Jeb Bush is up for torturing some folks

Jeb Bush says that if he becomes president, he may bring back waterboarding, a brutal interrogation technique that was officially banned by President Obama in 2009 and effectively abandoned by George W. Bush even earlier.

The former Florida governor on Thursday said he wouldn't rule out "enhanced interrogation techniques" — the preferred euphemism for what is commonly considered torture — in the fight against Islamic terrorism. "I'm not ruling anything in or out," Bush said. "There's a difference between enhance interrogation techniques and torture. America doesn't torture."

The Obama administration does regard waterboarding as torture, with Obama himself famously acknowledging, "We tortured some folks." A Senate Intelligence Committee report released last year concluded that waterboarding "yielded little reliable information," The New York Times reports. The last time the technique was frequently used against terrorist suspects was in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Jeb Bush's refusal to commit to upholding the prohibition of waterboarding is just the latest example of him embracing his brother's most controversial national security policies. Earlier this week, he said removing Saddam Hussein from power was "a pretty good deal," and laid out a foreign policy vision that was heavily neoconservative.