Trump: Geneva Conventions Are ‘Out of Date’
Speaking at a press conference, Donald Trump agreed with the statement that the Geneva Conventions outlawing war crimes were “out of date,” and reiterated his support for “enhanced interrogation” of terror suspects.
“Do you think the Geneva Conventions are out of date?” asked NBC’s Katy Tur.
“I think everything’s out of date,” responded Trump. “We have a whole new world.”
Trump repeated his much-scrutinized comments that NATO was obsolete. “Three days later, people that study NATO said, ‘You know, Trump is right.’ You know what, we have a lot of things that are out of date because they’re 20 and 30 and 40 years old.”
“What would you renegotiate?” asked NBC’s Katy Tur. “The enhanced interrogation aspect of it…?”
“Katy, I would renegotiate so much of everything,” he responded.
Tur asked the question again after he gave a long answer that nonetheless avoided the question: “The Geneva Convention and enhanced interrogation, do you think they should allow for that given the rise of ISIS?”
“I am a person that believes in enhanced interrogation, yes,” Trump responded. “And, by the way; it works.”
Reality
No it doesn’t.
Trump’s proposed reliance on tactics used by Bond villains as a practical response to the terrorist acts of the Islamic State should be leaving people feeling aghast and concerned.
Unlike fictional TV shows, like 24 where Jack Bauer runs around and tortures his way to the bad guy or movies like Zero Dark Thirty who include torture scenes that never happened which lead to the capture of Osama Bin Laden, reality is quite different.
Waterboarding, and other forms of torture, is considered a war crime according to the Geneva Conventions and is not reliable for obtaining truthful, useful intelligence.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that “the CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” There was no proof, according to the 6,700 page report, that information obtained through waterboarding prevented any attacks or saved any lives, or that information obtained from the detainees was not or could not have been obtained through conventional interrogation methods.”
In-fact, we’ve know for centuries that torture is not effective. Here is Napoleon’s own words on the subject:
“It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know.”
Instead, rapport-building techniques are 14 times more effective in extracting information than torture and has the upside of not being unethical.
Media