It would not surprise me one bit if this were true. I would not be surprised if many on the right wanted torture as a way of settling scores for 9/11--in fact, I wrote something on this topic some months back. For all we hear about the "religious right", there is little actual Christianity there, but rather endless reserves of grievance and victimhood complexes. The point of these things is generally to buffer one's self from criticism when one knows they are wrong--i.e. outsiders can't judge us. There is little empathy in the religious right, and even the smallest slights are unforgivable. Why do so many on the right care about what tinpot dictators like Chavez or puppets like Ahmadinejad have to say? Because they're running down the flag, and instead of laughing at these idiots, the right just gets angrier.
Fundamentally, today's right wing persists largely on hatred of the left. The torture debate shows this clearly: early on, before it became obvious that torture was to become one of the right's major policy ideas, you saw guys like Glenn Reynolds denouncing the Abu Gharaib torturers. They changed their tune pretty quickly.
