06/25/08 – Clay Ramsay – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our guest today is Clay Ramsey.
He's the Research Director at WorldPublicOpinion.org and he's the author of The Ideology of the Great Fear.
He is Director of Research at the Program on International Policy Attitudes and they have this new poll out about World Public Opinion on Torture.
It's at WorldPublicOpinion.org and you can find the link in the news somewhere today on Antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show, Clay.
Thank you.
It's good to have you here, although I can't say I'm very pleased with what you're reporting in this PDF file, this survey that you've released.
A poll of 19 nations, public attitudes in 19 nations, finds that in 14 of them, most people favor an unequivocal rule against torture.
I guess that's the good news, really, but then the bad news is what, exactly?
Well, if you want to focus on the bad news for a while, you have on average 35% across the 19 countries who say either that they think an exception should be made to occasionally torture a supposed terrorist in a case where you think you're going to save innocent lives.
And then a very small 9% on average who say that torture should be permitted to governments more broadly than that.
And then from the point of view of an American, the bad news to me is that we actually, in this country, barely make the cut at 53% opposing torture in all circumstances, right?
Well, that's true.
The U.S. is a little below the average of the 19 countries in this regard, and there has been a drop in support for an unequivocal norm against torture.
We asked this question in 2006, and at that time, only 36% said that some exceptions should be made in the rule against torture, and that 36% has gone up to 44%.
Really?
That's funny.
I guess I would have thought that the attitude would be more in favor of that kind of thing at the height of that show's 24's popularity and that kind of thing.
I guess not.
Well, this has been an argument that has gone on for an increasingly long period, and also perhaps it has gotten politicized.
Currently 65% of Democrats in our poll favor an unequivocal ban, so do 56% of independents, but only 38% of Republicans do.
And I think this is perhaps a regrettable effect of the issue having been waved around as a kind of political insignia.
Right, yeah.
Well, I think that's probably right.
It has gotten all partisan politics with candidates accusing each other of being soft on terrorists and those kinds of things.
Also, when you said that, I think you said average across the 19 countries, it was 10% generally think that torture should generally be allowed.
If their government wants to torture somebody, that ought to be okay.
And America's ahead of the curve on that one at 13%, huh?
Well, just to trifle, yes.
These really small amounts, once you get to 3% and below in these differences, you shouldn't put a great deal of stock on them.
But the rise that I spoke of, that's a real measure.
That's reflecting a real shift.
Yeah.
Now, tell me about this saving innocent lives exception.
How exactly is that phrased in the question?
Because I don't know a whole lot about opinion polls, but I know that how the question is put to the person doing the answering is all important to what kind of answer you get out of them.
That's true.
And what we wanted to do was make people think through the most difficult choices about this.
So we weren't looking for an easy ascent to an existing norm on torture.
And so we gave people two arguments and asked them, which position is closer to yours?
The first argument went, terrorists pose such an extreme threat that government should now be allowed to use some degree of torture if it may gain information that saves innocent lives.
That's the kind of rhetoric that you've heard before.
Okay, the other argument went, clear rules against torture should be maintained because any use of torture is immoral and will weaken international human rights standards against torture.
So they then had to choose between those two arguments.
Now those who said, well, sometimes there is an exception, got the next question, which was, what about cases that have nothing to do with terrorism?
Do you think that there should be rules prohibiting torture in all other cases or that in general, government should be allowed to use torture to try to get information?
So after people have gone through both of these questions, if they're saying that government should be more widely permitted to get information, then they've had to go through some thinking on the issue before they arrive at that.
And so that's how you get down to that 13% says that.
I want to point out that's an extremely small minority.
We can be shocked that there are people who disagree with us on lots of different things.
But the most important thing in assessing a public is where's the center of gravity of the majority.
That center of gravity is in the United States, quite definitely in favor of an unequivocal ban on torture, no matter what the possible short-term advantages that may appear.
Yeah.
Well, and center of gravity is deliberately vague because we are talking about trying to measure quality with numbers here and it doesn't always work that way.
But 53%, you know, as you said, don't put too much stock in a 3%.
It sounds like basically a half and half kind of proposition here in this country.
Well, you could look on it that way.
I'm a half empty kind of guy, man.
Okay.
There certainly is cause for alarm with this poll.
