Across the board.

People think '24' is a documentary. And there are too many people who vote for Democrats among that number. We are NOT the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave any longer.

I have friends, some of whom consider themselves to be extremely progressive, who have said that they have no problem with having "Big Brother" in our gov't. This scares the hell out of me. I try to tell them that this is ridiculous and our freedoms and liberty are worth more than our safety any day, but it is possible to have both.

I believe it was Franklin, who said those who would trade security for liberty deserve neither. I am a firm believer of this. The concept of torturing to keep us "safe" is so effed up!

Our country has moved so far away from our founders intentions, I fear we will never make it there now.

I feel sorry for my daughter and all those who may come after her.

When I go to the link where the actual poll numbers are posted by the Washington Post it says 59% approve..

""By a margin of almost 2 to 1 — 59 percent to 31 percent — those interviewed said that they support the CIA’s brutal methods, with the vast majority of supporters saying that they produced valuable intelligence.

In general, 58 percent say the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified “often” or “sometimes.”"

The report also found that more than two dozen detainees were wrongly held, that the program was poorly managed and that the CIA misled top U.S. officials about the effectiveness of the program. Fifty-four percent of the public agrees with this sentiment, saying the CIA intentionally misled the White House, Congress and the American people about its activities.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/new-poll-finds-majority-of-americans-believe-torture-justified-after-911-attacks/2014/12/16/f6ee1208-847c-11e4-9534-f79a23c40e6c_story.html

This is bullshit propaganda. How can 59% of the people approve and 54% of the people agree that the CIA lied?

simultaneous acknowledgement that the torturers lied.

Here's a passage from Conrad's Heart of Darkness that bears on this notion, where Conrad's dubious narrator Marlow describes what the Roman invaders who reached Britain must have experienced and then talks about how that conquest is justified by an idea that one can "bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to":

A major reason for this is that the same people who clamor for a return to "constitutional law" are ignorant of what's in the Constitution. Apparently they are oblivious to Article VI.

Let me quote a relevant excerpt from Article VI: "all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land". As per Article VI, when the US enters into a treaty (convention) with other nations, the terms of that agreement become, essentially, law in these United States. By entering into the Convention Against Torture - the Senate ratified the treaty in 1994 - the U.S. government made the use of torture illegal and subject to prosecution.

In these political times, Article VI has become quite relevant. It also validates the national debt, clarifies the supremacy (of the nat'l government) clause, and prohibits religious tests as a qualification for public office.

This reply was meant for KingC above: Well done and said! The heart of darkness was not at the end of the river, but in that horrible corporate office where the plans were made. Marlowe stood outside that idea and so made an excellent account of the monster it created. The voices of reason, speaking from the frame of research, look to these polls and mutter, "The Horror..., the Horror..."

Thunderous applause.

Princess Amadala

It only incites greater conflict!

Torture works great when you want to force false confessions to support your lying propaganda.

The report was running the neocon flag up the flagpole to see who would salute.

Sadly, most of the U.S. did salute and it says volumes about the lack of character and morals in America today.

The morons say "I want my country back", but want to keep all the things that America used to condemn in other countries, but now excuse as okay under certain circumstances.

They're referring to our older authoritarian system -- the Confederacy. Because at heart they're all authoritarians, not lovers of freedom:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026047376
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026043808

today thom hartmann played a recording of bush telling the press
that torturers were war criminals and the usa would treat them as such

bush was referring to torturers in other countries because the usa
did not do that

there can be no debate with criminals and pretending that
there can be debate under the terms of criminals is sickness

"with the goal of convincing Americans that a) the program did not work and that b) enhanced interrogations were wrong and should never again be permitted. "

I don't actually believe that EITHER of these two things was the goal. I believe the goal of the investigation was nothing more than the APPEARANCE of due-diligence.

It distracted us from the more important point that is is immoral and cruel.
They did this right from the bugining...tried to make it about effectiveness because there they have an argument where on the morality they had none.
And they reinforced it with TV...most notable 24 that set the narrative of the ticking time bomb clearly in the minds of people and gave them a reason to reject the morality of it.

