‘If I Say Do It, They’re Going To Do It’: Donald Trump Says He Would Force U.S. Military To Commit War Crimes At GOP Debate

Leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has said he would order the U.S. military to break international law at the GOP debate on Thursday.

Trump also defended waterboarding, torture and the killing of the families of terrorists at Thursday night’s Republican presidential primary debate. He also suggested he would order the military to use advanced interrogation techniques worse than waterboarding. Trump’s positions have drawn criticism from military and legal experts during the course of his campaign that his policies on the treatment of terrorism suspects and the killing of families would violate the Geneva Convention.

The U.S. military has been trained for decades that torture and retaliatory executions are both war crimes under international law. Legally speaking, an order to commit a war crime is not a legal order and soldiers are not bound to obey it. At the Nuremberg Trials following World War II, the United States supported Uniform Code of Military Justice, which charges soldiers with the duty to disobey illegal orders. The legal precedent set by Nuremberg is that soldiers cannot hide behind the defense that they were “just following orders” to avoid criminal charges for war crimes.

However, when asked about former CIA Director Michael Hayden’s recent comments that the military may refuse illegal orders to kill or torture civilians, Trump responded by brushing such concerns aside.

“They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse me,” Trump said, according to The Washington Times. “If I say do it, they’re going to do it.”

Nielsen says 16.9 million people watched Thursday's GOP debate on Fox News Channel: https://t.co/fBKwJwRWAp

— The Associated Press (@AP) March 4, 2016

TIME quoted the billionaire New York real-estate mogul as defending the practice of waterboarding during the Republican debate.

“You look at the Middle East, they’re chopping off heads, they’re chopping off the heads of Christians and anybody else that happens to be in the way, they’re drowning people in steel cages, and now we’re talking about waterboarding… It’s fine, and if we want to go stronger, I’d go stronger too. Because frankly, that’s the way I feel. Can you imagine these people, these animals, over in the Middle East that chop off heads, sitting around talking and seeing that we’re having a hard problem with waterboarding? We should go for waterboarding and we should go tougher than waterboarding.”

Trump strongly defended the idea that the United States should target the families of terror suspects, citing it as necessary by alleging that the families of the 9/11 hijackers were complicit in the attack.

“When a family flies into the World Trade Center, a man flies into the World Trade Center and his family gets sent back to where they were going… They knew what was happening. The wife knew exactly what was happening… I have no problem with it.”

However, according to The Washington Post, Trump’s claim that the families “knew exactly what was going to happen” was wildly inaccurate.

“There is no evidence that the hijackers had wives in the United States, shipped them home or even told them of the plot in advance. In fact, virtually all of the hijackers were unmarried. So there is no way the alleged wives could have known what was going to happen.”

Trump has defended his stances on military action and advanced interrogation techniques, condemned by critics as torture, saying that U.S. refusal to use such methods to combat terrorism was creating an atmosphere conducive to more extremism, and saying that if elected, he would authorize much harsher methods for dealing with terrorism suspects.

Political discourse and journalism at their respective bests. Proud to be an American. https://t.co/Pf8en9vt3g

— Zach Pendleton (@zachp) March 4, 2016

In a scathing column for USA Today, Trump’s comments were taken as evidence Trump is unfit to be the commander-in-chief of the military.

“Donald Trump doesn’t simply disdain the law and U.S. military values,” the article stated, “his avowed commitment to ordering war crimes disqualifies him from leading our men and women in uniform.”

According to CBS News, the tone of Thursday’s debate was criticized as hostile and vulgar, with frequent shouting matches between Trump, Rubio and Cruz, and with Trump even making an oblique reference to the size of his genitals.

[Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]