> Because it's not called terrorism when very similar incidents are perpetrated by citizens or residents, despite having very similar motivations, and especially not when it's the government telling us to call it terrorism going over and doing worse in other places.
Similar incidents? I don't recall any similar incidents of ~20 Americans working together for years to hijack 4 planes and collapse multiple large buildings killing ~3000 people.
The patriot act may have been a bad idea but it was a response to a real, significant event and is not based on totally incoherent reasoning. We had surveillance capabilities that detected the 9/11 attackers ahead of time, but arguably due to the separation of foreign and domestic intelligence, that information was not acted on. You can argue the costs of breaking down that separation aren't worth it, but don't bullshit people with word games.