By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
After the terrorist attacks in Brussels on Tuesday morning, Donald Trump made a series of statements that have confirmed the suspicions of many terrorism experts: The Republican frontrunner’s rhetoric doesn’t translate well into good foreign policy.
That’s what many security experts said following a day full of comments from Trump, The Washington Post reports.
Just hours after the bombings, Trump was asked what he would do if he were the president.
“I would close up our borders to people until we figure out what’s going on,” Trump said Tuesday morning on Fox News. “We have to be smart in the United States. We’re taking in people without real documentation, we don’t know where they’re coming from, we don’t know what they’re — where they’re from, who they are.”
On NBC’s Today, Trump said he would use waterboarding and other torture techniques to gather information.
“Frankly, the waterboarding, if it was up to me, and if we changed the laws or had the laws, waterboarding would be fine,” Trump told Savannah Guthrie and Matt Lauer when asked about what techniques he favored. “If they could expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding. You have to get the information from these people.”
Security experts responded with harsh criticism.
Michael Chertoff, who served as secretary of homeland security under George W. Bush, said Trump’s ideas were “preposterous.”
“First of all, we have a much, much tougher refugee program than the Europeans have,” Chertoff said. “The problem the Europeans have is people showed up on their doorstep — hundreds of thousands, coming directly from the region. That does not happen in the U.S. We check people very carefully before we admit them as refugees.”
Terrorism expert Malcom Nance said Trump’s heated rhetoric was endangering U.S. intelligence and armed forces.
“Donald Trump right now is validating the cartoonish view that they [Islamist militant groups] tell their operatives and that they tell their terrorists,” Nance said. “That the United States is a racist nation, xenophobic, anti-Muslim, and that that’s why you must carry out terrorist attacks against them.”
