Red Cross Torture Report

[CountArach]

My name is called and my polling (Dare I say...?) expertise is requested... I shall not delay...

The only recent poll regarding the specific action of release of the CIA torture memos was that one conducted by Rasmussen. I do, however, have a serious concern with the question asked in the poll:

Does the release of CIA memos on interrogation techniques help the image of the United States abroad or does it endanger the national security of the United States?

The question is bound to get misleading results because you aren't required to pick a side on whether or not it endangers national security - the only other option is that it helps your image abroad. This would, to some degree at least, account for the high level of undecideds in the poll. Torture, as I shall show, is a very contentious issue and one on which there are generally few undecideds. As such any poll with this many undecideds should be treated with a healthy degree of scepticism.

As for general polling on torture, not much has been released outside of questions relating to Guantanamo Bay. The most recent polls are:

• Pew Research (April 23rd) - 49% support/47% oppose (4% undecided)
• Gallup (February 12th) - 62% support some investigation into use of Torture (Ignoring the fairly strong partisan divide here you get 59% of Independents supporting these investigations). Interestingly it has been said that this will be re-poll over the weekend... hold on for that one.
• Gallup (February 2nd) - 74% of people approve of Obama's limitting of interrogation techniques.
• WaPo/ABC News Poll (January 16th) - 40% support torture/58% oppose (2% undecided).

I can't find any others at the moment, but I'm fairly sure that's enough to be going on with. As can be seen the public is fairly evenly divided on this particular issue. Pew is always trustworthy and non-partisan so I would go with their numbers over any of the other organisations.

Your poll is almost three months old and doesn't take recent events into consideration- the poll I cited was released Thursday. Make of it what you will.

When it comes to opinions on specific political questions such as this the public is often quite static in their viewpoints (compare the results of the recent Pew surveys... they are al within the Margin of Error). Actions such as this are likely to release a small degree of "noise" into the polling, and it remains to be seen whether that will hold or not - my guess is that it will not cause any major public opinion shifts in the long-run. This is simply because there are so few undecideds out there to shift and it is always incredibly difficult to cause long-term shifts in the other side's numbers... just look at polling on abortion for example.