jmagic wrote: ↑Mon Aug 27, 2018 6:27 pm A hitman is just doing his job. Is he not responsible for the murders he commits? How about if he wears a green outfit? Does that make it ok?

Like it or not homicide is legally sactiomed in time of war if those actions are not in conflict with the military code of conduct which is based on the Geneva conventions. Furthermore outside of military objectives, it is provides a handy means of survival. The senator was no more or less guilty than the opposing army was. You don't like war-fine, but don't place an international problem on the doorstep of one man.

jmagic wrote: ↑Mon Aug 27, 2018 6:27 pm A hitman is just doing his job. Is he not responsible for the murders he commits? How about if he wears a green outfit? Does that make it ok?

Hitmen generally say no to murdering women and kids. Chinese are different but did you read the thread title?

fax wrote:

jmagic wrote: ↑Mon Aug 27, 2018 6:27 pm A hitman is just doing his job. Is he not responsible for the murders he commits? How about if he wears a green outfit? Does that make it ok?

Hitmen generally say no to murdering women and kids. Chinese are different but did you read the thread title?

Really? They have a dollar / vagina moral?

Sent from my SM-G570Y using Tapatalk

Léon and the little girl do!

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opini ... 49835.html
John McCain: The impossible man

John McCain's legacy reflects the internal contradictions of the US imperial experience.
by Hamid Dabashi

On August 25, senator and former presidential candidate John McCain died aged 81. In the obituaries that poured in, "war hero" and "maverick" were the most frequent epithets used to describe him. Both these terms, however, frame the irreconcilable paradox of the dysfunctional empire McCain called his homeland - its rosy self-perceptions and the truth of its vile militarism.

"John S McCain," declared the New York Times obituary in august mournful fonts, "the proud naval aviator who climbed from depths of despair as a prisoner of war in Vietnam to pinnacles of power as a Republican congressman and senator from Arizona and a two-time contender for the presidency, died on Saturday at his home in Arizona. He was 81."

That pretty much sums up the abiding liberal sentiments at the heart of the empire Senator McCain served valiantly. In the same obituary we read, "a son and grandson of four-star admirals who were his larger-than-life heroes, Mr McCain carried his renowned name into battle and into political fights for more than a half-century."

What did those battles mean for the humanity at large - how many millions have perished around the globe at the receiving end of those waged wars? What did those political fights signify for the poorer and disenfranchised communities at the fractured heart of the empire itself? These are the places where the real obituaries of the senator will be written.

Upon his passing, we remember McCain for his sustained oppositions to the public spectacle of indecency that Donald Trump commits as US president - and for his agreement with the majority of his policies.

From Ronald Reagan to John McCain, the quintessence of the Republican Party war against the poor and the weak worldwide breathes fire into the Trump administration.

A 'common sense' conservative
Senator McCain has left behind a brand of conservatism that his supporters consider "common sense" when compared with the politics of his fellow Republicans Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan - two conservative robots who happily embrace any legislation that favours their enduring power, no matter the human misery it may cause.

McCain may indeed have been different from them, but his presence in the legislative body of the US empire was integral to a deeply reactionary, fanatically militaristic legacy that is wreaking havoc in the US and around the globe.

Being a military man, McCain was adamantly militaristic in his politics. He was a hardline supporter of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, considering the government of Saddam Hussein "a clear and present danger to the United States of America." He voted for the Iraq War Resolution in October 2002, promising US forces would be welcomed as liberators by the Iraqis.

When the extent of the US atrocities in Iraq became evident in the Abu Ghraib torture chambers, however, he was leading a public outcry against such practices, presumably because he was personally tortured while a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He was committed to upholding a military code of honour for an army that had done pretty dishonourable acts around the globe.

McCain never saw the prospect of a war anywhere in the world he did not instantly support - in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere. He advocated for prolonged wars. He died not seeing his wish to "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" fulfilled. But his legacy is alive and well in Trump's military logic of US domination around the globe.

McCain staunchly supported Israel, could not care less for the fate of Palestinians, and for a while even considered the arch-Zionist Joseph Lieberman as his running mate in 2008. Yet he also backed the Arab revolutions, criticising dictators Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Bashar al-Assad.
But with his hardline support for sending arms to Syria, he played a key role in aggressively militarising the peaceful resistance to the murderous Assad regime. This militarisation, with the help of Damascus, which released from prison hundreds of fighters the regime had been using against the US in Iraq, enabled the creation of various extremist groups, including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS).

At the same time, McCain's criticism of Sisi and Assad was, of course, seriously compromised by his fanatical commitment to the Saudi ruling clan, even and particularly during their slaughter of Yemenis, when he rejected calls to limit the US sale of weaponry to Riyadh.

