Nearly half of U.S. voters favor the use of waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation tactics employed by the Central Intelligence Agency to procure information from suspected terrorists, according to a poll released Thursday.
A Rasmussen Reports survey found that 47 percent of likely voters support the CIA’s practices in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack, while 33 percent disagreed with using such methods. Another 20 percent were not sure.
The poll comes in the aftermath of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s blistering report on coercive interrogation techniques, released Tuesday, which was highly critical of the CIA and the Bush administration.
Even so, 49 percent of those polled said the CIA’s interrogation of suspected terrorists “provided valuable information that helped the United States and its allies in the War on Terror,” a figure virtually unchanged from the 51 percent who said so in the August poll.
Twenty-three percent disagreed, saying “such tactics do not provide valuable information,” while 28 percent were undecided.
The poll also found that 67 percent agreed with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the committee, when she accused the CIA of “secretly and illegally trying to undermine the committee’s investigation of its practices.”
The poll was conducted Dec. 9-10, the day of and day after the report’s release, among 1,000 likely voters, with a plus/minus 3 percent margin of error.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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