Ah, I misread your paragraph, although I didn’t think your reference to my post sounded particularly defensive – I’m just wary of not being clear… or slamming people of good faith who aren’t shameless hacks. ;-)

Altremeyer’s book is good, and we’ll see with the Prop. 8 decision.

I reread that Greenwald article while I was writing this post, because I was hoping to find counter-evidence. Some of it’s encouraging, but the poll he raises is from February, which was before the full-court press from the torture brigade hit the airwaves. (Such metaphoric facility there…) I’d like to see a more recent poll on the question of investigation/prosecution, to see whether they’ve managed to corrode the notion of accountability with their misdirection and lies. (And that awful speech from Cheney today.)

It looks like my link to your post might have come across as defensive, which is certainly not how I intended it. I agree with you, about all of it. I just meant to say that the suspicion that has been instilled in me by this whole business of torture apologetics isn’t strong enough to overcome what I already know: that the people most important to me are firmly opposed to torture. I don’t have to worry about them.

And thanks for the reminder about the Altemeyer book! I somehow missed making that connection, which is kind of ridiculous, given how strongly Kit Whitfield has beaten that drum in the comment section at Slacktivist. She’s had her eye on that ball the whole time, and I plum forgot.

(Prop. 8–related matters are for the next post, so I’ll keep mum on them now, except to say that you’re right.)

I know the feeling – but I also take heart in pieces dissecting those torture polls. Many of the questions in the “pro-torture” polls are highly misleading. The poll on religious people supporting torture at higher rates than the general population is most easily explained by authoritarianism and an ‘Us versus Them’ attitude. For authoritarians, the only real “principles” are tribal identity, following authority and “tradition,” all of which results in the attitude that torture is wrong when done to us, but fine when done to those other folk who aren’t like us. That self-described Christians could essentially ignore a defining tale in their own faith is very sad, but sadly not surprising.

And I imagine your husband and friends are not defending torture insistently, nor are they professional talking head opining on these matters on TV while ignoring all the major evidence on the subject. I’m not trying to condemn average citizens who have been ill-served by the press. People of good faith can talk about these things, and come to better understandings.

With Prop. 8 and related issues, we’ve seen tremendous progress over the past few decades due to the wider population simply realizing that their fears about scary gay people were unjustified. It depends on where you live, of course, but a growing number of teens view homophobia as un-cool. We’ve also seen opponents fear-monger and lie relentlessly about measures such as Prop 8. On torture, we can see the same dynamics. A group of dedicated torture apologists (some of them true believers, but mostly knowing better) is lying and muddying the waters to prevent trials, a full investigation or even full disclosure. Most of the Beltway crowd doesn’t want accountability, either, because that would be terribly unpleasant and they’ve been complicit to various degrees. There will be some who won’t be convinced by any amount of evidence, but the more the public learns – and the more pollsters start asking good questions – the more those numbers will shift. The anti-torture crowd is currently closer to 50% or above, when the right questions are asked – and surely go even higher when the questions David Waldmam poses are asked (he’s now got a Facebook group that proves a community exists, and I hope is growing). It has to start somewhere.