June 03, 2016 03:08 PM UTC

Robert Blaha Loves Him Some Waterboarding

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• by: Colorado Pols

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Robert Blaha tells us how he really feels about the controversial interrogation practice known as “waterboarding” at last night’s candidate forum hosted by the Rocky Mountain Black Conservatives in Colorado Springs:

BLAHA: Well actually, I’ll rephrase the question because I do not consider waterboarding to be torture. [Pols emphasis] The way I look–I’m all tangled up here brother–the way I look at waterboarding is controlled waterboarding is not torture. What it does is it extracts information that is absolutely crucial to, to the men and women who are depending on getting that information.

As we saw last week when Blaha stated he would “go beyond” Donald Trump’s proposal to block Muslims from entering the United States, he appears to have locked on to a campaign strategy of shocking Republican primary voters with as strident a position as is possible on any given issue. The fact is that waterboarding is widely discredited as an effective interrogation technique, along with other forms of torture considered by experts more likely to render a prisoner willing to say anything the interrogator wants to hear to end the torture than the truth.

But once again, that’s how rational people think about waterboarding. And those are not the voters Blaha needs to win this primary.