A Citizenry’s Apathy Enables A Country’s Policies

Hey New York-based dance fans! The New York Times today reviews Jane Comfort’s “An American Rendition,” a new dance-theater piece that explores the parallels between government bureaucracy and reality television, both “dizzying, pointless, inhumane systems marked by conformity, stereotypes and black-and-white codes of conduct.” Dick Cheney is famously quoted, “We’ll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will.” And dancers alternate between portraying reality TV contestants and brutal interrogators.

“At one point a dancer morphs from a ruthless government interrogator into a dull-eyed channel surfer gazing expressionlessly at an imaginary screen as his victim limps off the stage, which is flooded in red light. The accusatory implication is clear: a citizenry’s apathy enables a country’s policies.”

To combat said apathy, please make use of our advocacy toolkit for more suggestions about how you can make sure your voice is heard by candidates across the country.

McCain and Obama Agree that Torture Needs to End

In case you missed it, both candidates agreed in Friday night's debate that the U.S. needs to put an end to torture. It's great to see both candidates recognize that opposing torture just isn't something that should be up for debate.

LEHRER: This is the last -- last lead question. You have two minutes each. And the question is this, beginning with you, Senator McCain.What do you think the likelihood is that there would be another 9/11-type attack on the continental United States?

MCCAIN: I think it's much less than it was the day after 9/11. I think it -- that we have a safer nation, but we are a long way from safe.

And I want to tell you that one of the things I'm most proud of, among others, because I have worked across the aisle. I have a long record on that, on a long series of reforms.

But after 9/11, Senator Joe Lieberman and I decided that we needed a commission, and that was a commission to investigate 9/11, and find out what happened, and fix it.

And we were -- we were opposed by the administration, another area where I differed with this administration. And we were stymied until the families of 9/11 came, and they descended on Washington, and we got that legislation passed.

And there were a series of recommendations, as I recall, more than 40.

And I'm happy to say that we've gotten written into law most of those reforms recommended by that commission. I'm proud of that work, again, bipartisan, reaching across the aisle, working together, Democrat and Republican alike.

So we have a long way to go in our intelligence services. We have to do a better job in human intelligence. And we've got to -- to make sure that we have people who are trained interrogators so that we don't ever torture
a prisoner ever again.

We have to make sure that our technological and intelligence
capabilities are better. We have to work more closely with our allies. I know our allies, and I can work much more closely with them.

But I can tell you that I think America is safer today than it was on 9/11. But that doesn't mean that we don't have a long way to go.

And I'd like to remind you, also, as a result of those recommendations, we've probably had the largest reorganization of government since we established the Defense Department. And I think that those men and women in those agencies are doing a great job.

But we still have a long way to go before we can declare America safe, and that means doing a better job along our borders, as well.

LEHRER: Two minutes, Senator Obama.

OBAMA: Well, first of all, I think that we are safer in some ways.

Obviously, we've poured billions of dollars into airport security. We have done some work in terms of securing potential targets, but we still have a long way to go.

We've got to make sure that we're hardening our chemical sites. We haven't done enough in terms of transit; we haven't done enough in terms of ports.

And the biggest threat that we face right now is not a nuclear missile coming over the skies. It's in a suitcase.

This is why the issue of nuclear proliferation is so important. It is the -- the biggest threat to the United States is a terrorist getting their hands on nuclear weapons.

And we -- we are spending billions of dollars on missile defense. And I actually believe that we need missile defense, because of Iran and North Korea and the potential for them to obtain or to launch nuclear weapons, but I also believe that, when we are only spending a few hundred million dollars on nuclear
proliferation, then we're making a mistake.

The other thing that we have to focus on, though, is al Qaeda. They are now operating in 60 countries. We can't simply be focused on Iraq. We have to go to the root cause, and that is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's going to be critical. We are going to need more cooperation with our allies.

And one last point I want to make. It is important for us to understand that the way we are perceived in the world is going to make a difference, in terms of our capacity to get cooperation and root out terrorism.

And one of the things that I intend to do as president is to restore America's standing in the world. We are less respected now than we were eight years ago or even four years ago.

