Saxby Chambliss: “The very best tool we have been able to utilize from an intelligence-gathering standpoint is the information we gather…”

“The very best tool we have been able to utilize from an intelligence-gathering standpoint is the information we gather from individuals who were involved in the crime or involved in the planning of the crime. That is the case whether it is an ordinary burglary, bank robbery or in the case that we are talking about today, the planning and the scheming of the carrying out of what happened on September 11, as well as terrorist activity prior to that, such as the USS Cole bombing and others, as well as terrorist activity against the United States subsequent to September 11, as well as the detainees who are at Guantanamo today who were captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. We have gone through each one of the detainees who were involved in specific incidents or who are battlefield-captured detainees and we have been able to gather intelligence from them that we simply would not have been able to get from anyone else. Many times what we have when we interrogate the detainees, we will know the answer to the question we are going to ask them. Sometimes it is information that was gleaned from detainee X, who was with detainee Y whom we are now interrogating. By virtue of the fact that we know information that we have already gleaned from detainee X, we can ask terrorist Y about it or detainee Y.…”