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.