And this is the greatest country on Earth. But because of some of the mistakes that have been made -- and I give Senator McCain great credit on the torture issue, for having identified that as something that undermines our long-term security -- because of those things, we, I think, are going to have a lot of work to do in the next administration to restore that sense that America is that shining beacon on a hill.

Taxi to the Dark Side Premiers Tongiht on HBO

Andrew Sullivan links to Rachel Maddow interviewing Alex Gibney, the director of Taxi to the Dark Side, which premiers on HBO tonight.

First Do No Harm

This morning NPR reported that the American Psychiatric Association, the nation’s leading organization of psychiatrists, says the Pentagon has reneged on an agreement not to use psychiatrists in interrogations of detainees at Guantanamo and other detention sites. This is an ethical issue about whether mental health professionals can serve as instruments of interrogation. Professional groups of psychiatrists and psychologists cannot give orders to the Pentagon, but they can kick individual mental health professionals out of these groups if they violate policies – which could jeopardize their careers if state licensure boards were to find they violated ethical rules.

“Pentagon officials say the presence of psychologists and psychiatrists prevent what they call "behavioral drift" — the erosion of ethical norms that they say can spiral into a situation like Abu Ghraib, the prison in Iraq where detainees were abused by some U.S. troops.”

But, Dr. Nada L. Stotland, president of the American Psychiatric Association, says, "The use of psychiatrists to aid in interrogations is a serious violation of medical ethics and should be discontinued."

"This is about the soul of a psychiatrist, which is to be dedicated to helping people and healing people," she says. "And in order to do that, we need to get and we need to deserve their trust."

Prisoner Held and Mistreated at Gitmo for Six Years Without Charges Released

Time magazine today has a brief piece on Sami Al-Hajj, an al-Jazeera TV cameraman who was recently freed from Guantánamo. He was held there for six and a half years without facing any charges.

“Al-Hajj penned thousands more words during years as Prisoner 345 —including accounts of being force-fed through a tube during months of a hunger strike; of being locked in a cage for two weeks with no toothbrush or soap, after guards found an iron nail outside his cell window; and of being placed in a single cell with no blanket or bed, after refusing to submit to vaccinations he had already received in Qatar.”

As Time notes, both Senator McCain and Senator Obama “have said they would shut the U.S. military detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, where about 250 men remain behind bars — some in their eighth year of captivity. But neither presidential candidate has outlined when and how they plan to do it.” Luckily Human Rights First does have such a plan. Here’s a multiphased blueprint to close Gitmo within a year.

Expert Interrogator Testifies About Abuse of Iraqis

Here's a write-up of yesterday's Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, an interrogation expert, testified that he witnessed illegal treatment of Iraqi detainees. Kleinman and 14 other expert interrogators issued a statement in June declaring torture ineffective in intelligence gathering. The group agreed to the following 5 principles:

We believe:

1. Non-coercive, traditional, rapport-based interviewing approaches provide the best possibility for obtaining accurate and complete intelligence.

2. Torture and other inhumane and abusive interview techniques are unlawful, ineffective and counterproductive. We reject them
unconditionally.

3. The use of torture and other inhumane and abusive treatment results in false and misleading information, loss of critical intelligence, and has caused serious damage to the reputation and standing of the United States. The use of such techniques also facilitates enemy recruitment, misdirects or wastes scarce resources, and deprives the United States of the standing to demand humane treatment of captured Americans.

4. There must be a single well-defined standard of conduct across all U.S. agencies to govern the detention and interrogation of people anywhere in U.S. custody, consistent with our values as a nation.

5. There is no conflict between adhering to our nation’s essential values, including respect for inherent human dignity, and our ability to obtain the information we need to protect the nation.

More Disarray at Guantanamo Bay

Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a prosecutor involved in war crimes cases at Guantanamo, has quit citing ethical concerns. According to Vandeveld, the prosecution is failing to share evidence that could help defendants with defense attorneys. Vandeveld had been prosecuting Mohammed Jawad, 24, accused of throwing a grenade into a military jeep in Kabul in 2002 (when he was just 16 or 17 years old), injuring two U.S. troops and their interpreter.

"My ethical qualms about continuing to serve as a prosecutor relate primarily to the procedures for affording defense counsel discovery," wrote Vandeveld in his filing. "I am highly concerned, to the point that I believe I can no longer serve as a prosecutor at the Commissions, about the slipshod, uncertain 'procedure' for affording defense counsel discovery."

