Hot Air links to a report titled World Public Opinion on Torture. The report tells us, inter alia, that:
While Americans oppose the use of torture on the whole, the majority endorsing an unequivocal rule against torture is more modest than in other countries and has declined since 2006.
A modest majority (53%) feels that torture should unequivocally not be allowed, while forty-four percent favor an exception for terrorists. Thirteen say torture should be allowed in general.
Support for making exceptions for torture in the case of terrorists has grown among Americans since 2006 (44%, up from 36%), while the majority opposing the use of torture in all cases has fallen slightly (53%, down from 58%).
The arguments for or against an absolute prohibition on torture aside, there's an interesting irony in the above statistics. We live in a country where a majority of people believe that nothing is wrong absolutely and yet a majority also holds that torture is absolutely wrong. It's amusing to listen to secularists, whose position entails that there is no such thing as an objective moral wrong, go apoplectic when confronted with evidence that the Bush administration has employed "harsh measures" in their interrogation of terrorists.
RLC
