Seemingly oblivious to events of the past decade, Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson said on Sunday he would not rule out the use of torture for suspected enemies of the United States. Speaking on ABC’s ‘This Week’, the former neurosurgeon, who currently trails Donald Trump in the race for the GOP nomination, was asked whether he agreed with the tycoon that the US should resume the practice of waterboarding, which was banned by the current administration in 2009.
"There's no such thing as political correctness when you're fighting an enemy who wants to destroy you," Carson said, "and I'm not one who's real big on telling the enemy on what we're going to do and what we're not going to do." During the interview, Carson reiterated his stance that he would place mosques under surveillance, as well as churches, schools and shopping centres “anything... where there's a lot of radicalisation going on."
However, this infringement on civil liberties would not extend to stopping Islamist terror suspects from buying a gun, as that would infringe their Second Amendments rights.
Speaking of blocking gun sales to people on a terror watch list, Carson said: "There are a lot of people on that watch list and they have no idea of why they're on that list, they have been trying to get their names off of it and no one will give them information. I am a big supporter of the Second Amendment and I don't want to deprive people unnecessarily of that. There needs to be better due process."