I've always liked Wes Clark. I interviewed him in 2005, when the topic of torture was new and fresh in our minds and he told me how disappointed he was in Dick Cheney. Our cell phone connection was horrible, but he called me back from the airport.
I say this because when I watched this segment I was as totally shocked as Digby was. I hope he rethinks his position after he listens to what he actually said. He's talking about bringing back WWII Japanese style internment camps to America, which has always been a blight on US history. How can you catch a person who is unhappy or depressed before they become a lone wolf? And of course, who would decide if a person was "radicalized?" Ann Coulter, maybe? Michelle Malkin, who wrote a sick book defending the use of internment camps?
Yes, Wes Clark really said what I said he said folks
I have always liked Clark. And he said some reasonable stuff in his interview with Thomas Roberts this morning before he said the following.
Roberts asked him what we needed to do about "self-radicalization" which seems to be the short-hand for a Muslim (as opposed to a white supremacist or a conspiracy theorist or just some nut) who reads some crazy stuff on the internet and decides to go out in a blaze of glory:
Clark: We have got to identify the people who are most likely to be radicalized. We've got to cut this off at the beginning. There are always a certain number of young people who are alienated. They don't get a job, they lost a girlfriend, their family doesn't feel happy here and we can watch the signs of that. And there are members of the community who can reach out to those people and bring them back in and encourage them to look at their blessings here.
But I do think on a national policy level we need to look at what self-radicalization means because we are at war with this group of terrorists. They do have an ideology. In World War II if someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States, we didn't say that was freedom of speech, we put him in a camp, they were prisoners of war.
So, if these people are radicalized and they don't support the United States and they are disloyal to the United States, as a matter of principle fine. It's their right and it's our right and obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict. And I think we're going to have to increasingly get tough on this, not only in the United States but our allied nations like Britain, Germany and France are going to have to look at their domestic law procedures.
People are arguing with me on twitter that he couldn't have said this, but he did. If you still don't believe me go watch the tape yourself.
