Surprised that Americans Want Answers from Terrorist? Don’t be.

Rasmussen reports that 58% of Americans polled want answers in a bad way from Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the terrorist who tried to kill over 250 people on a Christmas Day Northwest Airlines flight by detonating plastic explosive he’d secreted in his underwear. By bad way I mean bad enough to waterboard the radical Muslim.

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of U.S. voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from the terrorist who attempted to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 30% oppose the use of such techniques.

The news that Americans with an opinion favor torturing this would-be murder to gain information about his support organization should dishearten the Obama administration, bent as it is on posturing as a new, cuddly, friendly America to our enemies overseas. Unfortunately though it’s likely that the president and his advisors do not care what Americans think on this issue. In their minds they are the ones who have all the answers, ample evidence to the contrary.

To whit, Christopher Hitchens recently lambasted the politically correct doggerel that passes for policy in the Transportation Security Administration, before closing with a chilling paragraph that should be required reading for every American:

What nobody in authority thinks us grown-up enough to be told is this: We had better get used to being the civilians who are under a relentless and planned assault from the pledged supporters of a wicked theocratic ideology. These people will kill themselves to attack hotels, weddings, buses, subways, cinemas, and trains. They consider Jews, Christians, Hindus, women, homosexuals, and dissident Muslims (to give only the main instances) to be divinely mandated slaughter victims. Our civil aviation is only the most psychologically frightening symbol of a plethora of potential targets. The future murderers will generally not be from refugee camps or slums (though they are being indoctrinated every day in our prisons); they will frequently be from educated backgrounds, and they will often not be from overseas at all. They are already in our suburbs and even in our military. We can expect to take casualties. The battle will go on for the rest of our lives. Those who plan our destruction know what they want, and they are prepared to kill and die for it. Those who don’t get the point prefer to whine about "endless war," accidentally speaking the truth about something of which the attempted Christmas bombing over Michigan was only a foretaste. While we fumble with bureaucracy and euphemism, they are flying high.

Judging from the Rasmussen result, nearly 60% of us understand that Hitchens is absolutely correct. Mindless rules requiring verbal statements about the handling of luggage and banning the use of restrooms during the last hour of flight are nothing more than placebos meant to demonstrate to the brain-dead that the government is doing something.

The truth is another matter altogether, because the government bureaucracy’s hands are bound so tightly by the constraints of political correctness that the profiling of potential – and known – terrorists is verboten, despite the risks that lack of action poses to airline passengers.

When will Americans understand that profiling is a good thing and that relying on actual facts and probabilities as relates to attack vectors will keep us safer?

That safety is one of the few things that Americans actually want government to provide. The vast majority of us do not want welfare, health insurance, or financial investments run by the government. What we do want is to have our borders and our infrastructure protected against terrorists, foreign and domestic.

If that means that Muslims in this country are subject to additional scrutiny as a result of their religion, heritage, and/or country of origin, so be it. Similarly, if a known terrorist caught in the act has to be roughed up a little in order for law enforcement to gain information necessary to expose his/her network of cohorts, that’s what we want.