The US needs to be tough against terrorists, Republican presidential fruntrunner Donald Trump said on Sunday as he favoured restoring waterboarding and other types of interrogation techniques in the face of brutal killings by ISIS militants.
“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. That’s a whole different level and I would absolutely bring back interrogation and strong interrogation,” he said.
“Well, we have to be strong. They don’t use waterboarding over there, they use chopping off people’s heads. They use drowning people. I don’t know if you’ve seen with the cages, where they put people in cages and they drown them in the ocean and they lift out the cage. And we’re talking about waterboarding,” Trump said.
If elected, he would bring strong anti-terror interrogation techniques back which were removed by President Barack Obama when he came into office in 2009, he said.
Trump, who is now leading all Republican presidential polls, had said he would consider closing mosques in the US. His rival Jeb Bush has called it a sign of weakness.
“Jeb Bush is a weak person and that’s been defined very strongly. I mean, Jeb is a weak person who is a — you know, I call him a low energy person. That’s what he is. I mean, call him anything you want, but Jeb is a person that will not solve a problem like this,” he said.