Technique widely denounced as torture is ‘peanuts compared with what they are doing to us’, says real estate mogul as he does not rule out independent run

Donald Trump and Ben Carson, the two enduring frontrunners in the race to become the Republican party’s presidential candidate, have both indicated they would bring back waterboarding and other forms of “enhanced interrogation” that were dropped by the US government, having widely been denounced as a form of torture.



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In the latest ratcheting-up of rhetoric in the fallout from the Paris terror attacks, Trump told ABC News on Sunday he would “absolutely bring back” waterboarding in the fight against Islamic State militants.

“They don’t use waterboarding over there,” he said, “they use chopping off people’s heads, they use drowning people – they put people in cages and drown them in the ocean then lift out the cage.”

The real estate billionaire added that he thought waterboarding was “peanuts compared with what they are doing to us – what they did with [US journalist and Isis hostage] James Foley when they chopped off his head.”

Later in the same ABC show, Carson, a former neurosurgeon, was asked if he would support Trump’s call to bring back the controversial interrogation technique. He said: “I agree that there’s no such thing as political correctness when you are fighting an enemy who wants to destroy you.”

The significance of the remarks from Trump and Carson within the conservative debate following the Paris attacks that killed 130 people was underlined by a new Washington Post-ABC News poll that had the two outsiders holding tight to their commanding national lead over all other Republican presidential candidates.

In a finding virtually unchanged over the previous month, Trump was on 32% support among registered Republicans and Carson on 22%. They were followed by the only other contender on double figures, the Florida senator Marco Rubio, on 11%.

Even more pointedly, Trump had a massive lead when those who leaned Republican were asked whom they trusted to deal with the threat of terrorism. He garnered a 40% trust rating. The next leading candidate, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, was on 18%.

As the 1 February Iowa caucuses approach, the apparently rock-steady ascendancy of Trump over his more moderate rivals has begun to alarm the establishment of the Republican party, with reports that efforts are being redoubled to try and knock the reality TV celebrity from his perch.

Such anxieties will not have been calmed by further Trump comments to ABC that came across as a veiled threat that he was keeping open the option of running as an independent – contradicting his own pledge in September not to do so.

“I will have to see what happens,” he said. “I have to be treated fairly. If I’m treated fairly, I’m fine. All I want is a level playing field.”

When the Obama administration took office in 2009, one of its first acts was to denounce waterboarding as torture. The practice, whereby a stream of water is poured over a cloth placed over a prisoner’s nose and mouth to simulate the sensation of drowning, has also been classified as torture by numerous international organizations, including the United Nations.

President George W Bush banned the practice in 2006. A couple of years later, it was confirmed by the CIA that waterboarding had been used in 2002 and 2003 against three prominent terror suspects, the alleged 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In 2003, Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month.

In December 2014, the Senate intelligence committee issued a report which said “the CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were not effective”.

Trump’s promise to nonetheless bring the technique back in the wake of the escalating fight against Isis in Syria and Iraq came as controversy continued to swirl around remarks he made last week about setting up a database of all Muslims in America. Over the weekend, he attempted to distance himself from the idea, saying it came from a reporter, not himself.

But given the opportunity by George Stephanopoulos on ABC to clear up the confusion once and for all, he merely deepened it. Asked if he would unequivocally rule out a database for all Muslim Americans, he replied: “No, not at all.”

He went on to say that he wanted a database for Syrian refugees entering the country under a federal resettlement program.

“We have no idea who these people are,” he said. “We don’t know if it’s a Trojan horse.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, was waterboarded 183 times in one month. Photograph: AP

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The Republican frontrunner repeated his call for ramped-up surveillance, and even closure, of many mosques.

“I don’t want to close up mosques, but things have to happen,” he said. “You have to use strong measures or you are going to see buildings coming down in New York and all over the country.”

Trump also stuck to his dogged claim that on 9/11 he saw “thousands and thousands” of people in Jersey City cheering as the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York collapsed.

He said: “I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering. It was on television. I saw it.”

There have been rumors that the destruction of the twin towers was met with rejoicing among the Muslim community of Newark and Paterson. But investigations by local newspapers have uncovered no evidence that the scenes ever happened, and New Jersey police and community leaders have firmly denied that they occurred.