Seems to me that sometimes it's hard to tell the good guys from the bad. Maybe there ARE no 'good guys', just lesser evils to choose from. It seems this topic engenders some strong emotions. I know I get wound up thinking about it.
I can see how an idealistic and naive young man could make such a wrong choice. I don't excuse him, but I find it horrifying that anyone could mistake the American gov't for the White Hats in most any scenario.
People like Tim McV and other extremists don't need to look far for 'excuses' for their actions. When we are ruled by a gov't that allows stuff like MK Ultra to be perpetrated on the most helpless of folks, it's hard to see them as trustworthy. There is a long tradition of government screwing citizenry; even, as in the MK Ultra affair, screwing Canadian citizens with Canadian complicity! (the fact that the citizens being experimented upon were mentally ill was apparently all the excuse the CIA and its Candian contacts needed.)No apologies were ever tendered by USA, although Canada did offer a brief mumbled apology to the survivors. (We still don't know who else CIA did this stuff to: CIA always denied the whole nasty scandal and had shredded all documents, thinking they were cleverly in the clear, until a bright lawyer thought to check at the GAO and found the money trail and proved the CIA was lying about paying those doctors. Without such heroic efforts by a pro-bono volunteer, our gov't might still be permitting that hideous torture of innocent victims. Maybe they still are, and just hide it better...) As it is, the victims were forced to settle without an admission of guilt by CIA or USA, because most of them had already died off and the gov't was willing to sit and wait while the rest bit the big one.
The callous disregard for human life that the gov't displayed at Bimini and Bikinl, sending soldiers in right after the nukes and offering them seawater showers as 'decontamination,' then denying them all veterans' medical benefits when the cancers and other radiation effects began, is enough to make any decent person irate. Apologies? None, unil almost all the affected soldiers had died of their diseases, and then only when jounalists had made the Bimini films public.
The amount of nuke testing done right here in the States was deliberately underestimated to the public. When years later journalists uncovered evidence proving there have been far more testing, and the fallout far more widespread and deadly than gov't sources admitted, there were no apologies, no offers of restitution made to the people who became ill and died as a result of that exposure.
When Clinton signed away the last Hopi sacred mountain to Black Hills Mining in 1997, nobody protested. When the Hopis refused to leave, the mining company brought truckloads of poisonous refuse and piled it around the villages. When the groundwater was contaminated and the kids began to get sick, the Hopis left. Our government broke treaty and gave that mountain to a white profiteer. No apology, no shame. And guess who came with guns and threats to hurry the rout of grannies and sick kids? our precious FBI...
Watergate... Iran/Contra...Reagan's footsying in the Iran hostage deal...
No I'm NOT trying to justify what McVeigh did. It was sick, and stupid, and inhuman.
But so is a whole lot of what passes for 'government' in this fair nation.
In this as in so many areas of life:
Caveat emptor.