People say torture provides poor intelligence because once you're torturing a guy, he'll say pretty much anything to get you to stop. That looks like a pretty good reason not to do it if you're interested in the truth.

But wait now, if you're the Bush administration, and truth is just one interesting aspect of what you're all about, you can make something of this. Let your guy know what you want him to say, and beat the hell out of him until he says it. Then present it as truth, because it comes from a source "who had a reason to know." No doubt about it, information whispered by a half-dead man into the ear of his interrogator has a certain gravitas, like words spoken by lovers in moments of exultation, or the confession of a dying man to a priest. People think twice before questioning information like that, which is what makes it golden. 

Not actionable? Why son, it's the most actionable intelligence there is, because you can take any action you want based upon it. Refer obliquely to it in a press release, feed it into the legal justification machine, even go all out and invade a whole country (with oil) in a thoroughly nutty search for a terrorist connection that, let's face it, you just made up.

I suspect that as we delve even deeper into the "reasoning," such as it is, for the torture program, we'll discover this aspect lurking in the background: "Yup, we tortured 'em so they'd tell us all kinds of BS that we could pretend was true. And once that information was out there, we used it to justify going further, taking away more liberties, scaring people more. Yessiree, torture works--it works very well indeed. For us."