Trump repeatedly draws applause when talking tough about illegal torture

WASHINGTON — Tough talk about torture is a guaranteed applause line for Donald Trump on the GOP presidential stump.

Trump has repeatedly advocated waterboarding, an enhanced interrogation technique that simulates the feeling of drowning.

“In the Middle East, we have people chopping the heads off Christians . … I would bring back waterboarding and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,” he said to applause in a recent debate, without ever specifying what “a lot worse” would entail.

“I don’t think we go far enough,” he said, drawing loud clapping at a rally last week in Las Vegas. “We don’t go far enough,” he repeated, prompting now-thundering applause and chants of “USA! USA!”

Trouble is, waterboarding and “a lot worse” interrogation techniques are illegal.

To bring it back, Trump would have to get Congress to repeal the law that prohibits it. That could be an uphill battle. Last June, Republicans joined all 44 Senate Democrats in voting 78-21 to reaffirm a ban on harsh interrogation tech- niques.

That vote came just months after a Senate intelligence committee report denounced brutal interrogation methods as ineffective.

“In general, what I’ve taken away from our practices and what the research shows is that the rapport-based techniques — that we operate under and focus on — are shown to elicit greater detail in a quicker fashion,” said Frazier Thompson, director of the High- Value Detainee Interrogation Group, a secretive team of interrogators from the FBI, Defense Department, the CIA and other intelligence agencies that interrogates top suspects believed linked to plots against the U.S. or its allies.

“Every individual is different and every situation is different,” Thompson said.

Trump, however, told voters in Bluffton, South Carolina, simply that, “torture works.”