How about starting here, from the unanimous findings of the bipartisan Senate report:The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.
-Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody (pdf), December 2008
29 page report. Who was on the committee. How many Republicans and how man Democrats? I would be interested to know just how Bipartisan it really was. There are a few Republicans that are so Democrat in everything but name, that I would not be surprised if the media says it is bipartisan only because of a select few Republicans.
As far as that person that was mentioned, the abuses in Abu Graib, you will have to be specific as to what kinds of abuses from Abu Graib that was used by Terrorists networks in their recruitment process. The beginning of the report you linked clearly states that they trump charges against the US that are false.. Now Terrorists can and do lie about a lot of things, and would still claim that we torture wether we actually did or not. So it is a mute point. Even if we didn't, it would not stop their lies to recruit people. I think you are still naive to ***ume that #5 is accurate, because it really comes down to how honest the Terrorists are in the first place.They are recruited based on false propaganda that says the United States is out to destroy Islam.