Panetta praises ‘Zero Dark Thirty’

US: The man who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, ex-CIA director Leon Panetta, vouched Friday for “Zero Dark Thirty,” calling it a “good movie” even though the tale of the biggest manhunt in history had to be simplified for the big screen.

“It's a movie,” Panetta said, laughing. “And it's a good movie. But I lived the real story,” he told AFP in an interview.

Panetta, who is due to step down as US defense secretary this month, said the film should not be seen as a historical account of the secret operation that he was intimately involved with as the head of the CIA from 2009 to 2011.

“It's a little tough for me to take everything I saw and all of the work that was done and that was involved in that operation... and all of the people that worked at it and think you could put that all into a two-hour movie. You really can't.” But Panetta indicated that the Oscar-nominated film did convey some sense of the years of legwork it took the CIA to track down the Al-Qaeda mastermind to a hideout in Pakistan.

“I think people ought to make their own judgments. There are parts of it that give you a good sense of how the intelligence operations do work.

But I also think people in the end have to understand that it isn't a documentary, it's a movie.” The film, starring Jessica Chastain as a relentless CIA officer, suggests that torture and abuse of some suspects helped generate information that led to the May 2011 raid that ultimately took out bin Laden.

AFP