And I think more people that we have been showing it to have read it that way than have read it the other way.
Well, I'm looking at the graphic here and you have the line graph.
And again, that's at worldpublicopinion.org here.
And you know, Hey, Mexico puts America to shame, Spain and France and Great Britain and the Palestinians, which, you know, what experience do they have with torture?
The Chinese put us to shame here in this country, 66% opposed to unequivocal bans.
And many of those high numbers actually represent increases from when we have done this earlier from in 2006.
In Mexico, it's gone up from 50% then to 73% now.
In China, it's gone up from 49% to 66%.
In Russia, it's gone up 43% to 49%.
In Britain, it's gone up 10 points.
It was already high, 72% to 82%.
So there are some signs of the norm also strengthening in many parts of the world.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's great to see actually, you know, especially in some of these third world countries where they don't have any sort of tradition of habeas corpus and trial by juries and those kinds of things.
I mean, this actually does, and I'm sorry, this is kind of a little personal rant here.
This does cut to the very core of the American tradition here.
And I know there has been torture in our history, but enshrined in our constitution are at least two provisions which are attempts to ban it, and that is the prohibition against forced self-incrimination and against cruel and unusual punishment.
This is not the American way to torture people.
Well, there's been a lot of political stress around the issue, and the administration has made it clear that it's willing to take a lot of serious costs, political costs even domestically at home to cling to their view about this.
And so then if you are a supporter of the administration on entirely other grounds, you may feel some pull to stand with them on this.
I think that's very much a piece of these numbers rather than people coming home at night from work and saying, you know, I should reevaluate torture.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think you're right, especially when a lot of people on the right are bashing McCain for not being pro-torture enough, then that's what's wrong with the guy.
And that really is, I guess, you know, helps solidify the idea that that's the definition of what it means to be true to the Republican Party and so forth.
You know, I'm used to this kind of thing, but it still disappoints me when I see the way you phrased it in your report, modest majorities or pluralities in favor of outright bans on torture, Azerbaijan, Egypt, United States, Russia and Iran.
I mean, we're Sudan in here.
I guess they weren't on your list.
It's hard to pull in Sudan.
Yeah, I guess so.
Well, that's pretty shady company we're keeping there.
Yeah, I suppose so.
But taking the very long view and trying to look for that quarter full glass here.
Yeah.
Torture is a very, very old human activity.
This is a real atavistic thing.
And when you are measuring it on a world level, you're really trying to look at humanity's process of trying to kick the habit.
It's not that you can go back to some earlier values in your roots and go, oh, we never used to torture.
Right.
That's not really the history of the human race, unfortunately.
Yeah.
This is all progress.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You need to look at these norms as works in progress, as things that are in development.
And I think if you get, we have 60% of the world's population represented in these countries.
And I think if you have 57% on average across so many countries here, including some very authoritarian ones, where there is plenty of torture going on, saying that they think that this should be an unequivocal ban, then that's in a small measure good news.
Yeah.
I agree with that.
And it seems like the argument ought to win out that none of these people really are anything more than suspects.
It's no different than on the local news last night.
They accused a guy at the local motel of molesting a couple of kids.
Well, lock him up and throw away the key, except that he's a suspect.
He hasn't been convicted of anything.
Maybe he is a child molester.
Maybe he's not.
But that remains to be shown.
And the idea that you just torture him into admitting what a child molester he is doesn't make any sense to us in this society.
We know better than that.
Why should it be any different than the guy's supposedly a member of Al-Qaeda?
Mm-hmm.
Well, let me tell you some other poll findings from earlier studies we did, just with Americans on this subject.
Okay.
We found that it's very important for people in a poll to at least get informed, is there a structure of law about this already or not, so that they are not really being asked to spin out their ideas in a vacuum without any information about what the law actually is.
So, for instance, when Americans were told in 2006 that the U.S. has signed a number of international treaties that prohibit torture, and then asked, do you approve of the U.S. signing these treaties or not, 82% approved, only 15% disapproved of this.
We've also asked about court proceedings in a case where there's an accusation of torture, and we've asked, who should be held responsible at law?
The one who did the torturing, the one who gave the orders, or both?
And 77% of Americans said they should both be responsible before the law.
Only 4% said it should be limited to the one who did it, and only 12% said it should be limited to the one who gave orders.
