46% Of Americans Say, "Whatever It Takes"

However much the nation's political class may bleed for the well-being of our Islamist terrorist enemies, and however much they cynically and dishonestly rail at the Bush Administration for its supposed "mistreatment" of illegal combatant prisoners, nearly half the public remains to be convinced that torturing jihadis to extract intelligence information is something other than a good idea:

The survey, by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press by, of 2,006 persons found that 46% thought torturing terrorists to gain important information was sometimes (31%) or often (15%) justified; 17% thought it was rarely justified; and 32% were opposed. By contrast, the study found that of 520 "opinion leaders" questioned on the issue, no more than one in four thinks that torture of terrorist suspects can be sometimes or often justified, Agence France-Presse reports.

Debate the effectiveness of torture all you like; argue that the very notion of inflicting painful coercion upon men (allegedly) willing to blow themselves up to kill us "infidels" in order to gain the knowledge that can prevent fresh mass-casualty attacks is silly by definition to your heart's content. And remember that torture, as traditionally defined, is already against the law and is not being practiced, at Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, secret CIA prisons in friendly countries, or anywhere else.

But the fact that, after all the relentless left-wing propaganda wafting forth from the Democrat side of the domestic political divide about "torture" and the Bushies' "criminal" practice of it, the country is no more than split more or less down the middle on the issue is a heartening indication of the intrinsic practicality of the American people.

To adapt a line from John Lithgow's Walter Curnow character in 2010, "If the choice is between Ahmed's and Khalid's comfort and our lives, I vote our lives."