GOP Sen. John McCain blasted presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump for arguing Wednesday that waterboarding simply isn’t “tough enough.”
Trump made his comments in response to the new attacks on the airport in Istanbul, which left 43 dead and 230 injured, and lauded waterboarding as an effective and devastating technique to use on terrorists, NBC News reports.
“I like it a lot. I don’t think it’s tough enough,” he said at a rally in St. Clairsville, Ohio.
“We can’t do waterboarding but they can do chopping off heads, drowning people in steel cages, they can do whatever they want to do,” Trump said. “You know, you have to fight fire with fire.”
But McCain didn’t take kindly to Trump’s suggestion that he would use much harsher measures than waterboarding.
“It’s not the United States of America. It’s not what we are all about. It’s not what we are,” McCain said.
McCain added that waterboarding is a war crime, according to international law.
Part of the reason McCain is opposed to torture is because he spent five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and was frequently beaten. He also doesn’t believe torture is effective at extracting useful information.
“But perhaps more important than that, if you’re not into academics and history is it doesn’t work … Because if you inflict enough pain on someone they will tell you whatever they think you want to hear,” he said.
This isn’t the first time McCain and Trump have clashed over the policy of enhanced interrogation. McCain said back in February, “It is important to remember the facts: that these forms of torture not only failed their purpose to secure actionable intelligence to prevent further attacks on the U.S. and our allies, but compromised our values, stained our national honor and did little practical good.”
The animus between McCain and Trump stems back to July 2015, when Trump said he likes “people who weren’t captured,” taking an obvious dig at McCain, who he said was not a war hero.
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