Newly sworn-in CIA Director Mike Pompeo was caught off guard over a reported draft executive order to reinstate waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques, Michael Isikoff at Yahoo News reported.
Isikoff quotes a source familiar with Pompeo's conversations about the document as saying the director was "blindsided" by the draft order, which would allow for resumption of the techniques at reopened "black site" prisons outside the United States.
Waterboarding and other "enhanced" techniques were used during the George W. Bush administration to obtain information from foreign terrorism suspects, but President Barack Obama banned them in 2009.
"We're not playing on an even field," President Trump told ABC News' David Muir on Wednesday. "When they're chopping off the heads of our people, and other people — when they're chopping off the heads of people because they happen to be a Christian in the Middle East — when ISIS is doing things that nobody has ever heard of since medieval times, would I feel strongly about waterboarding? As far as I'm concerned, we have to fight fire with fire."
The New York Times reported on the draft order, but Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters the order was not written by the White House.
Trump told ABC, although he believes waterboarding works, he will defer to Pompeo and Defense Secretary James Mattis, who has said it is not effective.
Mattis also was not given a heads up on the order, Yahoo News reported.
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