December 30, 2009

Former CIA officer Jack Rice hits back hard at the comments made by Pete King and his cohorts about racial profiling on the Ed Schultz Show.

Schultz: Jack Rice this is a political hot potato for the White House. How far does the White House want to go with this kind of line of defense? What do you think?

Rice: My response is they push back hard on what Peter King said, what Pete Hoekstra said—I mean there is no room for racial profiling in this country. Every study that I have seen—and I’m a former prosecutor too—every study I have seen has shown that it’s far more effective to follow what it is that people do rather than what they look like. And if we think about the broad picture now—let me see if we get this right. If we’re going to racially profile, we racially profile everybody across the Middle East. Now we find that this young 23 year old man from Nigeria—most of Nigeria is Christian by the way—so I guess what we’re going to have to do is include all of the people of Africa. But now let’s contemplate al Qaeda in the Philippines, so now we have to include people in Southeast Asia, so now we have about four billion people.

Look, I think when people make an argument for racial profiling they’re either lazy, they’re either arrogant, or frankly they’re racist. This is a foolish idea and the worst part of it all is that what we’re going to do is alienate about 1.5 billion Muslims. We desperately need these people on our side. If we go down that path we’re in a very, very serious problem.

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