WASHINGTON, December 15 (Sputnik) — Over half of Democratic supporters and nearly half of those Republican think that torture is sometimes necessary to get information from suspected terrorists, a CBS News poll report released on Monday said.
According to the report, 73 percent of those voted for Democrats say that it "is sometimes justified to use waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques to get information" from suspected terrorist, with 49 percent of Republican supporters sharing the opinion. Thirty-two percent of US citizens not associating themselves with either party support the use of enhanced interrogation techniques.
The CBS poll follows the release of the US Senate Intelligence Committee's summary of a four year investigation into the CIA's detention and interrogation techniques used on alleged al-Qaeda suspects after the September 11 terrorist attacks between 2001 and 2006.
The CIA report outlined 6,300 pages of partially declassified information and detailed torture techniques used by the agency including waterboarding, forced nudity, threats of sexual assault and mock executions that were carried out in CIA black sites around the world.
The CBS report showed that the majority of those surveyed agreed that the torture techniques outlined in the CIA report such as waterboarding, forced sleep deprivation, ice baths and threats of sexual assault to suspects' families were all "a form of torture".
Following the release of the CIA report, the national and international community responded by calling for those involved with overseeing the agency's formerly covert program to be prosecuted. Some argued that the report would create a backlash of revenge attacks on US facilities around the world.
Additionally, more than half of those surveyed in the CBS poll said that the release of the CIA torture report "will have an impact on US security".
Despite the critical response to the revealed data across the United States, White House said that US President Barack Obama would not prosecute the CIA officers who were involved with the enhanced interrogation techniques outlined in the report.