It is increasingly clear that the military commission system is ill-equipped to deliver justice. Check out our report on the proven track record of federal criminal courts in prosecuting terrorism cases -- without compromising fairness – for a better solution to dealing with these difficult cases.


Oh, but there’s more. On the same day of Vandeveld’s resignation, a military judge rejected a formal motion by Khalid Sheik Mohammed to disqualify himself because of bias and his upcoming retirement. It looks like it will a long time before KSM’s victims see justice, especially since the issue of KSM’s torture continues to be an issue in the case.

Navy Lt. Cmdr. James E. Hatcher, the lead military attorney for defendant Tawfiq bin Attash, said that if a new judge is appointed, a new round of pretrial hearings would be required and the new judge would be forced to reexamine earlier rulings.

That could set back a process that still lacks a trial date and promises to be protracted. The loquacious Mohammed, as he does on most days, took the lead in speaking for the other four defendants, all of whom face the death penalty if convicted on various murder and war crimes charges.

CIA Director Michael V. Hayden has confirmed that Mohammed was subject to waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning, among other tactics when he was held by the intelligence agency. But the Bush administration has argued that the coercive interrogation techniques it sanctioned did not amount to torture.

Defense attorneys said they will seek to exclude from trial all evidence extracted under duress. "Torture is at issue in this case," said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, who is representing Ammar al-Baluchi. "It is going to be at the very center of this case."

Rice Admits to White House Meetings on Interrogation Techniques

Remember those unprinicipled "principals' meetings"? The ones where Attorney General Ashcroft reportedly exprressed qualms about the propriety of discussing torture in the White House? Secretary Rice confirmed to the Senate Armed Services Committee that they took place and that the Department of Justice was providing verbal cover for torture and abuse before it provided written memos on the subject. From today's New York Times:

Senior White House officials played a central role in deliberations in the spring of 2002 about whether the Central Intelligence Agency could legally use harsh interrogation techniques while questioning an operative of Al Qaeda, Abu
Zubaydah, according to newly released documents.

In meetings during that period, the officials debated specific
interrogation methods that the C.I.A. had proposed to use on Qaeda operatives held at secret C.I.A. prisons overseas, the documents show. The meetings were led by Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, and attended by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top administration officials.

The documents provide new details about the still-murky early
months of the C.I.A.’s detention program, when the agency began using a set of harsh interrogation techniques weeks before the Justice Department issued a written legal opinion in August 2002 authorizing their use.

Congressional investigators have long tried to determine exactly who authorized these techniques before the legal opinion was completed.

The documents are a list of answers provided by Ms. Rice and John B. Bellinger III, the former top lawyer at the National Security Council, to detailed questions by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which is investigating the abuse of detainees in American custody. The documents were provided to The New York Times by Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the committee.

A hearing is going on now in the Senate Armed Services Committee. The audio should be available here.

Update: here are the documents referenced in the New York Times piece:
080925%20sasc%20docs.pdf

U.S. Government Abuse Rears Its Head in Taylor Case

Here's the latest from the first ever prosecution under the Anti Torture Act. Enacted in 1994, the law prohibits U.S. citizens from engaging in torture anywhere in the world. From NPR this morning:

Jury selection begins this week in Miami in the torture trial of Liberian President Charles Taylor's son . . . Charles "Chuckie" Taylor Jr., also known as Charles McArthur Emmanuel, was born in Boston in 1977. When his father took power in Liberia in 1997, Taylor followed and became the head of the paramilitary Anti-Terrorist Unit, or "Demon Forces," which became notorious for abuses against civilians.

But here's an interesting nugget:

In pre-trial motions, [Charles Taylor Jr.'s lawyer] also sought access to a classified list of interrogation techniques approved and used by the CIA, saying he believes that some of the acts his client is charged with are similar to interrogation techniques approved by the United States. U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga denied the request.

And this, from the Guardian:

Prosecutors and defence lawyers are already sparring over how to define torture for the jury.

Prosecutors argue an act could be considered torture if it
causes pain that is "extreme in intensity and difficult to endure".

