I would encourage you not to go down that rabbit hole. I did so several years back, and wish I hadn't - the level of brutality and plain evilness of rendition and torture at scale (Torture as a Service, you might say) was/is just so utterly horrifying and disgusting. It went on so much in Iraq that they even forgot about people they'd tortured, broken, sexuality abused and left naked on freezing concrete floors in dungeons.

I swear something broke inside of me after reading some of the details - ever since, I don't even watch/read news anymore, because it just makes me so angry and sad. The Americans are supposed to be "the good guys", but agents of the state have performed atrocities on a bewildering scale for decades, and there is absolutely nothing any of us can do about it.

If you are a USA citizen, go down that rabbit hole.

Since 9/11 the USA has been a rouge state, slaughtering hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of people all over the world. It is very hard to figure out the motivation, it is more than money. I am no historian but it seems like the sort of imperialism we have not seen for over a thousand years.

It is urgent that USA citizens reign in their government that is causing so much misery for so many so widely

> The Americans are supposed to be "the good guys"

There is no "good guys", this is pure propaganda, same shit for every other country. It's all about ressources and power, not good and evil. I mean, Guantanamo, "the good guys", yeah, good joke...

Yes, it's a bad joke, but the propaganda works very well indeed. So much so that even back when some of this stuff was in the mainstream news (OK, not the details, but still), hardly anyone cared - because it was the "good guys" doing what "needed to be done" to "keep us safe", and anyone saying otherwise was a "nutter conspiracy theorist".

It's like with eating meat. People don't like animals being held in terrible conditions and butchered, but they deal with it by not thinking about it so they can eat a burger in peace.

I ultimately agree with not going down the rabbit hole, but I don't agree with the hopelessness. I wish I could counter the claim that "there is absolutely nothing any of us can do about it" with some specific actions. I hope someone else opines.

So, best to ignore it, keep consuming, go to Church or say you do, and celebrate Independence Day like it means something, yes? People should be sent down that rabbit hole until they are so sick of it, they actually get off their asses for change and then maybe the US can be a tiny bit better than other countries. "Angry and sad", needs to turn to "furious and motivated".

Your mistake is that you think that what people think matters, while in reality only the laws approved by the rich are enacted. What the poorer part of the society knows and thinks has no influence on anything.

So unless you tought up a scheme in which not torturing foreigners might be profitable for the rich Americans, the information you have has no influence on the future.

There's a US law for invading The Hague if ICC were to do this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_Intern...

In addition there have been public threats against the judges.

Here's a good place to start reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...

You're probably being sarcastic and I completely agree that it's scandalous that those responsible (like Cheney) got away with it, but it was all over the news at the time.

They didn't just, "get away with it", they were promoted to the highest levels of society. "Bloody" Gina Haspel, one of the CIA agents running the torture camps (where she earned her nickname) was promoted by the two subsequent presidents and eventually became head of the CIA! The worst peddlers of WMD/war propaganda in the media were promoted to the highest positions of power. People like Jeffrey Goldberg who is today the editor in chief of The Atlantic. The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations who supported the illegal invasion and rallied support among his fellow Democrats to ensure that a majority of them voted to support it is now President of the United States.

And on the flip side of the coin, one of the people who blew the whistle on US war crimes in Iraq with the release of the "collateral murder" video (among many others), Julian Assange, has been rotting in a UK dungeon for years.

it is so awful that there are real reasons not to pass the material around in public.. plenty of people here in the USA protested this extensively .. Your good-looking world leader and mine, Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, was the executive in charge here