Poll: Torture can be useful, nearly half of Americans say

The results were part of a poll carried out by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which surveyed 17,000 people in 16 countries, including many nations in conflict or recovering from conflict, to gauge public opinion about the laws of war.

The findings on torture were among the starkest. Among Americans, 46 percent said torture could be used to obtain information from an enemy combatant, while 30 percent disagreed and the rest said they did not know. On a more general question, one in three said torture was “part of war,” just over half called it “wrong,” and the rest said they did not know or preferred not to answer…

In the survey, only Israelis, Palestinians and Nigerians seemed to endorse torture as enthusiastically as Americans. In Afghanistan, by contrast, 83 percent of those surveyed said torture was wrong; in Colombia, that number was 85 percent.

Worldwide, two-thirds of those surveyed said torture was wrong, though on the more specific question of whether it could be used to extract information from an enemy fighter, just under half said it was wrong.