Donald Trump

Press TV
November 22, 2015

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has called for the return of waterboarding, a near-drowning torture technique used by the CIA at its “black sites” overseas.

The billionaire businessman said Sunday the practice was “peanuts” compared to what Daesh (ISIL) terrorists are doing.

“I would bring it back. I think waterboarding is peanuts compared to what they’d do to us, what they’re doing to us, what they did to James Foley when they chopped off his head,” Trump said in an interview with ABC News, referring to the American journalist who was beheaded by ISIL last year.

“That’s a whole different level and I would absolutely bring back interrogation and strong interrogation,” he said.

It was the latest in a string of inflammatory comments Trump has made recently regarding the threat of terrorism in the wake of the Paris attacks last month.

Waterboarding was banned by President Barack Obama shortly after assuming office in 2009.

According to the executive summary of a Senate report, the CIA employed brutal techniques like waterboarding, physical abuse, sleep deprivation, mock executions, and threats of sexual abuse to interrogate terror suspects imprisoned after the 9/11 attacks.

On Thursday, Trump said he would be open to having a “Muslim database” in America for security reasons, two days after he said that the US would have “absolutely no choice” but to close down some mosques.

Speaking Saturday at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, he doubled down on the hardline rhetoric by advocating for “surveillance of certain mosques” in the US.

Trump is leading the GOP presidential field with 32 percent, a 10 point lead over his nearest rival, Ben Carson, according to a new Washington Post/ABC News national poll.