They played us and still play us today...no one is arguing the morality of it.

she did the right thing. i for one do not believe that torture is ever right, and want to see the perpetrators prosecuted. the country is sick.

aspects of our nature. We're into acting out, and lashing out, bullying and being mean-spirited. That's us now. That's America. That's the so-called holy, sanctity-of-the "American Way." And it's shameful. As an American, I'm ashamed. And thoroughly disgusted.

I wrote this column, back when, that I called "The Meaning of America." It was NOT about some lofty rhapsody to our wonderful wonderful country and that tired old "shining city on a hill" canard. It was about how we're steadily devolving - we're turning more and more MEAN. As in mean-spirited. As in a bunch of meanies. As in mean and nasty. Outright hate-filled these days. As my husband now says - "America. We're not who we thought we were."

What really is the most galling, I think, is the overall lesson - the takeaway from this. And unfortunately it is that being mean PAYS. You get away with it. You're even praised and admired for it. LOADS of positive reinforcement out there for this kind of behavior. You're viewed as gutsy, ballsy, my-way-or-the-highway, get-outta-my-way, me-me-me, it's all about ME for ME and you can go fuck yourself. And there are no consequences. No accountability. You can shit on people, and if you're a cop, you can shoot first and not care about the fallout because it'll never touch you. NO! When you go mean, when do it that way, you're richly rewarded. Sometimes quite literally - you get wealthy. Or you get to feel as though you're one of 'em - because you vote for them and you think you're part of it. (Even though they're laughing at you and avoiding you like the plague!) And you think if you JUST. KEEP. ON. VOTING. FOR. THEM. and believing in them and swallowing the shit they spew, YOU TOO will be rich and powerful someday, and able to flitch off those who annoy you as though they were a spot of lint on the shoulder of your nice suit. And all the while, you loudly boast and swagger about what a devout holier-than-thou Christian you are.

It's a sickness. And I don't know when - or how - we're going to recover from it.

Our crisis is a moral one...Our constitution is a moral one founded on moral principles and once we reject that it is all over for our democracy.

And everyone needs to remember that it is also "we" and "us" doing this, not just "they" and "them". Anyone who thinks Democrats aren't screaming for exceptions to the law to made on their behalf, who thinks we are not applying a double standard on some issues or who thinks that only conservatives can be authoritarians...either hasn't looked very close or is choosing not to look very close at our meanness. By the math, the majority of people supporting torture has to include liberals, but don't kid yourself that it is the only such issue.

Nothing is going to get fixed as long as our attitude is "if they're getting away with doing it, we need to get away with doing it."

Glad you're here! And thanks for the reply, too. Your point is a good one. Some of "ours" are just as complicit. I am HOPING, HARD, that Hillary Clinton remembers WHY it isn't she who's serving the last half of her second term in the White House - because she caved to bush/cheney and swallowed the shit they were force-feeding everyone. I'm HOPING that she pays attention, and doesn't feel like she needs to just go along and rubber-stamp shitty ideas and shitty proposals and shitty bills - especially if she wins, and then faces the kind of opposition we've come to expect from the REAL "Sore Losermen." DAYUM! The GOP is the collective poster child for poor sportsmanship and sore losers!

As a mother, I thought when your kid acted out or threw a tantrum in the middle of the cereal aisle because they didn't get their five boxes of sugar cereal, or when they snatched a toy away from a smaller kid - I thought the wise response was always to check that behavior and CERTAINLY not give in to it. CERTAINLY you do not reinforce that behavior and teach that kid that this is what you can do to get your way, becuase it's always about getting your way. I HATE the very idea that mitch mcconnell not only survived in November but gets the reward he's always wanted - Senate Majority Leader. ICK!!! So his bad behavior and poor sportsmanship has been rewarded. Reinforced. This is just SHITTY!!!

I HATE to see bad behavior rewarded. It's not supposed to work that way.

But just because I've just started commenting with some frequency does not mean I have not been around a while. I had pretty much stepped away from all politics for a year or so just because of liberal-on-liberal toxicity. Got tired of being "not a real liberal" because I disagreed with the loudest and most irrational screamers on the digital block. I had hoped things would calm down after the mid-terms, but sadly the screamers are still there, still think they are the one true representative voice of liberal thought, and are still just as oblivious to the harm they are doing.

