At best, the citizens are ignorantly complicit by lack of attention. What did the people do about MK ULTRA? Who was punished? Oh, that's right, the CIA got off with paying their victims off and no-one was held "accountable". The republic has been dead. What's left is just the populace of the most financially successful country, and those people don't want to be told how complacently evil they and their country have become. I've argued with enough people that will reject the truth up until it's completely ill-refutable, the reason being, they like their lifestyle and make-believe country.

Abu Ghraib was a big fucking clue that something was going terribly wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner...

>I don't understand, how can you blame the citizens for this, when they were ignorant, against their will, about this?

>When the institution that is performing these acts out-and-out lies about the impact and severity, how can random citizens be held accountable? That honestly makes no sense to me.

because the institutions and individuals doing it know that they will go unpunished once the truth gets discovered. Whenever stuff like this surfaces nobody gets punished and thus the citizens/society give clear approval to the actions that have already been perpetrated and to perpetrate it in the future as long as visibility of convenient "ignorance" is maintained.

Is this a democracy, or isn't it? And yeah, sure, we're all "ignorant" in the sense that we ignore everything that isn't spelled out in black and white, and then posted at eye level in our line of sight.