Give a pen and a piece of paper to a Yemeni or Iraqi or Palestinian child and ask him or her what "war hero" and "maverick" mean at the receiving end of US militarism.

In many ways, McCain was a typical US politician, projecting an image that he means well, but in effect being integral to a structural violence definitive to a trigger-happy dysfunctional empire. In his moral confusions, he embodied the impossibilities of the American empire parading its moral cake for the whole world to believe and gobbling it up too.

The moral confusion of an empire
The moral confusion of John McCain, however, was not personal, it was endemic to the nature of the empire he cherished as his homeland. In the figure of John McCain, as in the moral fabric of the US empire, singing the praise of liberty and freedom, while bombing nations to smithereens, there is no reconciling between its innate militarism and its professed moral high grounds on what it calls "human rights."

McCain and his empire protested too much about liberty and freedom and did too little about it; they did not even know of their guilty conscience.
As a military man, he served his country with steadfast, unwavering, and straightforward convictions. But as a politician, McCain was caught between the rock of moral opprobrium he had inherited from his military family, and the hard-hitting miseries his militarism had caused at home and abroad.
He was a contradiction in terms. He was an impossible man. But that contradiction, and that impossibility was the persona US imperialism had solidly, transparently invested in him and he best exemplified it, carried it with convictions and pride.

We all remember when his infamous singing "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb … Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' classic "Barbara Ann" during a presidential campaign rally delighted the US, Saudi, and Israeli neocons and Zionists to no end.

But in another campaign rally in October 2008, when someone said she did not trust Obama because "he is an Arab", McCain went out of his way defending his rival for being a "decent family man" and "not an Arab". Meaning: No decent family man could possibly be an Arab.

This is not being paradoxical, ironic, or even personally racist. This is being true to the contorted moral imagination of a constitutionally racist imperialism, in which "a decent family man" can only be approximated to John McCain himself.

There was and there will always be a moral conundrum in being a John McCain, a consistent inconsistency, for he embodied and personified an empire that lacks any semblance of normative or moral hegemony, a militarism that murders and mourns at one and the same time.

Any time a mass murderer went on a rampage slaughtering innocent children and adults, McCain was quick to send his condolences: "Cindy & I are praying for the victims of the terrible #LasVegasShooting & their families", and yet he was the absolute largest recipient of money from the NRA.

Between Trump and McCain: The future of an empire
The ignominy of Trump in just about anything he says and anything he does, of course, makes McCain look like a towering statue of moral authority - particularly to his liberal admirers.

"He's not a war hero," Trump once infamously said about McCain, "He's [called] a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured."
The indecency was repeated later when a White House staffer dismissed McCain's vote because he "was dying anyway".
Spewing such vulgarities about a man who was captured, tortured, and maimed for life while serving in an army Trump's wealthy father had protected his son from being drafted into is positively obscene.

But Trump and Trumpism could not possibly be the measure of anything. Trump is at once at the rotten roots of American politics and yet an aberration to the liberal veneer McCain best personified in his conservatism.

We may indeed be witness to the end of an era by the passing of John McCain. The rise of Trump and Trumpism has ushered the end of the era of blunt and unbridled racism. The sorts of paradoxical tension McCain personified between highfalutin convictions and dastardly actions, between high-horse morality and cold-blooded murder, between exuding compassion while committing war crimes, may have indeed come to an end.
If Trump is the future of the American empire, we have a clear consistency between racist convictions and murderous acts. There is no camouflaging here. He kills while he shouts insults.

With the passing of John McCain, the American empire may have indeed lost an iconic figure definitive to its moral mystification of itself, and thus shed all its false pretences to be a shining city on any hill it has not yet bombed or else turned into a military base.
There is a strong sense of liberal nostalgia in much of the obituaries we read about John McCain these days. There is a strong sense of a desire to put this ugly chapter of Trump behind and move back to a polished imperialism of Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama - when Daddy was bombing the world 9 to 5, and then coming home for a civilised dinner with his lovely family.

The vulgarity of Donald Trump is just too much in the face, too much telling it like it is. In mourning John McCain, US liberalism is also mourning its own refined and cultured costume party that camouflages its murderous militarism in the refined garb of soft-spoken and cultured pride in one's county.

Read carefully these obituaries - there is a pronounced politics to their mourning. They are positing a "liberal conservatism" (or what they term "common sense" conservatism) to defeat Trump and discredit what passes for the left wing of the Democratic Party at one and the same time.

Come next presidential election, Americans will have a chance to go one way or the other once again: with the open racism of Donald Trump or the refined militarism of what they call "McCain Democrats". They will make their choice and the rest of the world will have to decide which way to run for cover.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
________________________________________
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/27/opin ... ture-.html

What John McCain Taught Us About Torture

“This is a moral debate. It is about who we are.”

