>>Sorry if I wasn't rooting for the right guys on this case - didn't really look who's wearing what kind of drab khaki gray camo garb, sunshades or not. I rarely have any sympathy for mercenaries, regardless of the color of their money.
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>Mercenaries? Hardly fits Pearle (sorry for the egregious misspelling which made the name unrecognizable <s> ) or Buckley. I guess you mean the Blackwater guys.
Them too. From how the press is behaving in this war (and actually since GWI) and regarding this government, they do what they're paid to do. There's no more journalism. If late mr. Pearl was one of the few who went to Iraq to report the truth, whole truth and nothing but the truth, then I wish I knew what he wrote. For most of today's media, I don't see a substantial difference between a presstitute and a mercenary. They are both lethal.
(like I said yesterday or thereabouts, I'm just a bit grumpier these days - probably have gone further down under my own influence)
>And I don't see the issue in terms of rooting for anybody but rather of being weary of so much smug self-righteousness. This whole rendition and torture debate has smacked of all this from the beginning.
I was not sitting with anyone on that debate, and am in no way responsible for anything anyone else said. All of them are presumed to be sapient. Smug self-righteousness? Don't recognize myself in it.
>If an American soldier shoots an Iraqi it is a human-rights tragedy rather than just one more senseless killing. If an Iraqi (or other arab or persian in Iraq) blows up a marketplace and slaughters 80 it is also our fault for not preventing it. And if we are less gentle in attempts to prevent such attrocity that too is a moral failing.
Much simpler than that. It's the way POWs are treated. You throw your Geneva convention through the window, so does everybody else. You declare your enemy an illegal combatant on a technicality, fine - they'll find their own technicality and do the same to you. You justify whatever you do with the power of your propaganda, they do the same. You outsource a war to private companies and put their mercenaries outside the law - ok, then no law protects them either, they become fair game.
It's nothing to do with being smug or righteous or anything else - it's just the simple golden rule: whatever you do may be done to you, period.
>There are people who have the responsibility of preventing unspeakable horrors
...with about five minutes left before the commercials. The ticking bomb argument was debunked by the professionals many times over. It makes bad TV but still gets good ratings because you get to save the female and fly towards the lens in slo-mo while the whole backdrop goes in flames in all directions, closing credits, shrink credits, run the ads.
>Sometimes there is no choice which involves moral purity - unless one is standing on the sidelines determined not to get one's jersey dirty ( but is nonetheless willing to accept the protection of the watchers on the wall
Oh, so not accepting it is always an option, right? How does one exercise that option?
>and eager to hold them fully accountable if suddenly some dark force - even more evil than Cheney or Haliburton - manages to nuke or poison an American city )
It has happened in my country, years ago. I've probably written about it several times. But no civilians were hurt by security, no liberties were cut, and you didn't see guys with machine guns at every important corner - heck, there weren't any cops in schools and hospitals at all. And nobody tried to sell protection.
I think this whole "liberty XOR security" is a fake dilemma, but it was sold and bought. I can only scratch my head.
