Trump calls for waterboarding
The GOP candidate says his national security plan would bring back strong interrogation tactics.
Donald Trump outlined more controversial steps he would take in the name of national security if he became president, calling Sunday for the return of the widely discredited interrogation technique of waterboarding and repeating that he would track Muslims and close mosques in the U.S.
He also revived his earlier suggestion that if he failed to win the Republican nomination, he might run for president anyway, a possibility he raised during the first GOP debate in August before signing a pledge to support the party’s nominee.
To combat Islamic State, Trump said, the U.S. “would have to be strong,” and waterboarding extremists would be a minor act compared with the group’s beheadings of American and British hostages.
“I would bring it back. I think waterboarding is peanuts compared to what they’d do to us … what they did to James Foley when they chopped off his head,” Trump said on ABC’s “This Week,” referring to the American journalist beheaded by Islamic State in August 2014. “That’s a whole different level, and I would absolutely bring back interrogation — and strong interrogation.”
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the George W. Bush administration turned to waterboarding, a method in which a suspect is made to feel as though he’s drowning, to try to extract information from Al Qaeda suspects. The effort proved mostly futile in producing useful intelligence about planned attacks and led to false confessions, according to the executive summary of a long-delayed Senate report that came out late last year. President Obama formally ended the program when he took office in 2009.
Trump, however, said he saw waterboarding as a useful counterbalance to the violent killings committed by Islamic State.
“You know, they don’t use waterboarding over there; they use chopping off people’s heads,” he said.
Trump also doubled down on his calls for a database to monitor Muslims and the possibility of closing mosques.
At a rally in Birmingham, Ala., on Saturday, Trump again brought Muslims to the forefront, a topic he has focused on in the aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks. Trump told the estimated 10,000 people in attendance that he saw images of Arab Muslims cheering in New Jersey after the Sept. 11 attacks.
“There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey where you have large Arab populations,” he said on “This Week.” “They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down. I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down — as those buildings came down — and that tells you something. It was well covered at the time.”
Rumors have surfaced over the years about Muslims in Paterson, N.J., cheering as the twin towers collapsed, but local police discounted those claims at the time.
During the Alabama rally, a protester from the Black Lives Matter movement heckled the real estate mogul. When asked about it in a separate interview Sunday on “Fox and Friends,” Trump suggested the protester should have been “roughed up.”
“Maybe he should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing,” Trump said. “The man that was — I don’t know, you say ‘roughed up’ — he was so obnoxious and so loud. He was screaming. I had 10,000 people in the room yesterday — 10,000 people. And this guy started screaming by himself.”
Trump also stoked fears in the Republican Party that if he did not capture the nomination, he might run for president as an independent.
Although he signed a pledge months ago promising to support the Republican nominee in what was seen as something of a peace agreement between Trump and party leadership, he said Sunday that he was still considering an independent run.
“I will see what happens. I have to be treated fairly. You know, when I did this, I said I have to be treated fairly. If I’m treated fairly, I’m fine,” he said on “This Week.”
‘I think waterboarding is peanuts compared to what they’d do to us … what they did to James Foley when they chopped off his head.’ — Donald Trump, referring to a U.S. journalist beheaded by Islamic State