Trump, at the same debate, said, “I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring back a helluva lot worse than waterboarding.” “This question regarding whether waterboarding is torture? It’s not arguable,” says Pardiss Kebriaei, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. It is enhanced interrogation, it is vigorous interrogation, but it does not meet the generally recognized definition of torture.”īut Yoo’s definition is absolutely not “the law.” His torture memos, written for Vice President Dick Cheney to provide legal cover for clearly illegal acts, were later rescinded and repudiated by the Bush administration itself, for being barbaric, legally unsupported, and unreasonable. Under the law, torture is excruciating pain that is equivalent to losing organs and systems, so under the definition of torture, it is not. The Texas senator, who had previously said that “torture is wrong, unambiguously, period, the end,” was asked if waterboarding qualified as torture, and responded: “Well, under the definition of torture, no, it’s not. “Torture, indiscriminate killing of civilians, and indefinite detention are clear violations of international and domestic law,” says Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.Ĭruz not only called for the reinstitution of waterboarding during Saturday’s presidential debate, but actually justified the practice using language reminiscent of the infamous 2002 “ Bybee Memo,” authored by disgraced former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo. The over-the-top bombast plays well in front of self-selected Republican audiences - the crowd responded to the description of Cruz Monday night with full-throated chants of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” But such promises of future criminality from potential presidential nominees have outraged many legal experts. In recent months, one candidate or another has promised to waterboard, do a “ helluva lot worse than waterboarding,” repopulate Guantánamo, engage in wars of aggression, kill families of suspected terrorists, and “carpet bomb” Middle Eastern countries until we find out if “sand can glow in the dark.” The Republican candidates have seemingly been competing with one another over who would commit the gravest war crimes if elected. The spectacle of one Republican presidential candidate being identified by another as a “pussy” for failing to sufficiently endorse an archetypal form of torture exemplifies the moral state of the current race for the GOP nomination. At a rally in New Hampshire on Monday night, Donald Trump was criticizing Ted Cruz for having insufficiently endorsed torture - Cruz had said two nights earlier that he would bring back waterboarding, but not “in any sort of widespread use” - when someone in the audience yelled out that Cruz was a “pussy.” Trump, in faux outrage, reprimanded the supporter, repeating the allegation for the assembled crowd: “She said he’s a pussy.
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