third question as well.

You make some excellent points here, but to your first two reasons, I would add a third:

#3 To spread fear and keep a population cowed.

Once the word gets out that people are being tortured, that throws fear into the equation, and thus a population becomes more suggestible, easier to manage, etc.  

That works when you are the only game in town.  In Iraq, we are not necessarily the biggest, baddest folks around.  The trouble with spreading fear in this way is that it just makes people responsive to whoever can take advantage of that fear, and that is not always us.  

sierra tango foxtrot uniform

...is a brave man. It was an interesting interview that he did today on npr. He built a rather convincing case for the reasons we don't need to do things like water boarding.

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.

thats rather specious Lou. Wouldn't he logically then have reason to say that the interrogation was NOT torture? That way we both 'saved lives' and 'didn't torture'?

Why accept the torture statement and yet reject the saved lives statement from the same person?

Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.