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Before and after. >> there you go. when you have to resort to torture, what happened in 9/11 was we had no human assets inside of al qaeda. at least according to french intelligence, who i was working very closely with. and all of the major terrorist attacks that the french stymied, stymied through infiltrating these groups. and the idea that torture is number one effective, because you reach a point where even if they say something is true, you keep going, and they'll say anything to stop the pain. >> time winds down. i want to give you the last shot. you've been enormously skeptical of what ...

If you're going to get good information, people are going to try hard and use these methods to get it. i would rather we didn't try it. if that meant bin laden had gotten away, i suppose he would still be running free. but i don't think we should flee from the possibility that the information was related, and i think we should just accept that and accept that maybe those programs, horrific as they were, may have helped lead to this outcome. >> being a good intelligence officer is not that different from being a good investigative reporter. when you have to resort torture, you intelligence syst...

They have human assets such as this man. some are honest. some are dishonest. some do it for money and some do it for self-aggrandizement and some just lie. >> did you ever when you found out there -- i asked -- i remember asking former president bush when you found out about it, when you found out there were no weapons of mass destruction, he said he was sick to his stomach. did anyone say give me the person who gave the intelligence because signature here listening to you the fault of the war was the intelligence community. >> well -- >> the false premise of the war. >> well, first of all, t...

That screen and strangle that guy? >> you know, the intelligence community created the national intelligence estimate. colin powell is an honorable man. he understood intelligence products. he worked hard to prepare those remarks to the united nations. he believed every word he said and what he was basing -- >> of course he did. he said, look, go ask the defense intelligence agency. you're as close as i can get. how did this guy's information become gospel when in fact he was completely lying, and by the way, the german sources who turned this over said we don't think the guy is reliable, but ...

We've gone through long periods where we've drawn down our intelligence funding and human assets. from a period when we focused on the soviet union intense civil over decades to a point where we have not just rogue states that are closed and very difficult to gain information from but we have networks, terrorist networks that don't have nations. that don't have parliments. >> greta: is the job that hard? >> the task of intelligence gathering is enormously difficult. we have a lot of fine people working on it. the implication that we ought to be able, as a country, to know the capabilities of a...