in a briefing on the new army field manual last wednesday, lt gen john f kimmons, army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, emphatically stated that in the 5 years since 9/11 no useful information has been obtained by abusive methods. [transcript]

since we know such methods have been used, the statement directly contradicts administration hints that actionable intelligence has been acquired thru unconventional interrogation techniques, thereby suggesting that torture might sometimes be of value.

here is a truly priceless quote from the general:

Some of our most significant successes on the battlefield have been—in fact, I would say all of them, almost categorically all of them have accrued from expert interrogators using mixtures of authorized, humane interrogation practices, in clever ways that you would hope Americans would use them, to push the envelope within the bookends of legal, moral and ethical, now as further refined by this field manual. So we don't need abusive practices in there. Nothing good will come from them.