Donald Trump Touts Waterboarding, Stokes Immigration Fears in Border State
Donald Trump on Sunday warned his supporters in this border state that Hillary Clinton “wants to let people just pour in,” saying without evidence that hundreds of millions of people could enter the US under a Clinton presidency.
And speaking just nine days before Election Day, the Republican nominee also bemoaned criticism of waterboarding and appeared to once again call for bringing back the since-banned technique for use in the fight against ISIS.
“These savages are chopping off heads, drowning people. This is medieval times and then we can’t do waterboarding? ‘It’s far too tough,'” Trump said, mocking critics of the technique used by the CIA in interrogations of terror suspects under President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 administration.
Trump has previously called for reinstating waterboarding and “much worse” methods of torture if he becomes president.
“We have to be tough and we have to be smart. And we have to be in some cases pretty vicious I have to tell you,” he added.
The Republican nominee also issued a dire — and baseless — warning to Americans that a Clinton administration could usher a flood of hundreds of millions of people crossing into the US.
“You could have 650 million people pour in and we’d do nothing about it. Think of it. That’s what could happen. You triple the size of our country in one week. Once you lose control of your borders you just have no country folks, you have no country,” Trump said, speaking in this Democrat-leaning border state.
Trump also stoked fears about undocumented immigrant crime, warning that continued illegal immigration would result “in the loss of American lives,” even though undocumented immigrants do not commit crimes at a higher rate than legal US residents.
Trump’s stop here came a day before Trump stumps in Michigan, also a state likely to swing in Clinton’s favor, as the Republican nominee and his campaign are hoping to make late gains to help secure the 270 electoral votes Trump needs to secure the presidency.
Trump’s stops in these blue-leaning states also helps bolster the campaign’s message that Trump’s candidacy is on the rise and that the campaign is going on the offensive the final slog to Election Day.
(h/t CNN)
Reality
Trump’s proposed reliance on tactics used by Bond villains as a practical response to the terrorist acts of the Islamic State should be leaving people feeling aghast and concerned.
Unlike fictional TV shows, like 24 where Jack Bauer runs around and tortures his way to the bad guy or movies like Zero Dark Thirty who include torture scenes that never happened which lead to the capture of Osama Bin Laden, reality is quite different.
Waterboarding, and other forms of torture, is considered a war crime according to the Geneva Conventions and is not reliable for obtaining truthful, useful intelligence.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that “the CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” There was no proof, according to the 6,700 page report, that information obtained through waterboarding prevented any attacks or saved any lives, or that information obtained from the detainees was not or could not have been obtained through conventional interrogation methods.”
In-fact, we’ve know for centuries that torture is not effective. Here is Napoleon’s own words on the subject:
“It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know.”
Instead, rapport-building techniques are 14 times more effective in extracting information than torture and has the upside of not being unethical.
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