All those things I listed are well-documented. For the sake of keeping my post short I didn't post links to the appropriate Wikipedia articles nor to mainstream US online newspapers that reported the events.
I'm pretty sure we could look at any person or government, find all their past flaws/mistakes and only list this to show that the person is 'evil'. But without looking at the bigger picture of everything they do, you aren't being fair with your judgement of that person/country.
In all but one of the examples cited, this was acknowledged, deliberate policy of the government at many levels. Extraordinary rendition, imprisonment without charge, torture, drone strikes, all were known, approved of, and carried out with the assistance of many levels of the central government.
The only example there that can be reasonably cited as an aberration of the norm is the judge taking payoffs for heavy sentences - that's an example of one piece of the machine going rogue.
Sure, the US has done good during all this time as well, but the atrocities cited are not "exceptions", they are a core part of the American government of the past decade.
As in all things in life there's a tradeoff between "justice" and "security". Luckily for you and most of the people in this thread, you get to benefit from the actions of people who have to make that call, while looking down on them from your moral high horse in your comfortably AC'ed parents' basement.
But actually, even (very generously) at 100,000 brand-new prisoners for the USG to deal with it would certainly cope just fine (an increase of 4% on the current prison population). And imagine all the money which would be saved from surveillance programs if all the terrorists were dealt with!
> As in all things in life there's a tradeoff between "justice" and "security"
Some amount of tradeoff between freedom and security, I will grant you. But I can't see how strong security precludes us from actually bothering to properly investigate, try, and incarcerate people. That's just laziness, if not pure malice.
just ask any black guy in a court room.
Weighing information is the nature of judgement. Sometimes we don't know what we don't know. Sometimes we don't care what we don't know. Sometimes we don't care even though we know. It's the nature of the human machine.
This is the principal reason for the old adage "Life's Unfair".
It's just that we usually won't notice that until it's unfair to us.
We should fix these negative things as they come up instead of doing the gymnastics it takes to justify them. You never want to get caught fighting a rear guard action against the truth.
So are many of the positive events powertower mentioned.
Either way, you don't even live in your own native country let alone the US, you don't have a dog in this hunt.
Oh, and if you think Spain is a good example of a decent place to live; look up those bull runs. Barbaric.
I'm not agreeing with him and I'm not disagreeing with you. I just don't think the way you're attacking him is entirely appropriate.