WASHINGTON, May 8: Former US vice president Dick Cheney credited harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding as playing a role in tracking down Osama bin Laden and called on Sunday for them to be reinstated.

In one of the first acts on entering the White House in 2009, President Barack Obama suspended so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” equating them to torture and 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 the merits of employing such methods.

Cheney, speaking on the Fox News on Sunday programme, 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.

“All have said one way or the other that the enhanced interrogation programme played a role,” he said. “My guess is that's probably the case that it contributed, just as did a number of other factors.”—AFP