Of course, those particular non-Americans are terrorists, dictators, dictators' thugs, and otherwise nasty people who one could reasonably say deserve it.

Or innocent bystanders mistaken for, or even cynically denounced without merit. The same legal and practical protections against torturing or even mistakenly imprisoning Americans are deliberately not applied when torturing or imprisoning foreigners.

The U.S. has, and all countries have, to some extent, a double standard, one for citizens and one for non-citizens. In the U.S. the distance between the two different standards has increased gigantically since 9/11/2001.

This may be what Aris was referring to.

The misleading interpretation: Republicans support torturing certain particular non-Americans and laugh than laugh about it on their forums. Of course, those particular non-Americans are terrorists, dictators, dictators' thugs, and otherwise nasty people who one could reasonably say deserve it.

No, it's not just "particular" non-Americans, because then you'd see Republicans debate in their forum what criteria should be used to determine those "particulars" -- WHICH I'VE NEVER SEEN THEM DO. The more accurate relation is just this: Republicans support torturing non-Americans. They support torturing certain kinds of non-Americans more than other kinds, but there's never been a torture of a non-American by Americans that they've ever found a legal or moral problem with. Not even taxi-drivers that were tortured to death for being in the wrong place.

Being a non-American is the sufficient condition for most Republicans to support the right of Americans to torture you, even to death.

That's been my impression from the Republican forums I've had the misfortune to observe.