Obama’s CIA Chief Leon Panetta Admits Waterboarding Aided In Results and Information on Osama bin Laden

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Obama’s CIA Chief Leon Panetta Admits Waterboarding Brought Results and Information on Osama bin Laden
Intelligence garnered from waterboarded detainees was used to track down al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and kill him, CIA Chief Leon Panetta told NBC News on Tuesday. CIA Director Leon Panetta talking to NBC News’ Brian Williams about the spectacular raid by U.S. Navy SEALs that resulted in the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

“Enhanced interrogation techniques” were used to extract information that led to the mission’s success, Panetta said during an interview with anchor Brian Williams. Those techniques included waterboarding, he acknowledged.

Panetta, who in a 2009 CIA confirmation hearing declared “waterboarding is torture and it’s wrong,” said Tuesday that debate about its use will continue.
Williams also tried to pin him down (begins at around the 3:50 mark) on whether the intelligence that led to Bin Laden was obtained through waterboarding. Panetta tried skirting the question first. He said there were so many different pieces of evidence that it was hard to settle on one piece as the deciding factor. Williams then tried asking Panetta if he was denying that waterboarding helped to obtain the key intelligence that led to Bin Laden. Panetta then said, “NO,” and went on to say that it was used on some of the detainees that gave up information – but that there is no way to know if the same information could not have been obtained through other techniques. He then directly confirmed at the end that “waterboarding” was used to gain information from the detainees that supplied intelligence which led to Bin Laden.
“Whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always gonna be an open question,” Panetta said.
“In the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information and that was true here,” Panetta said. “We had a multiple source — a multiple series of sources — that provided information with regards to the situation. Clearly some of it came from detainees and the interrogation of detainees but we also had information from other sources as well.”
Panetta’s comments hours after Attorney General Eric Holder defended as lawful Tuesday the intelligence gathering and raid that resulted in the death of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.
The raid was “lawful, legitimate and appropriate in every way. The people who were responsible for that action, both in the decision making and the effecting of that decision, handled themselves I think quite well,” Holder told the House Judiciary Committee.
Holder’s comments to the Judiciary Committee marked the first appearance before Congress by an Obama administration Cabinet official since the mission targeting bin Laden was carried out successfully early Monday.
Under questioning by a committee member, Holder said he did not know whether information helpful to the search for bin Laden was gained through harsh interrogation techniques of al-Qaida suspects.

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Wild Thing’s comment……..
They are really having a hard time admitting that the things Bush, the CIA with Bush and our military did when Bush was president worked and worked well!
How funny to see that Panetta is finally admitting it and at the same time Holder is being questioned about the same thing and says it did not.