released bin laden videotapes captured in the raid on that compound. today we learned that the courier who unwittingly led the u.s. to bin laden was first identified during the bush administration. i think it was about four years ago in 2007, we had built up sufficient lead information on the name of the courier that we thought it was ready for presidential primetime. so we briefed it to the president. not as something imminent, but as our most promising lead to track down bin laden. so this is classic human intelligence. you had people on the ground. they talked to people. they developed relationships. is that right? it is. but it also came out of detainee interrogations. one of the more prominent leads we had at the beginning of this exercise was partial identity information that came out of detainees that we were holding in our so-called black sites. then from that point, we used all the tools of intelligence. i can t go into detail, but i
to find and follow the couriers. that was a hypothesis with which we went into this four years ago or so. so this is classic human intelligence? you had people on the ground. they talked to people. they developed relationships. is that right? it is. but it also came out of detainee interrogations. one of the more prominent leads we had at the beginning of the exercise was partial identity information that came out of detainees that we were holding in our so-called black sites, and then from that point we used all the tools of intelligence. i can t go into detail, but it was signals intelligence and imagery intelligence and human intelligence that allowed us to build this. this wasn t done one brick at a time. this was actually done one pebble at a time. this is classic analytic work. tell us for a moment about that issue of interrogation. there s something of a debate here about whether the
director of the central intelligence agency in 2007. when a team comes in and says we think we need to focus on the couriers, we have a name that we took under redigs to black sites and interrogated using enhanced interrogation techniques and we think we have a lead and we want to follow it through. yesterday on scott hapb on s radio program in north dakota mike hayden said the original lead information, and frankly it was incomplete identity information on the cure yores ys bee came from detainees at the back site. was this information obtained through advanced interrogation techniques? hayden says, let me just leave it at that. the clear indication is that the black sites where the enhanced interrogation techniques were employed is where we got this information. one panetta affirmed it saying. bill: that s what i was getting to. he was asked, can you confirm that it was as a result of waterboarding that we learned