On Sunday, CIA Director John Brennan said in an interview with NBC News that he would not allow enhanced interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, even if a future president ordered it.
Today Trump called Brennan’s stance “ridiculous.”
“I think his comments are ridiculous,” Trump said on Fox News Monday. “I mean, they chop off heads and they drown people in cages with 50 in a cage, in big, steel heavy cages, drop them right into the water, drown people, and we can’t water-board and we can’t do anything,” Trump said.
“And you know we’re playing on different fields,’ he continued. “And we have a huge problem with ISIS, which we can’t beat, and the reason we can’t beat them is we won’t use strong tactics, whether it’s this or other things.”
Robert L. Deitz was senior counselor to CIA Director Michael Hayden from 2006 until February 2009, and general counsel at the National Security Agency from 1998 to 2006. In Trump’s comments such as this, and his March boast that, “If I say do it, they’re going to do it,” Deitz sees an aspiring president who has no idea how the intelligence world, covert action, and presidents work.
“Any professional is going to try to work with any president,” Deitz said. “If crazy stuff gets talked about, he’s going to go back and report to the director of the CIA — generally the briefer is CIA – and the director of the CIA may well talk to colleagues, people he trusts, elsewhere in the government about that.”
Deitz pointed to Hayden’s comments in February contending that if a President Trump ordered the military to target civilians, as Trump pledged when he said he would target terrorists’ families, “the American armed forces would refuse to act” because they under the law and under their oaths “are required not to follow an unlawful order.”
“Mike said the military wouldn’t do it, and he’s right,” Deitz said. “The people would just say ‘I’m not doing that,’ and that would be true for covert operations as well. If the president says, I don’t know, ‘go shoot the Queen of England,’ people would say, ‘I’m not doing that.’”