Our Bastards & Their Bastards

The recent idiocy about whether waterboarding is really torture, whether it's ok to torture in certain circumstances, and whether we should export torture when it gets too politically inconvenient to do it here has gotten me to feeling like the supposed lack of barbarism in modern society is a sham.
Any tool who likes to view the world in terms of black and white, good and evil, and who likes to kid themselves about America's Christian values would do good to look up Unit 731 on Wikipedia. Not for the weak of stomach, it discusses the human experiments that the Japanese Army performed on Chinese civilians, Mongols, Koreans, and POWs. Think of the most horrible, barbaric tortures you can think of and square it. This was the holocaust we never hear about.
But wait a minute. Macarthur and the other Japanese Occupiers *knew* about Japan's experiments in brutal detail when they were dealing out the war-crimes punishments.
So, the shining leaders of the greatest generation incarcerated these bastards and threw away the key!
NO.
Yeah. You see, actually, we granted the Japanese scientists blanket amnesty on the condition that they'd share the results of their torture experiments. Because, you know, it would sure be unAmerican to hang someone upside down until they suffocate...but it would sure be useful to know how long it took! The excuse for this of course, was that we were maybe saving american lives by getting tips how to build the most effective bubonic-plague bombs before the dirty commies did.
Except there were a million other less evil ways to get this information (how about infecting mice?), and to even prevent the Soviets from ever using it should they have gotten to it first. I should think that the Soviets would be smart enough to realize that the incubation period for Plague gives you plenty of time to push the big red button and blast the Kremlin towards Mars.
And as a result, Japan's bastards went on to be leaders in the Japanese pharmaceutical industry, and even the president of the Japanese green cross, and we name highways after our bastards!
And the Chinese, Mongols, and Koreans who died in agony in the name of a pointless statistic rest in obscurity outside of the bounds of their own countries.

In the end, a few of the Japanese scientists got rounded up and tried for warcrimes, but not by us. The *Soviets* rounded some of them up, tried them, and shipped them off to work camps in Siberia where they could do experiments on their OWN frostbitten extremities.

One good thing to come out of the clusterf#k that is the GW Bush Middle east is that we won't be viewing the last eight years through the rose coloured goggles of victory. Here's hoping that we can have the humility to admit the wrong of what we have done and make sure that it does not happen again.

Oh yeah. And if you were thinking that the whole "let's charge into Iraq with absolutely no idea of what we're going to do once we get there or who we are even fighting" thing was an anomaly, it looks like we're just now finding out that, Wow! We did that in Afghanistan, too. Can America have possibly screwed the pooch even more?