And I'll give you one more like this.
Back in 2004, just a little after the discovery of Abu Ghraib, we went to work and did a poll.
One of the questions we asked was, do you think that a soldier should have the right to disobey an order that he receives from a superior, but he thinks violates international law?
And 77% of Americans said, in that case, the soldier should have the right to disobey the order.
That surprised us very much, to see such a high level of support for someone in uniform going out on a limb, a long limb, and being insubordinate for this reason.
Yeah, yeah, that definitely is something to be hopeful about, it sounds like.
People, I guess, remember these kinds of lessons that they learn when they're little kids.
I mean, to me, that's really what I'm getting to, is all this stuff just contradicts the way that I was brought up, and I think most of my peers and neighbors and fellow Americans and so forth have been brought up, well, you know, the whole legend of America's the good guy at the end of World War II, and the Germans said I was just following orders, and that wasn't good enough.
We all know that.
Right.
Now, those positive-sounding results that I cited, they're all based on having the information somewhere in the question that there are these laws, and what we've seen in the last six years is the policy elite quarreling very publicly over whether these laws exist or not, and I think that that failure by the policy elite is really the biggest reason why you see the number of people who say they would support an exception to the ban on torture creeping up from 2006 to 2008 in this country.
Yeah.
Now, I'm sorry, I'm paging through your homepage there at worldpublicopinion.org, and I'm looking for something along these lines.
I'm not quite finding it, but I figured I'd go ahead and ask you while I've got you on the phone.
Have you done a survey of Americans' views toward the idea of a war with Iran?
We have asked a number of different questions about that.
Well, first of all, if you put it to them, the idea of talks with Iran without conditions, we've done that several times since 2003, and we've always found 70% or more who support that idea.
A majority has said also that they do not think there would be any effectiveness to attempting to use a military strike to knock out Iran's nuclear program.
Overall, a majority of Americans are quite strongly opposed to attempting to solve our problems with Iran through military action, and there is very substantial support in the order of 70% or more for holding direct talks with Iran.
Wow, 70%.
Now, do you know offhand where I can click on your website and get that?
That's my new footnote.
Well, if you just use the search and look up, I would suggest just Iran.
There are two occasions where we did polls of Iranians and Americans in which we asked people in both countries a lot of the same questions, and that's what I was speaking from primarily.
And so tell me about the Iranians and what they think of all this.
Well, the Iranians as a whole tend to be committed to the nuclear program as it has been explained to them by their government.
So they believe that they are conducting a program to have nuclear power plants, to have nuclear energy as an alternative to using oil, and that that is all that's going on.
They may be right or they may be wrong, but to the degree that they understand that to be true, that this is not a process of getting toward a nuclear weapon, they consequently support this aspect of the government.
They don't uniformly support Iranian government policies at all, especially the way the domestic economy is handled, which has given rise to a lot of dissatisfaction in Iran.
Yeah, people talk about the people of Iran hate the Mullahs so much.
If we only bomb them, they'll all rise up and take our side against them.
There is really no evidence for that, and we have tested that a lot.
Really?
Yes, yes.
People do not, you know, by any means describe the system as, you know, as perfect, but they view its limitations as not coming from the constitution of Iran.
OK, so you have a situation where people experience that they vote a lot.
They vote for parliament.
They vote directly for the president.
They vote for other councils and bodies.
They vote for the assembly that is supposed to be the one that picks the Ayatollah, that picks Khamenei, the religious leader of the state.
They don't necessarily feel that the Iranian government is fully representative of what the people want, but you wouldn't have popular support for throwing out the whole, you know, shooting match.
Right.
And particularly not with a shooting match.
Yes.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate this and have bookmarked your website and I'll be checking back for more of your work here.
It looks like really interesting stuff.
Just my search results from Iran at WorldPublicOpinion.org brought up all kinds of interesting stuff to be examined here.
So I'm going to have a good time doing that.
I really appreciate your time today on the show.
Thanks.
It was my pleasure.
All right, folks, that's Clay Ramsey, research director at WorldPublicOpinion.org.
And let me see if I can find the title of this thing on Antiwar.com today.
It's in the War on Terror section today at Antiwar.com poll.
More than 10 percent of Americans think torture is fine in general.