From The Some Americans Really Are At War Department:

Here are two stories that won't surprise those who have been paying attention.

Evidence indicates 'torture' worked
Al-Qaida operative a fountain of information for U.S. after water-boarding --Chicago Tribune

Moral and legal aspects aside, conventional wisdom is that torture simply isn't practical: that someone who is being tortured will say anything to make the torture stop, and that information gleaned through torture is therefore not reliable.

Some former military and intelligence officers say, however, that physically aggressive interrogation techniques that some human rights groups consider torture can be effective in the short term. When asked for specifics, the technique they cite is "waterboarding," in which water is poured over a subject's face to create the sensation of drowning.
Consider Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 39-year-old former al-Qaida operative who was the Sept. 11 mastermind and bearer of many al-Qaida secrets.

If anyone had a motive for remaining silent it was the man known to terrorism investigators as "KSM." But not long after his capture in Pakistan, in March 2003, KSM began to talk.

He ultimately had so much to say that more than 100 footnoted references to the CIA's interrogations of KSM are contained in the final report of the commission that investigated Sept. 11.

Not that everything KSM said was believable. But much of his information checked out in separate questioning of other captures al-Qaida figures.
What made KSM decide to talk? The answer may be waterboarding, to which KSM was subjected on at least one occasion, according to various accounts.

Intelligence operatives point out that while waterboarding can break through a suspect's initial resistance, it isn't effective for long-term interrogation.

Once a suspect begins to communicate, however, an interrogation specialist can put into action a wide range of far more subtle techniques, which include playing to a subject's ego or pretending to be his friend.
It could not be learned exactly when KSM was "waterboarded," or whether the technique was used more than once. But only 12 days after being captured in Pakistan, on March 1, 2003, KSM made his first reported major revelation.

As part of his initial proposal for the attack on America, he had "considered targeting a nuclear power plant," KSM said. But al-Qaida chieftain Osama bin Laden "decided to drop that idea," evidently concerned about a Chernobyl-type fallout that might threaten countries adjacent to the United States.

There are no footnotes keyed to the next 12 days. But on March 24 KSM began talking again, this time about assistance provided by al-Qaida to Zacarias Moussaoui, who was arrested in Minnesota three weeks before Sept. 11 and later pleaded guilty to planning to fly a hijacked airplane into the White House as part of a separate plot.


Clinton started CIA rendition program
Ex-agent: 'We asked the president what we should do with the people we capture' --Islam Online

(Thanks to WorldNetDaily for the heads up.)