Trump says torture ‘absolutely works’

> President would bring back waterboarding ‘to fight fire with fire’

WASHINGTON: Donald Trump claims senior intelligence officials have told him “torture works”, and that he would “absolutely” bring back banned interrogation methods like waterboarding.

The president said his administration was reviewing how the US conducts itself in the fight against militant organisations around the world.

Speaking in an interview with ABC News, Trump said he was considering reopening the CIA’s so-called “black site” prisons, secret facilities around the world that were used to detain suspects in George W. Bush’s “war on terror” before they were formally shut down by Barack Obama.

Trump was asked about his campaign trail promises to bring back waterboarding “and tougher” in the battle to defeat Islamic State (IS), to which he said, citing the group’s atrocities against Christians, “we have to fight fire with fire”.

“When they’re shooting, when they’re chopping off the heads of our people and other people, when they’re chopping off the heads of people because they happen to be a Christian in the Middle East, when IS is doing things that nobody has ever heard of since Medieval times, would I feel strongly about waterboarding?” he said.

“I have spoken with people at the highest level of intelligence and I asked them the question ‘Does it work? Does torture work?’ and the answer was ‘Yes, absolutely’.

“They chop them off and they put them on camera and send them all over the world. So we have that and we’re not allowed to do anything?” he added.

“I will rely on Pompeo and Mattis and my group and if they don’t want to do it that’s fine. If they do want to do then I will work towards that end.

“I want to do everything within the bounds of what you’re allowed to do legally but do I feel it works? Absolutely I feel it works.”

Trump risks damaging ties to liberal Western allies if he brings back Bush-era anti-terror tactics like the network of overseas detention and rendition facilities – and waterboarding, the process of pouring water over the face of a detainee to simulate drowning, which is widely regarded as a form of torture.

In 2015, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to ban all forms of torture in the US, putting into law an Obama executive order.

And unlike some of Trump’s more conservative policies, the move is also extremely unpopular among many senior Republican congressmen.

“The president can sign whatever executive orders he likes. But the law is the law. We are not bringing back torture in the United States of America,” said Senator John McCain, a Republican who underwent torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. – The Independent