In August 2009, Brennan criticized some Bush-administration anti-terror policies, saying that waterboarding had threatened national security by increasing the recruitment of terrorists and decreasing the willingness of other nations to cooperate with the U.S. He also described the Obama administration's focus as being on "extremists" and not "jihadists". He said that using the second term, which means one who is struggling for a holy goal, gives "these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek" and suggests the US is at war with the religion of Islam. Brennan told "The New York Times" in January 2010, "I was somebody who did oppose waterboarding," a claim that he repeated in 2013, during the Senate's hearings about whether to confirm him as Obama's CIA director. None of Brennan's superior officers at the CIA, however, recall hearing his objections, and in 2018, Brennan admitted to "The New York Times", "It wasn't as though I was wearing that opposition on my sleeve throughout the agency. I expressed it privately, to individuals."