We Are All Donald Trump and Ted Cruz Now

Well, 63% of us anyway.

A Reuters/Ispos poll Wednesday showed that 63 percent of Americans felt “the use of torture against suspected terrorists” was “often or sometimes justified.” The levels of support are roughly equivalent to Nigeria, which is enduring a seven-year insurgency, and Kenya which has been hit with a number of large-scale attacks by Al Shabaab in recent years, Reuters noted.

But Jack Bauer does it.

"There’s no question now that national security and terrorism are growing in salience in this political cycle," says Ken Gude, a senior fellow with the national security team at the Center for American Progress. "It’s incumbent upon our political leaders to not engage in the kind of political rhetoric that drives a jittery population toward policies like torture ... that only play right into the hands of our enemies." 

Of course that's what the liberals say. 

The idea that useful information can be extracted by torture has been debunked throughout history – from French torturers in the Renaissance to Japanese torturers during World War II, Mr. Freeman notes. Post-9/11 America has found the same thing, most experts agree. 

Oh, then why do it?

While there is very little support for Mr. Trump's assertion that "torture works" as an interrogation technique, torture really has a different purpose, experts say: social control.

"Indeed, for the many governments around the world that still routinely practice torture, it is seen as much as a tool for intimidation as information-gathering," writes Colin Freeman in The Telegraph.

Maybe he is Hitler, or at least Saddam Hussein. 

The non-liberals against torture:

• Former Federal Bureau of Investigation interrogator Jack Cloonan, who was directly involved in the questioning of some of the United States' high-profile prisoners, told Foreign Policy it was a public misconception that harsh interrogation tactics like waterboarding were an effective way of extracting information. Instead, Mr. Cloonan said such techniques strengthened the resolve of the terrorist groups to exact revenge on the United States and were a great recruiting tool for young jihadis, elevating those tortured to "mythical status."
• Malcolm Nance, head of the Terrorism Asymmetrics Project and a veteran of Navy intelligence, said Trump's reiterated call after Brussels to bring back waterboarding was likely giving the Islamic State free propaganda material. "Donald Trump right now is validating the cartoonish view that they tell their operatives … that America is a racist nation, xenophobic, anti-Muslim, and that that's why you must carry out terrorist attacks against them," he told MSNBC.
• Michael Hayden, the last head of the Central Intelligence Agency under the Bush administration, who has previously defended interrogation tactics used during that era, publicly explained why it would be illegal for US armed forces to obey Trump’s call to use torture. General Hayden also said Trump is already acting as a recruiter for so called Islamic State in a television interview with Al Jazeera.
• A 2014 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report that investigated CIA claims that its use of torture in the post-9/11 era was important in preventing acts of terrorism largely debunked them. 

What's wrong with people in this country?