CNN Asks Terrorism Expert ‘How Can You Be A Good Person And A Terrible Person At The Same Time?’

The plethora of time to kill as the nation awaits the end of the manhunt for at-large Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev and the demand for constant cable news content is a recipe for some surreal moments. You can add, to the pile, CNN’s Chris Cuomo filling some of that time by asking eternal questions of terrorism expert Phil Mudd. referencing the multiple interviews CNN has been doing with anyone who ever talked to the suspects, Cuomo asked Mudd “How can you be a good person and a terrible person at the same time?”

“Everybody is saying good things about this person,” Cumo observed. “Not defending the suspect, but just saying ‘As I knew him, good character, great athlete,’ and then he winds up here, the worst of character. How do we put the two together?” he asked.

“There’s not a paradox,” Mudd replied, explaining that “this is a tradition in terrorism. Looking, for example, at 9/11 or the jihad attacks in London. You have clusters of kids who bounce off of each other.”

“In this case,” he continued, “we have two kids who happened to be brothers where over probably or perhaps a relatively short period of time, they persuaded each other that what happened in this closed circle was right. Now, one of these kids is 26 the other is 19. In the cases that I’ve looked at, you often have an older brother figure to persuade a youth to go into the movement. I’d wager the older brother told the younger brother ‘What we’re going to do is okay.'”

Not satisfied, Cuomo followed up by asking Mudd “How can you be a good person and a terrible person at the same time?”

Rather than explaining that the mysteries of Jungian psychology and a contradictory universe were above his pay grade, Mudd gamely offered an answer. “What you’re doing is what we call an ‘analysis mirror imaging,'” he explained. “You’re assuming the world looks like what you think it should look. Where they’re coming from in the world is where they believe the United States is intervening in places they shouldn’t intervene, they’re raping women, they’re killing children. From their optic, this is perfectly logical. So it’s not inconsistent with being a good person. They would say our responsibility is not just to talk about this, it’s to do something about this. And they did.”

Unfortunately, Cuomo did not go on to ask Mudd how it is possible to have a “Jumbo shrimp,” or whether God can make a cable news segment so inane that he can’t watch it.

Here’s the clip, from CNN:

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.