Karl Rove said Friday that he was "furious" about a decision by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to review whether laws were broken in the interrogation of suspected terrorist detainees held in overseas locations.

"I almost can't speak about it, I'm so mad," said Rove, who insisted the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, eventually led to an operative called "Hambali."

"You know what the plot was that they were [trying] to operationalize? Bringing down up to 10 airliners over the Pacific simultaneously," Rove said to a gasp in the audience. "Can you imagine what would have happened to the psyche of the world and our country if they were able to execute this plot? And the only reason they got him was because they broke Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and they broke him in part because they used waterboarding."

In 2006, President George Bush delivered a speech where he outlined the connection between Mohammed and Hambali, whose real name is Riduan Isamuddin, the operational chief for a southeast Asian terrorist organization with Al-Qaida ties. The administration said Hambali's arrest led to a foiled plot to fly a jetliner into the Library Tower in Los Angeles.

Rove later told The Tribune that he confused the Library Tower plot with a 1995 plot to crash a dozen jets into the ocean.

The timeline of the foiling of the Library Tower attack has been questioned, since Mohammed was not captured until 2003. The White House said in a 2006 briefing that members of the cell plotting the attack believed it had been canceled in 2002, after the leader of the cell was apprehended.

A report by the CIA inspector general, part of which was released this week, said that Hambali provided information leading to some al Qaeda operatives, and Mohammed had provided information on several terrorist plots, although none appeared to be imminent. Mohammed provided little useful information before he was waterboarded, the report said. He was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 alone.

Rove said there are stringent rules that have to be followed when the CIA waterboarded a detainee, but those CIA agents who served their country will now have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills out of their own pockets defending their actions.

"This country is less secure today because this president, and his attorney general made it so, and we all have reason to mourn that," Rove said.

In announcing his inquiry Monday, Holder said the review would not touch on interrogators who followed the guidance they were given, only those who overstepped the bounds.

"The men and women in our intelligence community perform an incredibly important service to our nation, and they often do so under difficult and dangerous circumstances. They deserve our respect and gratitude for the work they do," Holder said.

A report by the CIA's inspector general released this week with large portions redacted found that the CIA used waterboarding in a manner that broke from the authorized techniques.

Waterboarding has since been banned as torture by the Obama administration. The report found that the enhanced interrogation of high-profile detainees produced valuable evidence, but it did not draw a conclusion on whether the tactics were justified.