Former Democratic presidential candidate and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark appalled many recently by calling on the government to create “camps” for ISIS sympathizers in the United States.
Clark clarified his remarks this week, however, stating he didn’t necessarily mean “internment camps,” but was thinking of something more along the lines of re-education camps.
Clark joined MSNBC Friday to discuss the recent shooting at two Chattanooga, Tennessee military facilities allegedly carried out by Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, whose father was reportedly once investigated for terrorist ties. Abdulazeez, who is Muslim, also allegedly authored two blogs about Islam in the days leading up to the attack, Mediaite reports.
The shootings killed four U.S. Marines.
On MSNBC, Clark likened the country’s current war against terrorism, and ISIS in particular, with the U.S.’s situation in World War II, and advocated for locking up people who might support terrorists at home.
“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,” Clark said, according to Mediaite.
“If these people are radicalized and they don’t support the United States, and they’re disloyal to the United States as a matter of principle, fine, that’s their right. It’s our right and our obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict,” he said.
“Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept noted that Clark’s remarks are a particularly surprising departure from his previous criticism of President George W. Bush’s response in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and what Clark has called a Bush-led imperialist strategy for the Middle East,” Talking Points Memo reports.
Clark is also known for criticizing the Bush administration over alleged violations of the Geneva Convention.
Regardless, he seemed serious about locking up people who don’t like the United States.
“We have got to identify the people who are most likely to be radicalized. We’ve got to cut this off at the beginning,” he said. “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.”
Clark said “not only the United States but our allied nations like Britain, Germany and France are going to have to look at their domestic law procedures.”
The Intercept reports the comments sparked “an outcry of comments on social media.” The criticism eventually convinced him to clarify his remarks on Fox News Radio’s The Alan Colmes Show, where Colmes asked him point-blank: “Were you saying some people should be put in some kind of internment camp in our society?”
Here’s what Clark had to say, according to Mediaite:
I’m saying we’ve got to deal with radicalization in our society…. You’ve got to have a counter-recruitment program. If the counter-recruitment program doesn’t work — that is to say: if you don’t know who is looking at these Islamic websites, if you don’t know what their reactions are, if you don’t have anybody who can talk them out of it, if they persist in becoming enemies, and wanting to kill people — you’ve got to set up some milestones along that journey for them. And at some point they either get arrested, get treated as terrorists, or they get put in a prisoner of war camp. It’s nothing like what some people on the internet misinterpreted what I’m saying. We had Italian and German prisoners of war in the United States; here are people who fought against us, they were brought here and kept here for the duration of the conflict. You can treat people as criminals or you can treat people as POWs.
Clark also allegedly suggested the government has the power to monitor “every chat room online” and has a duty to identify the type of folks he would prefer to detain “for the duration of the conflict.”
Colmes pressed Clark on how the government would determine who would qualify for his special camps.
“You know, Alan, the lawyers and political leaders would have to make those determinations,” he replied.
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