Word: tenets
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...TENET: Look, first of all, torture doesn't work. Second of all, the vast preponderance of data, it's not about the harshness of the techniques, it's about smart people. We don't believe in torture. Look, this is a country of laws. There's authorization. There's legal opinions. We did this by the numbers. We corroborate this stuff. We have other sources. There are plot lines that are broken. They give us enormous access and understanding of al-Qaeda, insights into operatives that we didn't know about. Enormous value to us. Huge insight. You want...
...TENET: Once you get very disruptive and you get inside the sanctuary and you catch Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and you catch Abu Zubayda and you catch Abu Faraj Al-Libbi, once you start taking down senior operational planners, logisticians, financiers, then you start to understand your impact on the capability of an organization to do things because it's that operational level just below Bin Laden and Zawahiri that you care about the most. Is it a permanent kind of report card? No, because they're always going to try to reconstitute. The issue for them, of course...
...TENET: You've got to keep working against that layer below bin Laden and Zawahiri who are operators, planners, logisticians, financiers, who are going to be responsible for that next operational act against us or an allied country, and you have to systematically keep eroding their ability to hurt you. And out of that, sooner or later, you're going to get a lead, you're going to get data, you're going to have an opportunity...
...TENET: I'm not so arrogant to believe that everything we did has stopped them. You've got to say you've hurt them on one level operationally, the country thinks about security differently, there's a different deterrent posture in the country. They're trying to figure out what it all means. And, ultimately, what they're trying to figure out is, are they going to be consistent and stay with it, or are we going to have the luxury of time and just wait for them to essentially get tired of doing this...
...TENET: Nothing that you see tells you that there's not anything but intense interest, and the United States is continuing to be a target...