The most sickening thing you’ll hear all day
by digby
This is one of the worst things I’ve ever heard:
SCARBOROUGH: “What we’re doing with drones is remarkable: the fact that over the past eight years during the Bush years – when a lot of people brought up some legitimate questions about international law – my God, those lines have been completely eradicated by a drone policy that says: if you’re between 17 and 30, and within a half-mile of a suspect, we can blow you up, and that’s exactly what’s happening . . . . They are focused on killing the bad guys, but it is indiscriminate as to other people who are around them at the same time . . . . it is something that will cause us problems in the coming years” . . . .
KLEIN: “I completely disagree with you. . . . It has been remarkably successful” —
SCARBOROUGH: “at killing people” —
KLEIN: “At decimating bad people, taking out a lot of bad people – and saving Americans lives as well, because our troops don’t have to do this . . . You don’t need pilots any more because you do it with a joystick in California.”
SCARBOROUGH: “This is offensive to me, though. Because you do it with a joystick in California – and it seems so antiseptic – it seems so clean – and yet you have 4-year-old girls being blown to bits because we have a policy that now says: ‘you know what? Instead of trying to go in and take the risk and get the terrorists out of hiding in a Karachi suburb, we’re just going to blow up everyone around them.’
“This is what bothers me. . . . We don’t detain people any more: we kill them, and we kill everyone around them. . . . I hate to sound like a Code Pink guy here. I’m telling you this quote ‘collateral damage’ – it seems so clean with a joystick from California – this is going to cause the US problems in the future.”
KLEIN: “If it is misused, and there is a really major possibility of abuse if you have the wrong people running the government. But: the bottom line in the end is – whose 4-year-old get killed? What we’re doing is limiting the possibility that 4-year-olds here will get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror.”
Am I wrong or did Klein say that he thinks killing 4 year olds is legitimate because it “limits the possibility “that 4 year old American will get killed? Holy Moley. That’s so far beyond the concept of self-defense he’s veering into simple pathology.
Klein tends to slip up and inadvertently spill the beans about what our foreign policy elite (of which he is one) really think. Now, I would guess that he was trying to fudge here and say that it was too bad that 4 year olds got killed but “we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.” But the truth that slipped out was that he believes we are killing their 4 year olds as part of a campaign of terror. And, for him, the good news is that we can do it with a joystick in California. That’s sick.
Now, I doubt very seriously that anyone’s targeting 4 year olds at the moment. Even I am not that cynical. But I also don’t doubt that there are people who believe that if the 4 year olds of “those people” are killed it will wear down the enemy and make them cry uncle. It sure sounds to me like Joe Klein is one of them.
Greenwald dismantles the argument, showing that Klein’s formulation results in exactly the opposite of what he claims to want. I’m so repelled by the fact that anyone would blithely remark that such a “trade-off” in this situation is remotely moral that I can’t get past it.
Update: Here’s Robert Gibbs saying that kids of terrorists should have more responsible fathers. For real.
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