Fearful Americans support torture

Kevin Drum

From Kevin Drum at Mother Jones:

The American public supports torture by a pretty wide margin, and Republicans support it almost unanimously. This means there’s really not much reason for anyone to feel ashamed about it or to think it will hurt their reputation or their ability to work in government.

The bottom half of the poll graphic explains why so many people feel this way: they’re scared. 

This is hard for people like me to understand: It never even occurs to me to feel scared in any of the situations they asked about. At airports I mostly feel annoyed. At movies I mostly wish Hollywood made better stuff. At sporting events I wish the guy in front of me wasn’t wearing a big hat.

But scared people support bad policies. They support interning people of Japanese ancestry. They support napalm and carpet bombing. And they support torture. The only way to change this is to figure out a way to make people less scared. Obviously we haven’t done that yet.

Rob's comment:

Senator Feinstein is steadfast against torture, but President Trump isn't. He wants to put a woman in charge of the CIA who oversaw a torture site under President George W. Bush:

It is a matter of public record that Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to be the next director of the CIA, played a key role in the agency’s now-defunct program of “enhanced interrogation techniques”—an Orwellian euphemism for a system of violence most Americans would recognize as torture. Haspel oversaw a black site in the Bush era. At least one detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was tortured during her tenure...

See also Dianne Feinstein's finest hour.