U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks with the audience as presenter Anderson Cooper looks on at the South Carolina Republican Presidential Town Hall sponsored by CNN in Columbia.

Donald Trump is defending his support of waterboarding by citing a largely unsubstantiated tale of a U.S. general who supposedly halted Muslim attacks in the Philippines in the early 1900s by shooting the rebels with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood.

The story about Gen. John Pershing’s efforts to quell the Moro Rebellion around 1911 has been widely discredited.

But Trump brought it up during a rally in North Charleston the night before the South Carolina primary.

He says after the alleged incident, “For 25 years there wasn’t a problem, OK?”

Trump adds, “So we better start getting tough and we better start getting vigilant, and we better start using our heads or we’re not going to have a country, folks.”

Trump says waterboarding is “minimal, minimal, minimal torture” compared with the tactics used by ISIS militants.

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