The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report released last December revealed that the CIA lied about the effectiveness of torture in gaining important information from terrorism suspects. But that didn't change America's opinion of using such tactics.
A Washington Post survey conducted shortly after the report’s release reveals the majority of Americans think enhanced interrogation was justified, and the CIA shouldn’t be held accountable.
Speaking on WNPR’s Where We Live, Kathleen Weldon, research manager at the UConn-based Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, said the Senate report didn’t influence public opinion.
“In this circumstance, we don’t really see an effect of this report. We don’t see it changing people’s minds. The issue of important information was a key one. The report basically said it was highly questionable whether any of these techniques had actually lead to important information,” Weldon said.
But it turns out 53 percent of participants in the December Washington Post poll believed enhanced interrogation had procured information that could not be produced from other means, regardless of the report’s conclusions, Weldon said.
Eighty-five percent of those who said that they believe important information had been attained by torturing suspects said that they thought torture in general was justified, according to Weldon. In comparison, she said 28 percent of people who said they didn’t think the information procured by torture was valid supported the program as a whole.
David Richards, UConn political science professor at the Human Rights Institute, said on Where We Live that social acceptance of torture is rooted in a political shift around 2009 caused by a greater concentration of Republicans supporting enhanced interrogation methods.
Richards also said U.S. citizens might not connect with media summaries of the 500-page executive report, which focus on issues of oversight rather than issues of morality. And the executive report is only a summation of the 7,000 page document Richards thinks “most people didn’t read.”
Weldon said that because the media has frequently uses the term “harsh interrogation techniques” alongside torture, the public understands the two as synonymous – and still supports the CIA’s decisions.
However, Weldon said there is a disparity between general approval of torture and approval of specific torture methods, specifically when those methods were detailed for poll participants. For example, 70 percent of the poll participants said forcing a prisoner to stake awake for up to 180 hours was torture, even though a majority of participants approved the torture program as a whole, she said.
With Americans aware that specific measures of enhanced interrogation are unpleasant, if not inhumane, why is public opinion supportive of CIA torture methodology?
Richards said that many observers say torture has a racist element to it, and those being trained in interrogation are taught to dehumanize their captives.
"To get people to commit violence against other human beings, it's easiest if you can dehumanize the other person. Especially if you're looking at torture as a human right. Human rights are what humans have. So if you dehumanize someone it becomes easier to do terrible things to them," Richards said.
Megan Berthold, assistant professor at the UConn School of Social Work, said part of torture methodology is “getting the [interrogation] group, the perpetrators, to see the people they end up torturing not as humans but as a severe threat to everything they know and love and hold dear in their society.”
Thus, torture becomes an emotional, personal issue.
“Pollsters have plenty of experience in dealing with new and emerging issues, but very rarely does an new, emerging issue have such a deep emotional charge as this one does,” Weldon said.
Ryan King is an intern at WNPR.