Meanwhile, Emmanuel's attorneys say the law requires a higher level of pain - that ordinarily is associated with death, organ failure or serious impairment of body functions.

Torture is only pain equivalent to organ failure . . . sound familiar? Yep, that would by the U.S. government's own Bybee Memo which concluded that, to be torture, the resulting physical pain must be "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." While this Department of Justice Memo has been withdrawn, the consequences of the United States having authorized torture and abuse are clearly far from over.



Presumably defenders of the CIA's "enhanced" interrogation program and the authors of the flawed legal arguments that excused torture never intended to aid the defense of a brutal criminal like Charles Taylor, Jr. But there we have it, the latest unintended consequence of allowing for torture and abuse.

Senator McCain Says He Differs from President Bush on Prisoner Treatment

Last night on 60 Minutes Senator McCain listed the treatment of prisoners as one of several policy areas where he differs from President Bush. Friday's debate on foreign policy issues will offer him a good opportunity to expound upon what he means by this point and what he would do to make changes from the current Administration's policies if he is elected in November. We'll also be listening for what Senator Obama has to say on this crucially important issue.

"asking hardened killers about their plans"

I guess the term "enhanced interrogation techniques" just isn't enough of a euphemism for Charles Krauthamer. No, Krauthamer, in his column today, decides to leave the unpleasantness of sleep deprivation, waterboarding, stress positions, and other abusive techniques that the Bush Administration has authorized for use against prisoners in U.S. custody completely unstated. If Krauthamer is in fact accurately quoting President Bush when he uses this twisted phrasing on torture, his wishful Harry Truman/George W. Bush comparison falls down, too.

President Truman is said to have responded to a supporter yelling, "Give 'em Hell, Harry!" with, "I don't give them Hell. I just tell the truth about them and they think it's Hell."

Calling torture and abuse "asking hardened killers about their plans" isn't telling the truth about anything. Thank heavens we'll have a chance for stronger leadership on this issue in January.

Relligious Leader Calls Torture the First Major Scandal of the 21st Centrury

Here's David Gushee writing in the Associated Baptist Press.

Opinion: Torture: Our first major 21st-century scandal
By David Gushee
Friday, 19 September 2008

(ABP) -- The week of Sept. 11, 2008, I had the privilege of hosting a national summit on torture at Mercer University in Atlanta. (To learn more about the program called “Religious Faith, Torture, and Our National Soul,” and what happened there, see www.mercer.edu for news summaries.) In this column I want to reflect on what the torture summit meant to me and where our movement will go from here.

The combination of military, legal, national security, and religious speakers have convinced me that the practice of torture by the United States marks the first major American scandal of the 21st century. It is a governmental scandal, necessitating investigations, accountability and policy change for at least the next several years. But it is also a religious scandal, involving the
compromised loyalties of a majority of American evangelicals.

Here is the basic story that was told at the conference:After 9/11, top officials in the United States government, driven by the vice president, concluded both that long-standing legal and moral constraints on torture needed to be set aside to prosecute the “war on terror,” and that the executive branch must be free to
pursue this effort with as little congressional and judicial review as possible.

Systematically cutting dissenting voices out of the policy-making process, Dick Cheney and his “war council” crafted a policy that set aside or weakened human-rights protections provided in the Geneva Conventions, in the law and traditions of the U.S. military and in domestic laws explicitly banning torture.

A series of secret legal memos were written -- primarily by a small cadre of ideologically driven lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel -- that provided the dubious legal permission for the executive branch to pursue
these policies. These memos narrowed the definition of torture so as to permit a number of cruel and inhumane interrogation techniques that aroused extraordinary alarm among senior military and civilian officials within the government once they were discovered. But the die was cast. These techniques were employed at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo, Cuba, where terrorism suspects captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere were held. They migrated to Iraq and then showed up in Afghanistan.

Worse techniques were employed by nations, such as Egypt and Syria, to whom we outsourced some of our prisoners. We still do not know fully what has happened at the so-called “black sites” and ghost prisons -- clandestine detainment centers run by U.S. intelligence agencies. But it is highly unlikely that treatment was or is better there, given the administration’s insistence on the need for “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the CIA even today.

