Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade suggested Tuesday that protesters aligned with anti-fascist groups — known broadly as Antifa — in Portland and other American cities should be locked up and treated like Al-Qaeda members in interrogations.
Asked on Fox Business Network about the ongoing unrest in Oregon, Washington and Michigan, Kilmeade said protests — which are largely centered on racial justice — will end “when the cops are empowered to stop it, when a mayor will go and use the resources of federal government to help stop it.”
In the clip, first highlighted by Media Matters’ John Whitehouse, Kilmeade said law enforcement should deeply interrogate protesters affiliated with the loose network of groups known as Antifa. They should, he said, “sit there, lock them up, and interrogate them almost like you would Al-Qaeda because they are undermining our country the same way these Islamic extremists were doing it. We were dead serious about that. We are not dead serious about this.”
The interrogation of Al-Qaeda members included waterboarding and was criticized widely, notably by the late Republican Sen. John McCain, who said in 2018, “The torture of detainees in U.S. custody during the last decade was one of the darkest chapters in American history.”
In 2014, then-president Barack Obama said the interrogation “crossed a line” and was torture, warning against doing it again.
“When we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture, we crossed a line,” the former president said. “And that needs to be … understood and accepted. And we have to, as a country, take responsibility for that so that hopefully we don’t do it again in the future.”
Watch Kilmeade’s comments below:
Brian Kilmeade likens protesters in the streets to Al Qaeda pic.twitter.com/kzXdwjza2d
— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) September 8, 2020