Washington, May 13: US Senator John McCain has said that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques were not a factor in tracking down al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

In an impassioned speech given on the Senate floor, McCain said people who supported those kind of measures were wrong to claim that waterboarding al-Qaeda’s No. 3, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, provided information that led to bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.

He said he asked CIA director Leon Panetta for the facts, and that the hunt for bin Laden did not begin with fresh information from Mohammed.

In fact, the name of bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, came from a detainee held in another country, The Scotsman reports.

“Not only did the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed not provide us with key leads on bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmed, it actually produced false and misleading information,” McCain said.

“Ultimately, this is about morality. What is at stake here is the very idea of America - the America whose values have inspired the world,” he said. (ANI)