USA Today:
Donald Trump is taking on CIA Director John Brennan on torture, saying Brennan’s pledge not to allow waterboarding is “ridiculous.”
Brennan said on NBC News Sunday that he would not allow enhanced interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, even if a future president ordered it.
“I think his comments are ridiculous,” Trump said on Fox News Monday. “I mean, they chop off heads and they drown people in cages with 50 in a cage, in big, steel heavy cages, drop them right into the water drown people, and we can’t water-board and we can’t do anything,” Trump said.
“And you know we’re playing on different fields,’ he continued. “And we have a huge problem with ISIS, which we can’t beat, and the reason we can’t beat them is we won’t use strong tactics, whether it’s this or other things.”
So let me tell you how this really works, and this little note is to you, Trump, and any other presidential candidate who thinks he or she is going to bring back waterboarding.
It will never get to the level of having to have the director of the CIA tell anyone anything. The president will give the order, and no one will carry it out. It’s not that they won’t carry it out for reasons of morality, although some refusals will fall into that category. It has to do with other, more pragmatic issues.
The things I am going to say to you can be found with research, so I’m not going to waste my time linking to things you should already know. The original guys who did this for the CIA, working directly under the employ of the CIA or as contractors, are now retired, and some of them live in the Northern Virginia area. Others live elsewhere, but the CIA knows where all of them are. They want to be left alone, and some of them fear a knock at the door, with federal marshals waiting at the door to take them off to federal prison, never to be seen again. I know these things because of my war and counterinsurgency coverage and commentary for so many years. Again, go research it yourself if you want proof – I’m not going to waste my time proving this for you and your advisers should already know all of these things anyway. For you to bring this up causes me to wonder about your advisers.
You see, even when a president tells them to do things, when another president comes into office and appoints his own attorney general, and the mood goes sour on what those men did, things change, and they can be held accountable not for what they did, but for what the people who came after them thought they should or shouldn’t have done.
This isn’t a commentary on waterboarding, per se. I have no opinion since I’ve never been waterboarded. The only man I know who has, a former Navy pilot who was waterboarded as part of his SERE training, says to me that it’s not torture. I don’t know. I don’t care. That’s not the point. The point is that in order for it to happen, you have to find people to make it happen. And outsourcing this to other countries isn’t an option, because they can still retroactively charge you with war crimes for enabling it to happen. So Mr. Trump, it isn’t ridiculous, and it isn’t going to happen, ever again. Ever. The only people Americans will ever waterboard from now on will be SERE training participants.
