But the questioners never got down to the guy on the end, Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
Now he is one of the last three in the once-crowded GOP race. And he says he firmly opposes torture and supports the ban on waterboarding.
As the Republican GOP primary pace slows down, voters who once scrambled to learn the stances of myriad candidates can now take their time and look at the positions of the three remaining candidates.
On torture, at least, the differences are clear.
To Kasich, the issue is one of practicality. He doesn’t think waterboarding is effective.
“You don’t want to have a system where you are getting things out of people that are not true because you’ve inflicted so much pain on them,” he said. “We have to have effective techniques and try to protect ourselves in terms of protecting ourselves.
“Torturing somebody doesn’t mean that you’re going to get information that’s real.”
He said that he sees no need to change U.S. law or policy to lessen restraints on the treatment of suspected terrorists, such as allowing waterboarding. President Barack Obama banned waterboarding through executive order during the first year of his presidency. Last year, Congress passed an amendment to a Defense spending bill making that ban law.
During the Feb. 6 New Hampshire debate, Cruz — whose own Cuban immigrant father was subjected to torture as a young Cuban revolutionary — said he did not consider waterboarding to be torture.
“Under the law, torture is excruciating pain that is equivalent to losing organs and systems, so under the definition of torture, (waterboarding) is not. It is enhanced interrogation. It is vigorous interrogation, but it does not meet the generally recognized definition of torture,” he said.
He added, “I would not bring it back in any sort of widespread use,” but said if such methods were needed to prevent, for example, an imminent terrorist attack, “I would use whatever enhanced interrogation methods we could to keep this country safe.”
Trump, however, is more unequivocal. He has said that he supports waterboarding and techniques that are “much stronger” and “so much worse” because “torture works” in questioning terrorists.
During a Feb. 7 interview on ABC’s “This Week,” host George Stephanopoulos asked Trump whether Trump would authorize torture.
“I would absolutely authorize something beyond waterboarding,” Trump replied.
Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the moderate Lexington Institute, a defense-related think tank, said much of Trump’s rhetoric would, if imposed, actually defy international law.
“Almost everything Mr. Trump has said on the campaign trail about defending us from terrorists seems to be phrased for popular affect rather than with regard for the laws of war,” he said. “When a candidate talks about targeting terrorists’ families, you know the laws of war are not forefront in his mind.”
The issue — which entered public discussion in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — has evolved into a key point among the GOP electorate. According to a Pew Research Center Poll released last month, 73 percent of Republicans said they believed torture could be justified against people suspected of terrorism, 58 percent of independents did and 46 percent of Democrats did.
To Ohio State University military history professor Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who served two tours in Iraq, including one as a brigade commander, the issue is simple.
“It’s easy for people who’ve never been in combat or worn a uniform or had a chance of being captured to say, ‘let’s go ahead and allow waterboarding.’ It’s much more difficult for those of us who’ve had a chance of it being inflicted on us or our soldiers to say it’s OK.”
Mansoor campaigned to ban waterboarding in 2008, before Obama was elected. More recently, he signed a letter with some 50 other military experts saying that “if any president orders the U.S. military to commit war crimes, the U.S. military will be legally and professionally obliged to refuse to carry out those orders.”
“This is an issue on which American leaders — policy makers, opinion shapers — should lead,” he said. “Instead of upholding our values, saying we’re better than the enemy, that we don’t have to win through torture, they are actually making it seem legitimate that support for torture is okay if it’s done in the name of national security.”
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