NPR’s “Day to Day” show reported Monday morning 1/24 that nearly 60% of Americans would not torture a suspect if they believed the suspect knew the location of an attack — even if it involved a nuclear weapon! Eric Winer lead his story with:

There is something called the “ticking bomb scenario” and it gets to the very heart of the debate over torture. It goes like this. A terrorist group plans to detonate a bomb — maybe even a nuclear bomb — somewhere in the United States. Federal agents capture one of the terrorists who knows where the bomb is, but he’s not talking. What do you do? …

After setting up the hypothetical, Winer knock it down with a quote from a source and this:

A recent Gallup poll presented the “ticking bomb scenario” to a few hundred Americans. Most of those surveyed, nearly 60%, said no, they would not torture known terrorists even if these terrorists knew details about future attacks in the U.S.

Only one problem — that landslide 60% did not evaluate the “ticking bomb scenario” at the heart of the story. Here is the exact question:

34. Would you be willing — or not willing — to have the U.S. government do each of the following, if the government thought it were necessary to combat terrorism?

… C. Torture known terrorists if they know details about future terrorist attacks in the U.S.

Willing 39%
Not Willing 59%
No Opinion 02%

This query is a lot more nebulous than what NPR originally posited: imminent nuclear attack and a suspect who knows the location of the bomb. This writer’s guess is that most people would be brutally realistic in this situation, and base a decision on whether to violate a suspect’s rights via torture on two factors: how many people are likely to be killed by a successful terror strike, and whether torturing the suspect is likely to prevent it.

Individuals will differ on how they trade these off, but those tradeoffs do exist. Many would play by the rules given a suspect who might or might not know plans for a suicide bomb attack in a small cafe, but what if a member of a terror cell had definite knowledge of the time and place of an imminent suitcase nuke attack? Wouldn’t hundreds of thousands or a million potential dead change those poll responses?

The poll question is so fuzzy that it allows people the luxury of responding “no;” had the poll asked the question the way NPR’s reporter initially explained the “ticking bomb scenario,” you would have had far more than 39% approving the use of torture (39%!).

By setting up the atomic terror attack straw man and then using the disingenuous “most said no to torture” ‘fact’ to close off the issue, Winer missed the more accurate story: almost 40% of Americans would support the use of torture in some general set of circumstances, and far more would likely approve its use if it would prevent an attack with a some x number of casualties. How people would make that call is far more interesting than pretending that there is consensus that the use of torture is absolutely out of bounds.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 28th, 2005 at 1:18 am by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Media, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.