It was hard for anyone to miss the blazing headlines and feature stories everywhere trumpeting the Senate Intelligence Committee’s majority report attacking the Central Intelligence Agency for the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” shorthanded as “torture.”
Despite the blitzkrieg, Rasmussen is reporting that most Americans still favor the use of the harsh tactics and they believe that those tactics elicited valuable information that helped the United States prevent terror attacks and to capture evildoers.
Waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation tactics should be used to gain information from suspected terrorists, according to 47 percent of those surveyed. Only 33 percent told the telephone survey takers they did not think those kinds of methods should be used. The final 20 percent said they were not sure.
The large percentage of likely voters who continue to approve of the aggressive interrogation methods despite the strong wording of the report, echoed deafeningly in the media, does not mean that all or most of them read the minority report, which contradicted the majority’s report on just about every point. It may simply mean that Americans prefer their own security to seriously compromising the comfort of suspected terrorists.
The Rasmussen survey was conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, Dec. 9 and 10. The “Torture Report” was released on Tuesday.
The margin or sampling error on this survey was +/-3 percentage points.