The qualitative distinction is that they are doing it here now. Terror designations; emergency powers; mass surveillance; disappearing people to third countries and outsourcing the torture there; DHS itself; everything that we built in Iraq has finally come home
@whstancil.bsky.socialAs bad as Guantanamo et al were, I think there is a stark qualitative distinction between it and Trump’s open, gleeful, flagrant defiance of the law. Remember, the thing about the torture memos is that they were making a legal argument for crimes, not laughing in the judiciary’s collective face.