The fact that the average american thinks that it's OK or "oh well, they were probably terrorists" it's what's sadder to me. I refuse to think people are THAT mind-controlled.
Americans are gradually becoming more averse to some of the excesses of their government's attempts to maintain power. The latest evidence for this is the widespread opposition to (overt) intervention in Syria, which is probably explainable in terms of (i) war-weariness from the Bush Administration's attempts at nation building and (ii) the wave of leaks from Manning, Snowden et al. which is putting the lie to USG rhetoric*.
This is at least a step in the right direction: even in the Vietnam era, people reflexively supported the government's actions abroad without the slightest opposition (as Noam Chomsky describes, opposition to the Vietnam War came very late in the game and was mostly limited to pragmatic arguments -- "We can't win this" -- rather than moral ones -- "We have no right to bomb this place into oblivion").
*An
article in the latest issue of
Foreign Affairs discusses this very point, arguing with some convincingness that in a new era of leaks, the USG can no longer lie about its actions as it has done in the past, and therefore must both make its rhetoric more in line with reality
and move its actual policies toward the ideals espoused in the rhetoric.
