A symptom rather than a cause?

[rexlunae]

Thanks. I didn't know about more severe torture that was authorized.

De nada.

Regarding losing who we are, and cruelty---this is all in the wake 9/11, which, while it's going farther and farther back in the rearview mirror thankfully, it did still happen, and some of what President Trump's been proposing and doing, is still in response to 9/11 + the Islamicist murderings/'terrorism' going on in almost all other countries, including Western democracies.

My feeling is that we shouldn't have allowed 9/11 to change us so fundamentally. I think we should have either considered anyone we captured in the subsequent wars as either prisoners of war, and therefore subject to the Geneva Convention, or criminal suspect, who could be prosecuted through the regular courts, or potentially the courts of other countries. When we started carving out new legal categories of people in order to make sure that the rules didn't apply, we fed a hunger for brutality that simply cannot be quenched. George W. Bush actually did a pretty good job setting this tone, but much of his administration, Cheney and Rumsfeld especially, was committed to this project. Trump ran explicitly on a promise to fill up Gitmo again, and just like that indefinite detention was an actual campaign promise.

For some more perspective, 9/11 killed nearly 3000 people on American soil. It was an unjustifiable act. But the War in Iraq killed hundreds of thousands, many of whom were innocent. You could look at that disparity of concern and ask how we justify our actions.

But this losing who we are; this is one of the big reasons I support the Second Amendment, because the right to keep and bear arms is part of who we are, as contrasted with people in other Western democracies who deny that this is an inalienable right.

fwiw

We would differ there, but I can respect that feeling.