To the likely astonishment of Senate Democrats, it turns out the American people aren’t as horrified by the CIA’s interrogations of terrorist suspects as they were supposed to be.
To the contrary, two recent polls confirm that Americans overwhelmingly endorse interrogation methods Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Dianne Feinstein, denounced as torture in their recent report.
It’s not even close.
Two recent polls — one by The Washington Post/ABC News and one by the Pew Research Center — report Americans overwhelmingly support what the CIA did to keep us safe.
In the Pew survey, slightly more than half of Americans say the CIA’s methods were justified, against only 29 percent who said they were unjustified.
The Washington Post/ABC News poll found Americans endorsing the tactics by a two-to-one ratio.
It gets worse for the anti-CIA crowd. Each survey reports a plurality saying the Democrats were wrong even to release the report, for which not a single CIA official — including those involved in the interrogations — was interviewed.
Both polls also find majorities of Americans saying (again, contrary to the report) that the interrogations produced valuable intel.
One way to read this is that the American people are morally indifferent to torture. No doubt that’s how the loudest members of the anti-CIA chorus will read it.
But a better way to read it is this: The American people understand we face an enemy unlike those we’ve fought before, and we are in a war where good intelligence is our most powerful weapon. They further understand that those quick to smear our CIA interrogators as torturers have done so with a highly selective presentation of the facts.
Which leaves us with this irony: Instead of discrediting its intended target — the CIA — polls suggest this one-sided report on “torture” has ended up discrediting the Senate Democrats who wrote it.