Trump calls for return to waterboarding to interrogate terrorists who are 'chopping off' heads

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Trump: You wouldn't have ISIS if people had listened to me

Business mogul talks president's remarks, his plan for ISIS

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Sunday that he’d bring back interrogating enemy combatants like the Islamic State with such enhanced techniques as waterboarding, which he said “is peanuts compared to what they do to us.”

“I would bring it back,” Trump told ABC’s “This Week.” “They don’t use waterboarding over there. They use chopping off people’s heads.”

He specifically pointed to the Islamic State apparently beheading American journalist James Foley after abducting him in 2012 in Syria.

Trump’s approach to defeating the Islamic State and other radical terror groups has been arguably the most strident among the 2016 presidential field. And his rhetoric has increased in the aftermath of the Nov. 13 terror attacks in Paris.

Trump has referred to the plotters of the deadly attacks as “garbage” and “punks,” instead of the more popular term “masterminds.”

He also has called for renewed surveillance of some mosques in the United States, based on the argument that they could be meeting spots for radical Islamists. And he has called for a database for refugees from war-torn Syria, the de facto headquarters for the Islamic State.

“They use drowning people, Trump said Sunday. “I don’t know if you’ve seen with the cages where they put people in cages. And they drown them in the ocean and they lift out the cage … . I think waterboarding is peanuts compared to what they’d do to us.”

Trump has 28 percent of the popular vote, according to a Fox News poll released Sunday, compared to 26 percent in early November.