McCain Floods Twitter with Graphic Photos of Syrian Atrocities - East Idaho News
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McCain Floods Twitter with Graphic Photos of Syrian Atrocities

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021214 JohnMcCain?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1392229302319State Dept Photo(WASHINGTON) — Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., flooded his Twitter account Wednesday with graphic photos showing alleged atrocities committed by the Assad regime in Syria.

“These images haunt me, but what haunts me more is thought that we’ll continue to do nothing #Syria,” McCain said in one of the tweets, which shows a photo of a child whose legs appear to be badly injured.

McCain also showed giant versions of the photos propped up on easels on the Senate floor during a speech Wednesday.

[ WARNING: The photos are graphic and can be seen here. ]

“When the images and horrors of this conflict occasionally show up on our television screens, the impulse of many Americans is to change the channel. But we must not look away. We must not avert our eyes from the suffering of the Syrian people, for if we do, we ignore, we sacrifice that which is most precious in ourselves — our ability to empathize with the suffering of others, to share it, to acknowledge through our own sense of revulsion that what is happening in Syria today is a stain on our the collective conscience of moral peoples everywhere,” McCain said on the Senate floor.

“These images of the human disaster in Syria haunt me. And they should haunt all of my colleagues and all Americans,” McCain later added. “But what haunts me even more than the horror unfolding before our eyes in Syria is the thought that we will continue to do nothing meaningful about it, and how that deadens our national conscience, and how it calls into question the moral sources of our great power and the foundations our global leadership.”

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf pushed back on McCain’s criticism that the U.S. is doing “nothing meaningful” to stop the humanitarian crisis in Syria, saying, “I would challenge someone like Senator McCain to say what we should be doing, because the alternatives quite frankly don’t present a lot of good options either.”

She later added, “I don’t even want to guess what would be meaningful for Senator McCain.”

Harf did, however, say that the State Department supports raising the awareness of people around the world to the atrocities in Syria using whatever means necessary.

“We absolutely believe that not just people in the United States but around the world need to be fully aware of the horrific atrocities the Syrian regime is perpetrating on its own people. And whether that’s through photos, whether that’s through firsthand accounts, we actually do think that that’s an important way to make very clear to the world why we need to push the Syrian regime.”

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