If I may: I think you are conflating "feelings" with "beliefs" and "thinking". When a guy cuts me off on the road when I am on my motorcycle, I "feel" like choking him to death, but I do not "believe" or "think" that such a "feeling" is meaningful (in a theoretical sense) or justified.
Of course I want to see Pinochet or Kissinger suffer. For the same reasons that I want to watch The Big Lebowski and Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle every few months. It's a kick. The question is: can we generalise from this feeling? What is the value? I think the primary positive contribution of this biological impulse is in its ability to motivate and force us to act so as to relieve and avoid such suffering.
It is a stretch to say that it is barbaric or "indecent" to not want to see Kissinger arrested. That is true only if the lack of his arrest perpetuates the suffering he imposes on others. But that goal can be accomplished in other ways. Too many respectable people (Gandhi and everyone influenced by him including Mandela, Tutu, and various common participants in struggles of the past) hold such a view, for it to be summarily dismissed as "silly claptrap" or "barbaric", etc.
Once again, I think we (the list) can learn a lot from you if would eschew the flame-baiting and educate us on how a legal or moral theory can be built out of retribution as an instinct and a sanctioned act. For instance, the only argument I have heard in favour of punishment is its deterrence value. It seems the data is inconclusive on that front. Well there is another one that I find even more strange if not outright silly: "the victim's rights" business(*). I am sure more sophisticated arguments are available and I am certain you have one.
[thank you for your other message, to which I will respond shortly]
--ravi
(*) A friend of mine lost her brother in an auto accident that involved a drunken driver who swung off his side of an undivided highway and smashed into his car (the drunk lived). She was constantly puzzled by the fact that the police and others she and her family spoke with were puzzled by her family's lack of any great interest in the prosecution of the drunk. All the talk about "closure", coupled with the modern dislike of ambiguity (and addiction to certainty), projected a sort of bloodthirstiness that she found scary!