Ted Cruz and Donald Trump say waterboarding isn’t torture

“I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring it back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”, he added, without noting what constitutes “worse” in his view.

“What Donald Trump did was use eminent domain to try to take the property of an elderly woman on the strip in Atlantic City”, Bush charged.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said he would not employ waterboarding.

Ted Cruz, meanwhile, who’s also known for his hawkish language on the campaign trail – he’s fond of saying he’d “carpet bomb” the Islamic State – said he didn’t think waterboarding was, by definition, torture.

Republican presidential candidates… Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz talk during a commercial break in the debate in New Hampshire.

But speaking at a Republican debate on ABC, the billionaire remained largely at odds with the other Presidential candidates ahead of Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.

The poll released by Quinnipiac University put Mr Trump on 31 per cent, with Mr Cruz on 22 percent and Mr Rubio, who came third in Iowa, on 19 per cent. The poll placed Ben Carson on six per cent, with nine percent undecided and no other candidate securing more than three per cent. We need comprehensive health screenings, then we need to figure out how do we get the right nutrition and vitamins.

The candidates viewed Saturday night’s debate, held here on the small campus of Saint Anselm College that has quadrennially hosted presidential debates going back decades, as their most urgent of their eight debates so far. “It is enhanced interrogation, it is vigorous interrogation, but it does not meet the generally recognized definition of torture”. The U.S. military uses precision-guided bombs against the kinds of specific targets that Cruz is talking about, which also reduce the risk of killing civilians – a goal the U.S. military has embraced under Republican as well as Democratic presidents. And if it’s going to be tougher than waterboarding, I would bring that back, too.

Donald Trump said Sunday he would “go through a process” to end waterboarding’s status as a war crime in order to use it against ISIS if he is elected president. “Enforcing the law. We can do it”.