Donald Trump Says He Would ‘Absolutely’ Bring Back Waterboarding Torture As An Accepted Form Of Interrogation, Ben Carson Agrees
Business magnate and leading Republican candidate for the White House, Donald Trump, continues to resort to populism in his attempt to win votes. In a recent interview with ABC News, the 69-year-old billionaire sparked even more controversy when he said he would “absolutely” bring back waterboarding as an accepted form of interrogation.
“I think waterboarding is peanuts compared to what they do to us,” Trump was quoted as saying. “What they’re doing to us, what they did to James Foley when they chopped off his head, that’s a whole different level and I would absolutely bring back interrogation and strong interrogation.”
Waterboarding has been defined as torture by the U.N. and denounced by many human rights groups as cruel and degrading treatment. Wikipedia described how it is performed in the following paragraph.
“Waterboarding is a form of water torture in which water is poured over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages of an immobilized captive, causing the individual to experience the sensation of drowning,” the article explained. “Waterboarding can cause extreme pain, dry drowning, damage to lungs, brain damage from oxygen deprivation, other physical injuries including broken bones due to struggling against restraints, lasting psychological damage, and death. The publication also states that it “can cause adverse physical consequences can manifest themselves months after the event, while psychological effects can last for years.”
n 2006, the Bush administration banned torture including waterboarding on detainees. Three years later, President Barack Obama issued a similar ban on the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture in interrogations of detainees.
According to a report from the Guardian, Donald Trump doesn’t see anything wrong with using waterboarding in the fight against Islamic State militants.
“They don’t use waterboarding over there,” he said, “they use chopping off people’s heads, they use drowning people – they put people in cages and drown them in the ocean then lift out the cage.”
We’re worried about waterboarding as our enemy, ISIS, is beheading people and burning people alive. Time for us to wake up.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 4, 2015
Donald Trump: "Waterboarding doesn't sound very severe" http://t.co/RrJswJEB8s pic.twitter.com/lzeWl8cRGB
— Vox (@voxdotcom) August 2, 2015
Famed neurosurgeon and Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson also endorsed the use of the controversial technique, which was used by George W. Bush’s administration to extract information from suspects arrested after the attacks on September 11, 2001, and prohibited by the current president, Barack Obama, shortly after he came to power in 2009.
“There’s no such thing as political correctness when you’re fighting an enemy who wants to destroy you,” Carson said, adding that “I’m not one who’s real big on telling the enemy on what we’re going to do and what we’re not going to do.”
Huffington Post wrote that on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Carson also said he favored surveillance of mosques, essentially repeating something he said on Saturday.
“We should monitor anything — mosque, church, school, you know, shopping center — where there’s a lot of radicalization going on,” Carson said.
As previously reported by the Inquisitr, earlier this week Trump also said that he wishes to monitor refugees entering the country from Syria.
“I want surveillance of certain mosques if that’s OK,” Trump said during a rally in Birmingham, Alabama. “We’ve had it before and we’ll have it again. I want surveillance. I will absolutely take (a) database on the people coming in from Syria. If we can’t stop it — but we are going to if I win — they’re going back.”
Do you agree with Donald Trump and Ben Carson’s stance on waterboarding? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
[Image via Scott Olson/Getty Images News]
