I’ve been catching up on my interrogation reading, and was surprised to see that Ron Suskind–no fan of the administration and its policies obviously–isn’t as critical of Bush’s speech last week as I had been led to believe. He has plenty of criticisms of Bush, of course, and thinks he is guilty of “a bit of an overstatement” in calling Abu Zubaydah a senior leader, but he also thinks we got some things of value from him:

Well, I don’t think that the president contradicted anything that’s in the book. I say in the book that we did get some things of value from Abu Zubaydah. We found out that “Muktar” — the brain, that’s what it means in Arabic — was Khalid Sheik Mohammed. That was valuable for a short period of time for us. We were then able to go through the SIGINT [signal intelligence], the electronic dispatches over the years, and say, “OK, that’s who ‘Muktar’ is.” Zubaydah, of course, is showing up on signal intelligence as Zubaydah.
Also, we essentially said, “You’ve got to give us a body, somebody we can go get,” and he gave us [Jose] Padilla. Padilla turned out to not be nearly as valuable as advertised at the start, though, and I think that’s been shown in the ensuing years. So that’s what we got from Zubaydah.