Fighting Terrorism in the Age of Trump

The president-elect has vowed to kill the families of ISIS members and bring back Bush-era torture tactics.

Siddhartha Mahanta

4:50 AM ET

A detainee's feet are shackled to the floor as he attends a "Life Skills" class inside the Camp 6 high-security detention facility at Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in 2010.Michelle Shephard / Reuters

In February, Donald Trump vowedto make “enhanced interrogation techniques”—like sleep deprivation, waterboarding, and “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”—part of his then-hypothetical administration’s approach to fighting terrorism. He also promised to target the families of suspected terrorists. His pledges, sometimes reversed, then reinforced, all seemed like instances of his fiery, base-riling campaign rhetoric.

Trump faces significant hurdles to reviving George W. Bush-era interrogation practices amounting to torture; those hurdles include the Geneva Conventions and 2005’s Detainee Treatment Act, which prohibited some of the worst abuses. But other restrictions, including a 2009 executive ordersigned by President Barack Obama barring the CIA from operating its own detention facilities and banning some interrogation techniques, could be quickly overturned by Trump.

Now that Trump has won the presidency, the prospect of that rhetoric becoming policy—or, at the very least, a viable possibility—has revived a debate that seemed settled when Obama repudiatedthe policies of his predecessor with the declaration that “we don’t torture.”

Source http://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/507380/