THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding played a role in tracking down Osama bin Laden and should be reinstated, former US vice president Dick Cheney said.
Another top member of the Bush administration, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, credited the use of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" with yielding "a major fraction" of US intelligence on al-Qaeda 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 United States over their use.
Cheney, speaking on the "Fox News Sunday" program, 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 United States were to capture a new high-value target, Cheney replied: "I certainly would advocate it. I'd be a strong supporter of it." » | Telegraph’s Foreign Staff | Monday, May 09, 2011
