Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump Sunday said “strong interrogation techniques”, including waterboarding, should be brought back to fight the Islamic State group and added if the victims of last week’s deadly attacks in Paris had guns, “very few people” would have died. “We want to go with watch lists, we want to go with databases, and we have no choice”. He said: “I agree that there’s no such thing as political correctness when you are fighting an enemy who wants to destroy you”.
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Earlier this week, Trump stirred a storm a criticism for demanding a nationwide registry of Muslims. “Somebody like Jeb, and others that are running against me – and by the way Hillary is another one”, he said.
Ben Carson, who faced criticism this week for comparing Syrian refugees to “rabid dogs”, wouldn’t say whether he would reinstate the use of waterboarding.
But on Sunday, Trump said: “I don’t want to close mosques; I want to surveil mosques”.
“I think waterboarding is peanuts compared to what they do to us”, the Republican presidential candidate said.
But Mr Trump retreated from his call to close certain mosques, which had provoked criticism even from his Republican rivals.
“I will have to see what happens”, he said.
He said he would “absolutely bring back interrogation and strong interrogation”.
It was the latest in a series of inflammatory Trump responses to the threat of terrorism in the wake of the Paris attacks that appear to have bolstered his poll numbers. “When I did this, I said I have to be treated fairly. If I’m treated fairly, I’m fine”, he said Sunday on “This Week”. “I want to have him in jail – that’s what I want. This could be the – it’s probably not – but it could be the great [sic] Trojan Horse of all time”, Trump said.
“I’m the only person in this race who’s actually done this before”, he said, highlighting his prior career as a federal prosecutor.
“You have very, very tough people that you’re dealing with”.
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Last year, the Senate Intelligence Report found that waterboarding didn’t actually work in gleaning important information from detainees, though the CIA maintains that waterboarding helped the agency obtain information that eventually led to the location of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden’s in Pakistan.
