Trump says the military 'won’t refuse' to waterboard terrorists on his watch while he attempts to justify going after family members
- Donald Trump doubled down on waterboarding saying the military would follow his orders to torture suspected terrorists
- He again pointed to the brutal beheadings of Christians in the Middle East at the hands of ISIS
- Trump was forced to respond to comments made by ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden who said the military could ignore illegal Trump orders
Donald Trump said members of the military 'won't refuse' to waterboard terrorism suspects if he becomes commander-in-chief.
'They won't refuse, they're not going to refuse me, believe me,' Trump said. 'And, and, I'm a leader, I'm a leader, I've always been a leader, I've never had any problem leading people, if I say do it, they're going to do it.'
The question came up in tonight's Republican debate after former CIA Director Michael Hayden suggested during an interview with HBO's Bill Maher that members of the military could refuse to follow a President Trump's orders if they violated international law.
Donald Trump said military members 'won't refuse' to waterboard terrorists if he becomes commander-in-chief: 'If I say do it, they're going to do it'
'You are required not to follow an unlawful order,' Hayden told Maher. 'That would be in violation of all the international laws of armed conflict.'
Trump explained that any use of waterboarding, which the Obama Administration has branded as torture and thus discontinued, would be justified when compared to how the Islamic State has treated civilians.
'You look at the Middle East, they're chopping off heads, they're chopping off the heads of Christians and anybody else who happens to be in the way, they're drowning people in steel cages and now we're talking about waterboarding,' Trump said.
'Can you imagine, can you imagine, these people, these animals over in the Middle East that chop off heads sitting around talking and seeing that we're having a hard problem with waterboarding,' Trump continued.
'We should go for waterboarding and we should go tougher than waterboarding,' Trump added.
Besides waterboarding, the campaign rhetoric that Hayden specifically brought up in his interview with Maher was comments the brash billionaire made about going after the loved ones of terrorists too.
Targeting terrorists' family members is indeed barred by the Geneva Conventions.
Trump tried to justify this statement by saying that the family of the 9/11 terrorists knew that the attack was coming.
'The wife knew exactly what was happening, the left two days earlier with respect to the World Trade Center and they went back to where they went,' Trump said on tonight's debate stage. 'And they watched their husband on television flying into the World Trade Center, flying into the Pentagon and probably trying to fly into the White House except we had some very, very brave souls on that third plane.'
It's a statement he's made previously and is problematic because none of the 9/11 hijackers' spouses and girlfriends, which there were few, were living in the United States, according to the 9/11 Commission Report.
Politifact fact-checked similar Trump rhetoric in the past and said 'there is no substance behind the statement.'
Extended family of Osama bin Laden did leave the U.S. and head to Saudi Arabia, but this didn't happen until after the attacks.
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