BRIAN WILLIAMS: I’d like to ask you about the sourcing on the intel that ultimately led to this successful attack. Can you confirm that it was as a result of waterboarding that we learned what we needed to learn to go after bin Laden?<\/p>\n
LEON PANETTA: You know Brian, in the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information, and that was true here. We had a multiple source — a multiple series of sources — that provided information with regards to this situation. Clearly, some of it came from detainees and the interrogation of detainees. But we also had information from other sources as well. So, it’s a little difficult to say it was due just to one source of information that we got.<\/p>\n
WILLIAMS: Turned around the other way, are you denying that waterboarding was in part among the tactics used to extract the intelligence that led to this successful mission?<\/p>\n
PANETTA: No, I think some of the detainees clearly were, you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees. But I’m also saying that, you know, the debate about whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always going to be an open question.<\/p>\n
WILLIAMS: So, finer point, one final time, enhanced interrogation techniques — which has always been kind of a handy euphemism in these post-9\/11 years — that includes waterboarding?<\/p>\n
PANETTA: That’s correct.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
President Barack Obama may not have to defend the chasm between his campaign rhetoric denouncing the Bush Administration\u2019s policies and his use of those same tactics to find and kill bin Laden.\u00a0 Don\u2019t expect Panetta, his nominee to be the next Secretary of Defense, to be so lucky in his Senate confirmation hearings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Former Department of Justice official John Yoo is helping set the record straight on how much credit the Obama Administration should be sharing with its predecessor. Writing in today\u2019s Wall Street Journal, Yoo makes the case that the raid on Osama bin Laden\u2019s compound would have been impossible without Bush era policies such as warrantless […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[143,139,1453,491,733,730,2563,571,2270,536,2646,2651,2650],"class_list":["post-9531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-barack-obama","tag-cia","tag-department-of-justice","tag-george-w-bush","tag-interrogation","tag-john-yoo","tag-leon-panetta","tag-osama-bin-laden","tag-secretary-of-defense","tag-terrorism","tag-war-on-terrorism","tag-waterboarding","tag-wiretapping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9531"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9535,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9531\/revisions\/9535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}