It’s been a week of eye-popping statements and occasional stabs at clarification for Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, after his calls for greater surveillance on Muslims in the US provoked intense criticism from civil libertarians and drawn comparisons to tactics used in Nazi Germany. Asked if there should be a database system for tracking Muslims in the United States, Trump said, “There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases”.
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Donald Trump outlined yet more controversial steps he would take in the name of national security if he becomes president, calling Sunday for the return of the widely discredited interrogation technique of waterboarding and repeating that he’d track Muslims and shutter mosques in the U.S.
He compared the experience to a “lynch mob” and said people were dropping racial epithets like “monkey” and the n-word.
He said Sunday that he would want a database of Syrian refugees coming into the USA “When the Syrian refugees are going to start pouring into this country, we don’t know if they’re ISIS, we don’t know if it’s a Trojan horse”, he said. So we want to be smart… we want to be vigilant.
But then he suggested the database would focus more on refugees than Muslim Americans.
“I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down”.
“It was on television”.
“If we’re just going to pick out a particular group of people based on their religion, based on their race, based on a few other thing, that’s setting a pretty risky precedent”, said Ben Carson, who is rivaling Trump atop most Republican primary polls.
The real estate tycoon also doubled down on his assertion thousands of Arabs in New Jersey cheered the World Trade Center’s collapse on 9/11 despite police disputing that account.
“The United States will have absolutely no choice but to close down a few mosques where a few bad things are happening”, Donald Trump said in a recent interview that aired on Fox News’Hannity”. “I want a watch list for the Syrian refugees that [President Barack] Obama’s going to let in if we don’t stop him as Republicans”, he said. I want to have surveillance. In a tweet Sunday, the mayor called Trump’s remarks “absurd”.
“You know, they don’t use waterboarding over there; they use chopping off people’s heads”, he said.
Matthew Guerra posted, “Yeah, they did cheer … not thousands, but believe me it happened”.
Trump held up the signed promise at the time and said: “I will be totally pledging my allegiance to the Republican Party and the conservative principle for which it stands”. “… I would absolutely bring back interrogation, and strong interrogation”.
Trump did back away from comments on closing mosques.
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Carson, who has joined Trump atop GOP presidential preference polls, did not delve into constitutional questions about whether expanding government surveillance activities would violate First Amendment protections.
