And I would object to the claim that "Americans are responsible for Abu Ghraib" for the same reason.

First off, we are responsible.

Second, we did not benefit from what happened there. We did not have lower food prices.

Depends on if the US is a democracy or not.

Democracy is a scale, not a binary state. The actually relevant question is "could the average American have prevented Abu Ghraib?"

And I believe the answer to be No, so 'Americans' cannot possibly be responsible under any reasonable definition of responsibility.

Well you can also have average Americans who think they have no business taking responsibility after it happens, since it wasn't something that concerned them, and nothing ends up done in response to it happening. Or you can note that some people did horrible things under the banner of your country and accept it as such, vowing to never let it happen again and holding those directly involved in the decision to account for what they did. Being upset that someone said "Americans committed war crimes in Iraq and calling it hate speech" is definitely not that.

> Or you can note that some people did horrible things under the banner of your country and accept it as such, vowing to never let it happen again

That requires having the power to keep it from happening again. Without that, such "vows" are meaningless moral posturing.

Sounds more reasonable than calling it hate speech ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> those directly involved in the decision to account for what they did

We don't do that here.

As pointed out, only a small minority of Brits had the vote back then, so not the same at all.