HANNITY: All right. The president is now taking credit for getting bin Laden. If he had his way of closing Gitmo, ending enhanced interrogations, which, calling people like yourself torturers, would we have gotten bin Laden?

RODRIGUEZ: We got a lot of information from the detainees that eventually led us to bin Laden.

HANNITY: And that's a fact.

RODRIGUEZ: And that's a fact.

HANNITY: You were there, and you know, and you saw, you watched this unfold.

RODRIGUEZ: What concerns me is that there is still doubt out there. People are doubting, you know, the amount of information that we got from these programs that gave us the basis to go after Al Qaeda and destroy Al- Qaeda, the Al Qaeda that attacked us on 9/11, is just amazing and yet, you know...

HANNITY: So, you don't think we would have gotten bin Laden without the techniques leading to intelligence?

RODRIGUEZ: The reason why is because there is a clear trail. There was someone that we captured, a facilitator that we captured in 2004 that told us about bin Laden's courier and gave us a pseudo name, Akhmeid Al-Kuwaiti.

HANNITY: And that was what led to bin Laden in Pakistan.

RODRIGUEZ: And eventually we got the true name of Al-Kuwaiti.

HANNITY: So the president is really not -- look, I give the president credit for making the decision to get bin Laden. I give SEAL Team 6 all the credit and all the people in the intelligence, but without these techniques, the things he opposed wouldn't have allowed him to make that decision. Is that a fair statement?

RODRIGUEZ: That is a fair statement.

HANNITY: All right, let me ask you this, what do you say when you are called a torturer? What does that mean to you considering you're trying to save American lives?

RODRIGUEZ: Well, I say in the book that I was disgusted and my colleagues were disgusted that after we stepped up to the plate to do what we had to do after 9/11. We answered the call. We had our president basically called us torturers.

HANNITY: There was a controversy about the water boarding of Al-Zubaydah. Those were taped. At one point, you made the decision. You felt you were given two opportunities where they told you, you could destroy them and use a shredder and you did. But people said it was a cover up and compared it to Watergate. What's your reaction to that?

RODRIGUEZ: There were 92 tapes and the tapes were done actually to prove to the world that we were actually taking care of Al-Zubaydah. We were concerned that he was going to die. Again, we realized that the tapes actually had the faces of our interrogators and they were a security problem.

If the tapes were to leak, the security of my people was going to be compromised. So they asked us if we can destroy these tapes and that started a three-year ordeal.

HANNITY: You had a lawyer and you had to defend yourself.

RODRIGUEZ: It was three-year ordeal was until I finally made the decision --

HANNITY: You made the call --

RODRIGUEZ: To go ahead and destroy. Two years later that story leaked and there was an investigation and there was a special prosecutor assigned to investigate. It was three-year investigation.

HANNITY: You think that all of the people that were working on behalf of the safety of Americans had those tapes -- it's like an arrest, wouldn't have looked pretty, but you think their lives would have been in jeopardy?

RODRIGUEZ: I really do.

HANNITY: One last question, you saw the waterboarding of the Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Mohammad and you said Mohammad in particular was a very evil, cold individual --

RODRIGUEZ: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was even more of an evil, cold murderer. He is the person who cut the throat of Danny Pearl, the reporter on tape. He was just pure evil. He was looking for different ways of coming after us. He was the guy who back in 1995 came up with the Bojinka plot to blow up airplanes in mid-air. He followed up in 9/11. He was the toughest, toughest detainee.

HANNITY: One last question. If we abandon these policies, are Americans less safe now?

RODRIGUEZ: Well, these tools saved us, saved lives. I am convinced that it saved lives and allowed us to stop plots against us. It allowed us to go after all these terrorists. We don't capture anybody anymore. So we don't get the intelligence anymore.

HANNITY: Mistake?

RODRIGUEZ: It's a mistake. Even if we captured, we no longer of have the discretion that we used to. Now, we are bound by the Army field manual, which restricts any of this.

HANNITY: Well, thank you for what you did for the country's safety. I know you will have your critics forever, but I agree with you. I believe it kept the country safe.

RODRIGUEZ: Thank you very much.

HANNITY: The book is a fascinating revelation, I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

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