Dick Cheney says Obama should reinstate waterboarding program.
Waterboarding helped find Osama bin Laden, Dick Cheney says
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')ASHINGTON - Harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding played a role in tracking down Osama bin Laden and should be reinstated, former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney said Sunday.
Another top member of the Bush administration, former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, credited the use of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" with yielding "a major fraction" of U.S. intelligence on al-Qaida and called ending them a "mistake."
In one of the first acts after entering the White House in 2009, President Barack Obama suspended such methods, equating them with torture and saying they represented all that was wrong with the Bush-era "war on terror."
But the killing of bin Laden, or more exactly the way the intelligence was gathered that led the CIA to track him down, has reopened a raging controversy in the U.S. over their use.
Cheney, speaking on Fox News Sunday, said top intelligence officials had stated that "some of the early leads" that helped agents find bin Laden had come thanks to the harsh interrogation techniques used on terror suspects.
"All have said one way or the other that the enhanced interrogation program played a role," he said. "My guess is that’s probably the case that it contributed, just as did a number of other factors."
Asked whether the methods should be reinstated if the U.S. were to capture a new high-value target, Cheney replied: "I certainly would advocate it. I’d be a strong supporter of it."



