You know, it is hard to believe that the other side is capable of doing these things, but they are.
I always wondered how Germany, a highly technical and educated society, could descend into the barbarism of Nazism in the 1930s.
Now I don’t wonder so much.
Science, technology, education, and for that matter capitalism and democracy, are all essentially amoral. They are ways of doing things more efficiently and don't in themselves have much to say about the rightness or wrongness of what is done with them.
Science is the pursuit of knowledge. To bring ethics into science, other than things involving the scientific process itself such as falsifying data, you have to import your moral judgment from some source outside science.
The Nazi scientists performing horrific medical experiments on children in the camps may have done excellent scientific work and derived useful knowledge from it. You cannot, from science alone, extract any logical reason why such experiments were wrong.
I've often wondered about that as well. You'll get a myriad of answers to that question but to me its simply that they were unable to recognise evil so long as it benefitted them.
The scary thing is that in hindsight the evil of Hitler is so clear, but was that so in 1933? Today the evil is clear enough but there are so many that stand to gain from it.
It could win in '08.