“You know, they don’t use waterboarding over there; they use chopping off people’s heads”, Trump said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos”.
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Following the attack on September 9, 2011, there were reports of people celebrating from parts of the Middle East, but none mentioned such celebrations in New Jersey.
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who is second to Trump in a new national Washington Post-ABC News poll, also didn’t rule out waterboarding in an interview that aired Sunday with Stephanopoulos, though Carson didn’t explicitly endorse it like Trump did. He said he “would absolutely bring back interrogation and strong interrogation”. The police in New Jersey too dismissed rumours on the internet which said that locals in Paterson in New Jersey cheered the attack.
The Republican frontrunner repeated his call for ramped-up surveillance, and even closure, of many mosques.
‘Well, I don’t want to close mosques; I want to surveil mosques.
“Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down”, Trump told a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, on Saturday evening.
The billionaire businessman sparked controversy at the end of last week by suggesting that he would have all Muslims living on the United States register on a database.
“I think it’s pretty clear ISIS presents the real threat to our country, to the world”, he said, acknowledging at the same time the USA can not abandon the goal of replacing Bashar Assad as Syria’s president, whom he described as “a very bad guy”.
He said it would require the beefing up of U.S. intelligence capabilities. “We can’t keep playing a proxy war game”.
Waterboarding is an interrogation tactic that consists of placing a cloth over someone’s head and then pouring water over the cloth.
“We have no idea who these people are”, he said.
The candidate has been in a back and forth with reporters beginning with a Yahoo!
“He looked like he was 12 years old, he’s got a camera, I’m signing autographs, and I’m going like, he’s asking me questions, talking about the wall, we’re gonna build a wall, we’re gonna build this, we’re gonna”, he said.
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Speaking on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos”, Trump noted that when he sees lines of refugees, he only sees “strong, very powerful” men and very few women and and children.
