Let's go back in history a bit Tom. Your take seems to be that if some rogue country employs horrific torture and human rights violations, that turns on the green light for any benevolent country to suspend their own exacting standards to meet the potential threat.

I'm sure, since you appear to have read a few pages of history, that you're well aware of the savage methods early Americans used to deal with Native Americans and the black slave populations. Some of those tactics would rank right up there with the things you're detailing about North Korea.

Let's say some benevolent country with strong human rights laws and a tight controls on torture had enough power and military might during those times to be alarmed at what they saw going on in America and act upon their revulsion. Would they have been justified then to have suspended the gains they made in their ethics, invaded the US and began to treat the combatants they came in contact with in a manner most of their citizens felt to be reprehensible? Under your thinking, any country looking in our our actions would've been justified completely to treat us as an Axis of Evil nation.

Obviously there was no such situation then. I would hope that our progression and growth in our national ethics would help erase those very evil days of our experiments in Manifest Destiny. If those alleged practices in North Korea are going on, I certainly wish the worst for the perpetrators under either the rule of international law or the vengance of a citizen's revolt in their own country but you are dead wrong to believe the answer to stopping that kind of action is to move even slightly towards the tactics they use. It's a slipperly slope that simply doesn't work. You find these little piecemeal snippets of human nature and ignore the macro lessons of history.

Art