WASHINGTON — Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta today became the highest-ranking Obama administration official to admit that the U.S. used torture to help find Osama Bin Laden.
Panetta was responding to a question on the movie “Zero Dark Thirty,” which depicts prisoners being waterboarded by the US in an effort to find out where bin Laden’s is hiding.
“The movie seems to say, to indicate that enhanced interrogation techniques or torture was used to get information to get Bin Laden. Is that true?” asked NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press.”
“Yes, some of it came from some of the tactics that were used at that time, interrogation tactics that were used,” Panetta responded.
“The real story was that in order to put the puzzle of intelligence together that led us to Bin Laden, there were a lot of pieces out there that were a part of that puzzle,” Panetta added.
But the former CIA Director dismissed the tactics as playing a key role as the movie depicts in the location of Bin Laden, who was shot and killed in May 2011 by Navy SEALS while he was hiding in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
“The fact is we put together most of that intelligence without having to resort to that,” Panetta said. “I think we would’ve gotten Bin Laden without that.”
Panetta’s stance is different from that of Bush administration officials, who have called the “enhanced interrogation” methods that were used under them critical to the operation.
Meanwhile, Panetta blamed the nation’s intelligence community for the failure to get the military to Benghazi on Sept. 11 after the consulate was attacked.
But he did say that the response was a swift as possible.
“This is not 911,” Panetta said in an interview aired Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “You cannot just simply call and expect within two minutes to have a team in place. It takes time.
“In these situation you’ve got to look at what we’re facing, what we knew, what intelligence we had in order to respond. Admittedly, better intelligence about what was taking place there would have given us a head start.”