Politics

Panetta seems to admit torture was used to find bin Laden [VIDEO]

Jeff Poor Media Reporter
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On Sunday’s broadcast of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta seemed to tell host Chuck Todd that the CIA did employ torture tactics like those seen in the film “Zero Dark Thirty” during the hunt for Osama bin Laden — but he insisted the United States would have caught the terrorist mastermind even without those techniques.

“Zero Dark Thirty” repeatedly depicts CIA operatives taunting and waterboarding defenseless detainees. It attracted widespread criticism before its release and sparked an ongoing debate about its accuracy.

But when Todd asked Panetta flatly whether “enhanced interrogation techniques — or torture — were used to get bin Laden,” Panetta suggested they were.

“The real story is that in order to put the puzzle of intelligence together that led us to bin Laden, there was a lot of intelligence,” Panetta said. “There were a lot of pieces out there that were a part of that puzzle. Yes, some of it came from some of the tactics that were used at that time — interrogation tactics that were used. But the fact is we put together most of that intelligence without having to resort to that. I think we could have gotten bin Laden without that.”

(h/t Gateway Pundit)

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Jeff Poor