By Matt Welch

It was that other P.O.W.-turned senator, the unfathomably brave Jeremiah Denton, who first signaled to United States military intelligence — via blinking out “T-O-R-T-U-R-E” in Morse code during a propaganda video — that our prisoners of war in North Vietnam were being treated in gross violation of the Geneva Convention. But it was John McCain who brought that mistreatment viscerally into American living rooms, through a harrowing hospital-bed interview broadcast by CBS News in the fall of 1967.

Fearful eyes bugging out of his head, Mr. McCain speaks haltingly, in obvious physical pain, while fighting a losing battle to keep his lips from quivering. “I would just like to tell my wife,” he says at the end, barely keeping it together, “I will get well.” The prediction did not inspire confidence.

Mr. McCain, who died Saturday at 81, spent more than a half-century trying to teach us about torture — that it produces faulty intelligence, that “every man has a breaking point,” that military personnel derive a motivational pride from America having higher moral standards than its debased adversaries. “Your last resistance,” he writes in his latest book, “The Restless Wave” (written as usual with Mark Salter), “the one that sticks, the one that makes the victim superior to the torturer, is the belief that were the positions reversed you wouldn’t treat them as they have treated you.”

That lesson is fading from view in 2018, disregarded both by a president who believes that torture “absolutely works,” and by a #resistance cadre of ex-national security officials whose own brazen lies about the practice have yet to put a noticeable dent in either book sales or cable-TV contracts.

When Osama bin Laden “finally met the fate he deserved, the apologists for torture appeared in numbers on cable news shows and in the newspapers claiming bin Laden wouldn’t have been found without intelligence gained through the use of EITs” — enhanced interrogation techniques, Mr. McCain snarls in “The Restless Wave.” “In truth, most of the C.I.A.’s claims that abusive interrogations of detainees had produced vital leads to help locate Bin Laden were exaggerated, misleading, and in some cases, complete bullshit.”

To his great credit, Mr. McCain did not just make these critiques with seven years’ hindsight, but in real time, when Americans were still high-fiving over Bin Laden’s long-awaited capture. “Ultimately, this is more than a utilitarian debate,” he wrote at the time in The Washington Post. “This is a moral debate. It is about who we are.”

Much of what we know about the country’s post-Sept. 11 use of torture came about because of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s 6,000-page report in 2014 on the C.I.A.’s Detention and Interrogation Program. That document, of which only a 525-page summary has ever been made available to the public, detailed not just a psychotic level of brutality but also a bureaucratic indifference to torture being inflicted on innocents, and a concerted effort at the most senior intelligence levels to lie about their misdeeds to the press and even the president.

Only one Republican on the committee, Susan Collins of Maine, voted to approve it; the rest released a minority report pooh-poohing its conclusions. Mr. McCain’s was a lonely voice of Republican praise. “This report strengthens self-government and ultimately, I believe, America’s security and stature in the world,” he said on the Senate floor. The investigation, he writes in his book, “was as professional as any I’ve observed by a congressional committee.”

As for rot at the top of the intelligence community? In his recent book, Mr. McCain singled out for disdain a series of former C.I.A. directors who these days can be found in high dudgeon about President Trump’s untruthfulness. “George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden misled the White House, Congress, and the director of National Intelligence about the program’s effectiveness,” he writes. They “lied about the value of intelligence extracted from abused detainees.”
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Trump-averse Republicans these days are routinely and often justifiably hit with the criticism that they don’t meaningfully oppose the president’s policies or personnel. But one of Mr. McCain’s last acts as senator was to urge his colleagues to vote against Gina Haspel’s nomination to become the C.I.A. director. Her role in “overseeing the use of torture by Americans is disturbing,” he wrote from his sick bed in Arizona. “Her refusal to acknowledge torture’s immorality is disqualifying.”

In the end only two Republican senators — Mr. McCain’s Arizona colleague and friend Jeff Flake, and his Kentucky antagonist Rand Paul — found the argument persuasive. Anti-torture politics is passé.

Some of this relaxation is for a happy reason: Barack Obama banned torture upon taking office; Congress — under the leadership of Mr. McCain — legislated the practice away in 2015; and the Supreme Court has extended at least some judicial protection to detainees imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay.

But the 44th president pointedly did not end Washington’s controversial practice of secretly spiriting terrorist suspects away to third-party countries, and America’s “dirty wars” (in the journalist Jeremy Scahill’s evocative phrase) have proceeded apace from George W. Bush to Mr. Obama to Mr. Trump.

If we’ve learned anything about the nature of government over the span of John McCain’s lifetime, it’s that unaccountable power behaves unaccountably. As long as Americans are blasé about the immorality of subjecting prostrate humans to intentional cruelty, and as long as their government can operate with impunity, Mr. McCain’s best lesson will need continuous relearning.

Even after all, he would have been better than Trump.