WASHINGTON – The Senate Intelligence Committee’s five-year investigation into the CIA’s torture of suspected terrorists just came out. There’s plenty in there to shock – for starters, just go to the document and search for “rectal feeding.” The Washington Post has compiled a list of 20 key takeaways from the report, which detail a regime of brutality, incompetence and deceit that have been damaging to the United State’s standing abroad.
Good luck trying to convince many Americans of that, though. Polls have shown a public generally supportive of the use of torture to gain information from terrorist suspects, at least in some circumstances, and even when you flat out call it “torture.”
In 2009, the Pew Research Center found that 49 percent of the public said “the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information” can “often” or “sometimes” be justified. This belief was held by 64 percent of Republicans, 54 percent of Independents and 36 percent of Democrats.
Including the number who say that torture can rarely be justified, 71 percent of Americans accept torture under some circumstances.
Overall, 25 percent of respondents said torture could “never” be justified. Fourteen percent of Republicans said the same, compared to 38 percent of Democrats.
While these figures are from 2009, Pew data from 2011 paints largely the same picture. A more recent YouGov poll from 2012 showed similar levels of support for torture among the public overall.
A 2014 report by the advocacy group Amnesty International found that U.S. respondents were more supportive of torture than people in other wealthy Western countries.
U.S. forces on ‘high alert’
The United States has beefed up precautions to protect Americans and U.S. facilities abroad for possibly violent responses after the release Tuesday of a long-awaited Senate report on interrogation techniques used by the CIA.
Just hours before the report was issued, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said U.S. military forces were on “high alert everywhere in the world.”
“We don’t have any specific information or intelligence to show that there is anything out there that would lead us to do anything beyond high alert right now,” Hagel told reporters in Baghdad. “But, yes, we were concerned about the content of that report being declassified.”
The report details the CIA’s post-Sept. 11 detention and interrogation program.
U.S. officials are most worried about a violent backlash in Africa and the Middle East, or in countries where anti-American sentiments often run strong, including Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The troops on heightened states of alert are mostly Marines, a Pentagon official said.
