Allah:
Not surprising, really, but the result conflicts so sharply with the media’s sense of how Americans should feel about this that it’s worth highlighting for that reason alone. The press, which supposedly aims to serve the public interest, doesn’t always agree with the, er, public about what that interest is.
What is surprising is the gender gap, or rather non-gap. Wow.
Evidence that ladies are more willing to tolerate torturing suspected terrorists than gents are? Well, no. Skim the crosstabs here and here and you’ll find that men reliably will accept getting rough with jihadis in various specific ways more than women will. That’s what makes the above result so interesting — since women oppose assorted EIT practices more than men do, you would think they’d be more inclined to say that coming clean about those practices now will serve American interests. Nope. Just the opposite, actually. I can’t explain that.
This is more easily explained.
An interesting result in lots of ways, not just the obvious partisan divide. There’s reason to believe from those numbers that Democrats have grown more opposed to EIT over time. Polls taken over the last few years found that a majority of Dems support enhanced interrogation of terrorists in the abstract. Here, though, when asked if torture of suspected jihadis who might know details of future attacks is ever justified, just 36 percent say “always” or “sometimes” versus 58 percent who say “rarely” or “never.” (Then again, another way of looking at that result is that 54 percent of Democrats agree that torture can be justified on rare occasions, with a mere 38 percent saying it’s never justified. And among the wider public, thanks mainly to strong GOP support, 48 percent say torture is always or sometimes justified versus just 42 percent who say rarely or never.) Hard to explain the Democratic evolution on this subject in terms of reaction to ongoing practices since EIT has been banned for years now. What we’re seeing here, I think, is partisan discipline at work.
