A majority of Americans believe that the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified, even as about half the public says the treatment amounted to torture, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.Most of the answers can be attributed directly to what's being said on the news. Over half of those polled said torture "did produce important information;" that is solely a reflection of which of your news sources you choose to believe, not a personal insight on your part. A plurality calls the report "unfair" in its description of the CIA program, but a majority also says the CIA "intentionally misled" Congress—again, a test of which radio station your car stereo is tuned to, and very little else.By an almost 2-1 margin, or 59-to-31 percent, those interviewed support the CIA’s brutal methods, with the vast majority of supporters saying they produced valuable intelligence.
In general, 58 percent say the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified “often” or “sometimes.”
The polling, however, shows the enormous danger of going down this path. Inhuman treatment of prisoners can, with the coaxing of national figures, easily be made into a majority opinion. Torturing innocent suspects, as Dick Cheney still triumphantly supports, can quite easily be normalized as necessary and proper. Any number of horrific crimes against others can be made "popular," even in the most supposedly civilized of societies, by appealing to a sense of fear and telling the population that the crimes will keep them safer. That is how Japanese Americans found themselves in internment camps. That is how the Klan ruled the South. That is why there were trials against "witches" in Salem. That is how wars are sold. That is how one of the most "civilized" of European nations, their people goaded into thinking the other in their midst were existential threats to their families, their towns and to the greatness of their nation, turned to the methodical slaughter of minority groups on an industrial scale.
Yes, torturing potentially innocent prisoners to get them to "confess" what they know can become a popular position. That does not make torture a valid moral choice or wipe away the legal prohibitions against it that all "civilized" societies have agreed to. It shows that all of civilization is balanced on a knife's edge, every law merely one momentary good intention from collapse. This is the danger of celebrating criminal acts on the television shows, instead of locking the participants behind bars. This is the danger of treating the torture of both known enemies and mere possible suspects as an ideological disagreement between distinguished peers, rather than a matter of civilization, or treaty, or law.