Cheney, Rumsfeld, other Bush officials claim credit for nabbing Bin Laden, talk up waterboarding

A parade of former Bush administration officials went on the Sunday political shows to talk up waterboarding and claim a measure of credit for bagging Osama Bin Laden.


Former Vice President Dick Cheney said waterboarding - which the Obama administration nixed as torture - "probably" played a role in tracking down Bin Laden and should be brought back.


"It was a good program. It was legal program. It was not torture," Cheney told Fox News Sunday. "I would strongly recommend we continue it."


Former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld called it "a mistake" to rule out waterboarding. "It's clear that those techniques that the CIA used worked," he said on CBS.


Officials have said the key to finding Bin Laden was locating his courier. Captured terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave the courier's nickname in 2003 after being waterboarded 183 times.


Torture opponents say Mohammed never gave up the real name, even under so-called "enhanced interrogation," and suggest regular questioning might have worked better.


Further, they say torture is a betrayal of American values, whether it works or not.


Rumsfeld said he thought Obama made "the right decision" to gamble on a SEAL raid, but added, "I would have preferred a lot less discussion out of the White House about intelligence, personally."


Last week, the Daily News reported that former President Bush declined an invitation to visit Ground Zero with President Obama because he thought Obama wasn't sharing credit for the raid. His loyal aides set out to change the narrative Sunday.


Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised Obama's "brave decision," but stressed that the operation - which she called a "victory across presidencies" - took many years to set up.


"You don't just stumble upon Osama Bin Laden. It takes a lot of work to get there," she said on CNN.


"These leads developed quite a long time ago."


Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said on NBC, "Both presidents deserve a lot of credit for maturing the apparatus over 10 years."


On Saturday, former Bush chief of staff Andrew Card criticized Obama's visit to Ground Zero as grandstanding.


"I think he has pounded his chest a little too much," Card told the German newspaper Der Spiegel. "He can take pride in it, but he does not need to show it so much."


Card oversaw one of history's worst-conceived presidential victory laps: when his boss donned a flight suit to jet to an aircraft carrier draped with a banner announcing "Mission Accomplished" in 2003, just five weeks into the Iraq war that still rages.


*Helen Kennedy,Daily News Staff Writer