It was released basically before Christmas and was on the news a few days and then the NYPD took over the news and people were buying gifts and getting ready for travel. The whole thing was a big yawn. We here had the most coverage and most Americans heard David Muir report about it for three minutes for two days MAYBE.

are usually foreigners anyway. yeah right

dock at the Hague. Shame that the Russian Federation and PRC would have to invade and occupy us, for their arrest and rendition to be effected. But if it comes to that, justice must needs be done.

the actual poll..

IT IS AGAINST THE LAW.
And secondly, USA-ians need to understand that torture also
grievously damages the people who carry it out.
They have off-the-chart rates of PTSD.
So if you are pro-torture, you are in favor of destroying
young American lives - not just those of the foreign "other".
And guess what, many of those ex-torturers are now ticking
time bombs - walking the streets of our country.

... and there's 'agreement' here with him on this?

This is an attempt to close the book on the process of accountability when the summary report should serve as the beginning of assigning responsibility and initiating prosecutions for violations of the law.

Is it any surprise that this summary, with the redactions engineered and overseen by the very architects of the torture program - including Tenet protege, CIA chief Brennan - failed on its own to convince the public on all of the points polled? That was the intention of the cover-up; that's the effect.

Does anyone here remember the public reaction after the publishing of the Abu-Ghraib torture photos? That's the kind of impact that's needed and it won't come from a doctored summary. It will take a determined effort by a prosecution-based commission or tribunal which details to the public exactly what occurred, what laws were broken, and who's responsible.

Newsweek:

The nightmarish images from Abu Ghraib are still seared into the American consciousness: piles of naked bodies, detainees being led on leashes and U.S. soldiers giving a thumbs-up as it all happens. But now, a decade after they were made public, the U.S. government is trying to conceal as many as 2,100 additional photographs that are said to be even more disturbing.

A federal judge ruled in August that the Obama administration had to decide by October 21 whether it would release the images showing U.S. military personnel torturing detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq or defend its case, photograph by photograph, in order to continue withholding them. The administration said Tuesday that it intended to defend keeping the images secret and would supplement the record with its reasons.

Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq...Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

The graphic nature of some of the images may explain the U.S. President's attempts to block the release of an estimated 2,000 photographs from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan despite an earlier promise to allow them to be published

in the very first line of an opinion piece is surely engaged in propaganda, unless they have absolutely no awareness of who exactly Marc A. Thiessen is and what he represents in our country today.

And worse, to believe uncritically any poll taken and published by the Washington Post shows a political naivety that will in the end accomplish exactly what the torture-mongers hoped for...an end to the conversation of holding anybody accountable for torture.

I do not believe that poll and it is certainly NOT the final verdict on the case for making torture an acceptable form of interrogation.

The Pew Research Center is generally viewed as a sound, non-partisan polling organization. They also asked the question:

link

By the Pew numbers, 37% of Democrats said the CIA interrogation methods were justified, and 43% of Democrats thought using those methods helped prevent terrorist attacks.

If someone's first response to a criticism is not to examine it, but instead to reject it because of who said it, and to disparage that person because they said it, then they're part of the problem, not part of the solution.

If what we are supporting is wrong, it is wrong regardless of who calls us out on it.

a bunch of questions which, even in their presentation, assumed that those 1000 people knew anything about the very real torture methods used, who they were used on, and whether or not any actual benefits arose from that torture, is disingenuous. In fact, that Pew Poll was conducted within the very same week that the Senate report was released and honestly, how many of even very politically active people had delved into the many despicable revelations of the report by the time "pollsters" asked such questions?

I don't give two figs what that Pew Poll claims. Pew could come here where I live and ask those very same questions right now, a whole month since that Senate report revealed just a smidgen of what the fuckers did, and concentrate their polling specifically to 1000 members of the Democratic Party in my county. Well, guess what? The results would most likely skew even higher in favor and that is because the demographics here tend to lean conservative, whether the tag they identify with is Democratic or Republican. An overwhelmingly white, rural county, where very many are content, no, proud, of the fact that they are uninformed.