It appears that the weakening of human-rights protections not only permitted cruel techniques that were explicitly authorized, but also created a degraded environment in which unauthorized sadism and cruelty ran rampant. For example, according to original research done by graduate student Michael Peppard and presented at our conference, religious desecration and humiliation of sacred Muslim objects and practices appears to have been widespread at Guantanamo, at least for a time. Not that this is the bottom line, but it must be noted that these cruel techniques were employed against hundreds or thousands of prisoners who were either innocent of any terrorist activity or had no particularly valuable information to give up. Many of the people we are holding at Guantanamo were sold to us by bounty hunters in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan and never have been charged with any wrongdoing. Meanwhile, we were reminded at the conference of a number of cases in which detainees tortured in other conflicts from around the globe told their captors anything they could think of that would make the torture end, as most of us would do in the same situation. This yielded worthless information and misdirected our intelligence efforts in pursuing false leads.

When the secrets are all out and the documents are all released, prosecution of government officials who authorized torture will be a real possibility unless foreclosed by pardons. Even then, international criminal prosecutions are possible. In the meantime, we have compromised our values, forfeited our claim to the moral high ground, damaged our most important alliances, implicitly authorized torture by other governments and created or deepened an everlasting hatred toward our
nation by those most affected by our actions -- all for a negligible intelligence benefit. The American human-rights community, including many groups represented at our summit, will continue to press for policy changes to be adopted immediately by the new president and Congress. (See www.campaigntobantorture.org to sign on to the major policy principles we are promoting.) There is a serious chance that these principles will be accepted, given the general policy stances of Sens. McCain and Obama on torture. But nothing can be taken for granted -- especially in light of the disturbing results of the poll of Southern evangelical Christians that Mercer University and Faith in Public Life released at the conference.

Perhaps the most shocking number is that only 22 percent of white Southern evangelicals say that torture is always wrong. Fifty-seven percent say it is often or sometimes justified. The sliver of good news from the survey is that, when presented with the option of affirming the Golden Rule principle -- we should do nothing to our detainees that we would not want done to our troops if captured -- opposition to torture increased strongly across all demographic groups. I was shocked to hear that only 28 percent of all those evangelical Christians we polled said that their faith provided the primary source to which they turned when thinking about the morality of torture. Most cited common sense or life experience.

Southern evangelical Christian leaders apparently have failed to
communicate an understanding of the Christian faith and its moral demands that would prohibit believers from embracing the torture of their fellow human beings in the name of national security. This emerges from a faith community whose Founder was tortured and murdered by the state, and most of whose original leaders were also tortured and murdered by the state.

What an incredible collective amnesia! Who would Jesus, Peter, John and Paul torture? Not long ago I was in northern Georgia at one of those ubiquitous interstate gas stations. Interspersed among the tacky trinkets and mugs was a T-shirt with the slogan,
“Waterboarding is my favorite sport.” I wonder if the creator of that T-shirt goes to church? We are indeed in a fight for our national soul. That fight begins in the church, whose complicity with torture is far more scandalous than any government wrongdoing.

-30---

David Gushee is distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at
Mercer University. http://www.davidpgushee.com/

American Influence on Foreign Law on the Wane

Today's New York Times article about the declining influence of American jurisprudence on the rest of the world isn't about torture or official cruelty per se, but it is a good example of the unintended consequences of abandoning our global leadership on human rights.

Judges around the world have long looked to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court for guidance, citing and often following them in hundreds of their own rulings since the Second World War.

But now American legal influence is waning. Even as a debate continues in the court over whether its decisions should ever cite foreign law, a diminishing number of foreign courts seem to pay attention to the writings of American justices.

“One of our great exports used to be constitutional law,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. “We are losing one of the greatest bully pulpits we have ever had.”

From 1990 through 2002, for instance, the Canadian Supreme Court cited decisions of the United States Supreme Court about a dozen times a year, an analysis by The New York Times found. In the six years since, the annual citation rate has fallen by half, to about six.

Australian state supreme courts cited American decisions 208 times in 1995, according to a recent study by Russell Smyth, an Australian economist. By 2005, the number had fallen to 72.

The story is similar around the globe, legal experts say, particularly in cases involving human rights. These days, foreign courts in developed democracies often cite the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights in cases concerning equality, liberty and prohibitions against cruel treatment, said Harold Hongju Koh, the dean of the Yale Law School. In those areas, Dean Koh said, “they tend not to look to the rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court.”

