Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said Tuesday that "there are a number of ways to extract information" from terrorism suspects — including such medical methods as "truth serum" — and that he would not close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay until "we have a better alternative."
"I believe there are a number of ways to extract information — including, some medical ways of putting people into a less-than-conscious-state, which allows information to be extracted much more humanely," Carson, a retired pediatric neurosurgeon, told Poppy Harlow on
CNN.
When asked to elaborate, Carson said: "The average person might understand it as truth serum.
"But there are ways where you decrease a person's conscious defenses and they might be much more willing to give up information," he said.
Harlow asked Carson what truth serum was and he said: "sodium anethole. There are a variety of different things we can use."
He added that he opposed President Barack Obama's plan to close Gitmo because no better alternatives existed.
"We're involved in a long-term war here," he said. "This is not something that's going to disappear. We need to have a place to take people. We need a place to derive information from them that would be beneficial to us, in terms of our safety. I'm not seeing what the alternative is, quite frankly.
"Until we have a better alternative, I certainly would not close it."
Carson explained his comment Saturday about
President Obama being "raised white" by saying that his experience of being raised biracial was not reflective of most African Americans in the United States.
"I said I was proud of the fact that the color barrier had been broken, but there's a difference in breaking the color barrier in somebody who's had the typical experience versus somebody who has not," he said. "For you and the rest of the media to try to pretend like just because your skin is the same color, it means you've all grown up in the same way doesn't make any sense."
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