The defense against tyranny that we all share is within a healthy US Constitution. Well, we don't all share that do we?

And it doesn't really seem that healthy for those who do share it, I mean as a way of immunising people against going over to the dark side and calling it the light.

It seems to me there are two different ways in which we can fail, if put to the test. On the one had there is a failure that comes from fear, because it takes courage to stand out against pressure and the possibility of threats. We should never be too confident that we will be able to do that, until and unless we face it, and I think most of us know that.

But there is also the failure that comes from an appetite to power, a desire to hurt other people, when we are given permission to do things which had always been forbidden - and that is the kind of thing that those experiments Donuel mentioned revealed, and that came out in Abu Ghraib. (Though I don't think any of us should be fooled by the claims that what happened there was out of line with what intended to happen - apart of course from the photographic evidence getting into the public domain).

In a way that last is more frightening in what it suggest about humanity. But I think and hope there probably is more we can do to protect ourselves in advance against this kind of failure and to recognise its seeds in us.

Every time I read people writing fantasies of hate about what they'd like to do to genuinely evil people - letters in the papers, posts on the Mudcat - I get a cold shiver up my back - it seems to me there goes another person who has opened themself to the enemy within.