Republican presidential candidates compete over which would torture detainees the most

“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 ago. “They're chopping off heads of Christians and many other people in the Middle East. They're chopping heads off, they laugh at us when they hear we're not going to approve waterboarding”, he noted. To wage the war on terror, Mr Trump said he would "bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”. He did not specify which additional methods of torture he would introduce to bolster American intelligence-gathering.

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When Barack Obama banned the practice two days after he took office as "humiliating and degrading", citing the 5th and 8th amendments to the constitution, the War Crimes Act, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture, among other legal sources, a global consensus had developed that waterboarding constitutes torture. The Human Rights Watch describes it as “a form of mock execution by suffocation with water” that “incapacitates the victim from drawing breath, and causes panic, distress, and terror of imminent death”. People subjected to the procedure often “suffer prolonged mental harm for years and even decades afterward”.

Yet no contender for the GOP nomination seems fazed by the ethics or legality of engaging in state-ordained torture. Ted Cruz explained in clinical terms why he doesn’t consider waterboarding to be beyond the pale. “Under the law”, he said, “torture is excruciating pain that is equivalent to losing organs and systems”. Waterboarding is “enhanced interrogation, it is vigorous interrogation”, he said, “but it does not meet the generally recognized definition of torture”. He wouldn’t use it “widely”, but neither would he eliminate it as an option “to keep this country safe”. Marco Rubio has much the same stance. But his rivals’ limited embrace of enhanced interrogation is a sign of weakness in the eyes of Mr Trump. When a supporter at a rally in New Hampshire yelled out that Mr Cruz was a “pussy” for failing to whole-heartedly endorse waterboarding, Mr Trump repeated the epithet in the microphone for all to hear. “That’s terrible”, he added, in mock rebuke.