Robert Gibbs Blames the Victim?

"A 16-year-old American boy killed in an Obama administration drone strike 'should have [had] a far more responsible father,' Obama campaign senior adviser Robert Gibbs says in a new video released by the group We Are Change. – Young Turks

Dominant Social Theme: If you don't hit them over there, they will come here.

Free-Market Analysis: In this video, Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks comments on why the US killed a male US minor in Yemen – a young US citizen whose father, US officials claim, was a terrorist.

Robert Gibbs is a former spokesperson for the Obama administration and the initial YouTube posting was created by the alternative media group, We Are Change. While the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki (who was said by some to have actually been a CIA asset) was widely reported, the death of his young son, Abdulrahman, also a US citizen who lived in the United States, is not nearly so well known.

Al-Awlaki's death is justified by those who carried it out as a strike against someone who meant to harm US citizens. He was labeled a terrorist and put on an Obama death list. But his son wasn't on any such list and was killed anyway, two weeks after his father, in another drone strike. Neither individual received judicial due process.

In defending the killing, Gibbs says at one point: "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don't think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business."

Uygur calls this answer "a terrible one."

Apparently, Gibbs's response has been noted by the larger, "mainstream" US press. "The Atlantic suggests that if Gibbs is giving the genuine rationale for the killing, it's grounds for impeachment." And Esquire magazine wrote about the death of the son as follows:

He was a boy who hadn't seen his father in two years, since his father had gone into hiding. He was a boy who knew his father was on an American kill list and who snuck out of his family's home in the early morning hours of September 4, 2011, to try to find him. He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on his search, and the friends he'd made. He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.

(Video from TYTNETWORK's YouTube user channel.)