Have you considered that after seeing how the US handled Manning, handled Assange, handled Snowden, handled Ellsberg, handled Martin Luther King Jr, handled the Vietnam war, the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, Guantanamo Bay, and the countless other shit just in the last half century, I might have a hard time putting them squarely into the "good guys" bracket?

That isn't to relativize in any way what others are doing - which is often even worse, no argument there - but I'm not grading on a scale where you get a passing grade at 40% just because China and Putin - and others - are even worse. Being the lesser evil doesn't make you "good".