“YOU BET your ass I would”, Donald Trump said in November, addressing whether he might, if elected, bring back waterboarding, the interrogation technique used during the Bush administration in the early 2000s and abandoned, for its brutality and ineffectiveness, in 2009. Mr Trump declared he’d embrace waterboarding “in a heartbeat” because “it works”. The GOP Presidential candidate then mused that the practice serves nicely as a punishment even if it fails to loosen suspects’ lips: “If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway for what they do to us”.

On February 6th, at the most recent Republican presidential debate, Mr Trump repeated his support for waterboarding and upped the ante on what George Bush’s advisers euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation” techniques 15 years...Continue reading