Let's be clear that while the CIA director apparently insists he was offering a generic statement on intelligence craft, he was not asked a generic question.
Litvinenko's friends are urging British officers to question a jailed Russian intelligence officer who has accused the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB, of creating a hit squad to silence Russian emigres in Britain.
In answer to a question, he said that if intelligence experts did not feel that the information came from suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden or the al Qaeda network, the government would not have "ramped up" on it.
CNN: Information from Canada helped lead to alert, official says
The document in question is the National Intelligence Estimate, a joint effort by all 16 intelligence-gathering agencies in the U.S. government.
And yesterday the Senate Intelligence Committee de-classified a report that calls into question the White House's claim of a link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein.
One key witness the British officers hope to question is Andrei Lugovoi, a former Russian intelligence officer, who met with Litvinenko at a London hotel on the day he fell ill in November.
"There's no question that some of the intelligence gathered was a result of those efforts, " he said, referring to the enhanced interrogations.
WSJ: The Weekend Interview with Mark Boal: The Art and Politics of 'Zero Dark Thirty'
Getting back to the question of artificial intelligence, then, you can see why it becomes a much taller order to produce a human-level intelligence.
Without question, TIA represented a radical leap ahead in both data-mining technology and intelligence analysis.
CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Balancing security and privacy during wartime
News stories have reported that terrorists in custody provided critical information, which brings up the question of the names Khalid Sheik Mohammed supplied to intelligence agents under interrogation in a secret prison in Eastern Europe several years ago.
FORBES: What Obama's Bin Laden Speech Tells Us About His Economic Policies
Last night, Vice President Dick Cheney told a conservative group in Washington what he thinks of those who question whether the White House manipulated prewar intelligence.
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