The rise of new and sophisticated constitutional courts elsewhere is one reason for the Supreme Court’s fading influence, legal experts said. The new courts are, moreover, generally more liberal than the Rehnquist and Roberts courts and for that reason more inclined to cite one another.

Another reason is the diminished reputation of the United States in some parts of the world, which experts here and abroad said is in part a consequence of the Bush administration’s unpopularity around the world. Foreign courts are less apt to justify their decisions with citations to cases from a nation unpopular with their domestic audience.

Psychologists Take a Firm Stand Against Torture

APA members have voted in favor of a referendum stating that members may not work at detention sites beyond the reach of U.S. and international law.

Be it resolved that psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.

U.S. Detention and Interrogation Policies Must Be 'Rooted in the Rule of Law - Not in Loophole Lawyering'

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee today Human Rights First
Executive Director Elisa Massimino outlined concrete steps that the United States must take in two key areas:

1. enforcing legal prohibitions on torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment of
   prisoners; and


2. abandoning the failed experiment at Guantanamo in favor of the proven
   effectiveness of our federal criminal courts.

These actions also are laid out in her testimony, as well as in How to Close Guantanamo: A Blueprint for the Next Administration,issued last month by Human Rights First.

Sen. Whitehouse Advocates an End to Secret Prisons

Here's video from the Senate floor yesterday. Senator Whitehouse makes the case for legislation that would guarantee Red Cross Access to all prisoners in U.S. custody.

Southern Evangelicals Less Likely to Support Torture When Presented with the Golden Rule

A new poll shows that a majority of Southern evangelicals support torture . . .but that support decreases when they are asked about the Golden Rule and whether the U.S. government should use any methods we do not want employed against Americans.

Poll shows support for torture among Southern evangelicals
by Adelle M. Banks
Religion News Service

WASHINGTON -- A new poll released Thursday (Sept. 11) finds that nearly six in 10 white Southern evangelicals believe torture is justified, but their views can shift when they consider the Christian principle of the golden rule.

The poll, commissioned by Faith in Public Life and Mercer University, found that 57 percent of respondents said torture can be often or sometimes justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists. Thirty-eight percent said it was never or rarely justified.

But when asked if they agree that "the U.S. government should not use methods against our enemies that we would not want used on American soldiers," the percentage who said torture was rarely or never justified rose to 52 percent.

"Presenting people with this argument and identifying with the golden rule really does engage a different part of people's psyche and a part of their heart, their soul, and really does shift their views on torture," said Robert Jones, president of Public Religion Research, which was commissioned to conduct the poll.

The findings of this poll, which did not define torture, compared to a Pew Research Center poll from February that found that 48 percent of the general public think torture can be justified.

The new poll found that 44 percent of white Southern vangelicals rely on life experiences and common sense to determine their views about torture. A lower percentage, 28 percent, said they relied on Christian teachings or beliefs.

The poll was released on the seventh anniversary of the 9/11
terrorist attacks, and comes after several religious groups have joined a public campaign to oppose the use of torture in interrogating suspected terrorists.

Results were unveiled during the National Summit on Torture at
Mercer in Atlanta, which was co-sponsored by Evangelicals for Human Rights.

David Gushee, a Christian ethics professor at Mercer and the
president of the evangelical group, said the poll numbers should tell leaders, including presidential nominees Barack Obama and John McCain, who oppose torture that people can change their minds about this issue if it is discussed from a moral standpoint.
"Opinion on this question is movable," he said.

Pollsters also found that 53 percent of white Southern evangelicals believe the government uses torture in its anti-terrorism campaign, despite claims by government officials to the contrary. About one-third, or 32 percent, said the government does not use torture as a matter of policy.

Researchers also found that 65 percent of white Southern evangelicals support McCain, 14 percent support Obama and 21 percent remain undecided.

The telephone poll of 600 white evangelical Christian adults in 14 Southern states was conducted Aug. 14-22 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

Psychologists and Torture

Check out today's Leonard Lopate show for the latest on the effort to ban psychologists' involvement in torture and coercive interrogation.