Republican candidate
Donald Trump says he would make America safer by waterboarding prisoners and shutting down mosques across the U.S.
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.
Insisting that the U.S. “would have to be strong,” Trump said that waterboarding Islamic State extremists would be “peanuts” compared with their 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 the Islamic State in August 2014. “That’s a whole different level, and I would absolutely bring back interrogation.”
In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush administration turned to waterboarding, a method in which a suspect is made to feel like he’s drowning, to try to extract information from al-Qaida suspects. The effort proved mostly futile in producing useful intelligence and led to false confessions, according to a 2014 Senate report. President Barack Obama formally ended the program in 2009.
Trump also doubled down on his calls for a database to monitor Muslims and the possibility of shuttering mosques.
At a rally in Birmingham, Ala., on Saturday, Trump again brought Muslims to the forefront — a topic he’s focused on in the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks. Trump told the estimated 10,000 people in attendance he saw images of Arab Muslims cheering in New Jersey after the 9/11 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 those buildings came down, and that tells you something.”
Rumors have surfaced over the years about Muslims cheering in Paterson, N.J., as the twin towers collapsed, but those claims were discounted by local police at the time.