Donald Trump is wrongly promoting the use of "enhanced interrogation" on captured terror suspects as a way of getting revenge against America's enemies, John Yoo, a former assistant attorney general under former President Bush, tells
Newsmax TV.
"Mr. Trump is raising these issues for the wrong reasons … It sounds like for the purposes of revenge or punishment," Yoo, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said Monday on "The Steve Malzberg Show."
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During his years in the Bush administration, Yoo helped draft the so-called "torture memos" which set the bar for what methods the United States could legally use to get information from those accused of terrorism.
"That's not the reason why the Bush administration … had to use waterboarding for the very top al-Qaida leaders that we captured in the months after 9/11," Yoo said.
"The purpose is to get intelligence without violating the law. In this situation, we needed the information immediately. As you can tell, that seems to be the furthest thing from Mr. Trump's mind."
This week, Trump said during a campaign stop that he would go to further extremes than waterboarding to interrogate Islamic State members who decapitated, burned alive and drowned Christians.
"I don't think that using enhanced interrogation is justified for the reasons that he's given — as a way of punishing or getting revenge on our enemies," Yoo said.
"If it's about getting information then I think waterboarding is really the limit. It's the closest thing to the line of falling across the line of torture that we could go and really only for the purposes of information."
Yoo also said he's concerned the United States could go the way of Europe which last week saw a major attack in Brussels, Belgium in which 35 died.
"You're starting to see cracks in our homeland defense because for the last seven or eight years we have fought the way the Europeans have," Yoo said.
"That's why this election in November is so critically important because you need to have leadership in the country … which means going after and taking the fight to the enemy there.
"That's what the Bush administration did and that has a lot to do with why there were no successful attacks on the homeland in the months and years after 9/11."
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