The defense of torture that we all witnessed last month, in the MSM, via any "polls" conducted, and from the mouths of leaders in our government, both past and present, was done to control the conversation on the subject, to make Americans think that there actually is a question such as, "Is torture justified?" under both our Constitution and the Geneva Conventions.

And Marc Thiessen is a right-wing propagandist that I've no qualms about disparaging. He was a neo-con bastard long before Rumsfeld ever hired him; hell, his "successful" work with that sexist, racist Helms was the reason he ended up as the Shrub's mouthpiece.

I did not realize that your personal professional qualifications trumped those of multiple national polling organizations that have been doing this sort of thing for decades. Nate Silver. Remember him? The guy with a perfect track record in the 2012 election predictions? I'm sure someone with your ability to instantly analyze the pulse of America will save him a lot of time and effort with all that math and statistics stuff, since his site, like me, is willing to put its rep on the line by giving credence to the Pew results. I'm positive that after hearing your critique, his site will post a retraction of that story and immediately put you on their payroll to vet their stories and prevent future embarrassments.

So in addition to apologizing for not realizing your awesomeness, let me be the first to congratulate you on your new job!

The Op's poll(ABC News) claims 74% of Americans support torture, and yours (Pew) claims 51%. A 23% difference.

So much for polls.

It's wrong according to international law, domestic law and it doesn't work.

Fascism Watch (Third World Traveler)
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Fascism.html

You got to be kidding

I can never agree with the concept of torturing people... It is inhumane, to say the least. We lose our soul when we permit it.

... when the inevitable happens and Americans are tortured by some other nation. Then we'll be hearing that such treatment is barbaric, and never appropriate.

It shouldn't have to take that to change people's minds - it makes me embarrassed to be an American.

violent and lacking any morals. Fucking A.

There really is no public support for such a thing.

many people would do a great many things "to protect the country". We wage unlimited war with public backing "to protect the country".

What of course is lost in this is that nothing that was done "protected the country" in any measurable way.

So the better question is "knowing that none of this protected the country in any way, would you do it again?"

The result, regardless, is an indication of how far we have fallen as a civilized society. Even in the Jim Crow dark ages, the people would have been appalled by such revelations.

would perhaps be another version of the question that comes closer to addressing the philosophy that actually initiated the torture.

That's some sick shit.

if not, then why not? If you believe in it...

I think the wording in Feinsteins report didn't support her cause. The CIA prefers "EIT" Dianne of course prefers "Torture".

The difference is subtle but Dianne infers by using the word "torture" that the CIA is a bunch of sadistic brutal monsters using torture to punish. I don't believe America is believing that narrative.

Who will handle the interrogations if the CIA doesn't? New York lawyers?

Furthermore eliciting sympathey for people like Khalid Sheik Mohammed the killer of 3000+ americans might be a tough sell.

In context of 9/11 how would you interrogate KSM if you captured him on 9/12? "pretty please Mr KSM tell us what al Qaedas plans are?"

But I don't believe your assumption that EITs don't work at all.

I think the poll shows that many Americans believe they do. I think a reasonable person could assume that interrogation involving the EITs could work in some circumstances.

gotten. Because "many Americans" believe it worked and got info.

Under what circumstances does torture work?

Torture didn't work on McCain, why should it work on anyone else?

And since the torture was useless, it was a waste of time that could've been better spent.

And yes, it's torture, no matter how you may want to spin it into something less violent and sadistic.

Torture is torture and it is a CRIME. It should be called what it is and government officials should not be allowed to cover it up or use euphemisms to sugar coat it.

There was no ticking time bomb scenario, and no evidence that useful and timely information was obtained through these methods.

I have no sympathy for terrorists. A refusal to torture is not based in sympathy for the proposed victims. It is a statement of our values, not a mercy granted to the deserving.

Our values are not known when they are not tested. It is easy to be polite, civil, and humane to those who are polite, civil and humane toward us, this is not values, it is only good manners. Values are how you act when it is not convenient, values are how you act when you think your actions will remain secret.

There are many interrogators and a great deal of research on what works. It is very well understood that the approaches we have now seen in photos are read about in a report do not work. There is a long track record of proof that this stuff does not work.

However when you have an administration headed by a man who made jokes about signing death warrants as Governor, none of this stuff should be a shock.