<<While I agree with you that much of the current administrations public parseing on what is torture, and what isn't, is highly regreatful. And, while I agree with you that what took place at Gitmo, and at prisons in Iraq, and Afghanistan, is also highly regreatful. The difference is I don't therefore wish death and distruction on the American people, or any other people. You, on the other hand, are vengeful. That brings into question your take on world events. >>
The torture is the tip of the iceberg. The millions of dead, from Viet Nam to Indonesia to Latin America to Iraq AND the torture are a heavy load of unavenged atrocities that cries out for retribution. If America punished its own criminals there would be no world sense that a huge crime or series of crimes requires payback of one kind or another. The American people are no more or less deserving of massive retaliatory payback than the citizens of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but both were subjects of regimes that committed unspeakable atrocities and made no effort to punish their own guilty. Token prosecutions of low-ranking nonentities aside.
What you are lacking is a sense of outrage. "Highly regretful" is a ludicrous way of describing America's crimes. "Regretful" or "regrettable" doesn't begin to cover it and you probably know better. Whether or not the American people "deserve" actual punishment of some horrific nuclear catastrophe is debateable as I indicated before, but to put the idea before people is to at least indicate the scope of the atrocities - - which Americans are either denying completely, meretriciously rationalizing, or minimizing. There are enormous wrongs extant and on-going, which deserve active war-crimes prosecutions (at the very highest levels) and massive amends and reparations. Instead of which, you see this right-wing fascist shit proceeding in sheer ignorance of the facts to assert that nothing much has gone wrong (apart from the inevitable "mistakes" that America makes, which they are gracious enough to admit - - the old "We're not perfect" excuse which any fucking Nazi apologist would be familiar with.)
My feeling on payback is this: ideally it should fall on the perpetrators themselves, but when it doesn't, it's worse for the crimes to go unavenged than for some type of cosmic retribution to fall on the nation, on the guilty and innocent alike. It is only when mankind becomes accustomed to the idea that all wrongful actions WILL bring retribution, collective or individual, that the kind of behaviour which characterized the Bush administration will gradually become a thing of the past. Unavenged crimes just encourage more of the same.
