Peter King Issues Warning On Major 'Internal Threat:'Hundreds' Of Hezbollah Agents In U.S.

[Agorism]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/21/peter-king-iran-hezbollah-agents-undercover_n_1369950.html?ref=politics

http://images.cheezburger.com/completestore/2009/7/10/128917477505050478.jpg


WASHINGTON -- Iranian-backed Hezbollah agents, not al Qaeda operatives, may pose the greatest threat on U.S. soil as tensions over Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program ratchet up, according to the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security.

"As Iran moves closer to nuclear weapons and there is increasing concern over war between Iran and Israel, we must also focus on Iran's secret operatives and their number one terrorist proxy force, Hezbollah, which we know is in America," said New York Rep. Peter King at a Wednesday hearing of his committee.

The hearing, which featured former government officials and the director of intelligence analysis for the New York Police Department, follows a foiled plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., and testimony by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in late January that Iran's leaders are "more willing to conduct an attack inside the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime."

Opening the hearing, King said, "We have a duty to prepare for the worst," warning there may be hundreds of Hezbollah operatives in the United States, including 84 Iranian diplomats at the United Nations and in Washington who, "it must be presumed, are intelligence officers."

But Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said he was concerned that the testimony he was about to hear was based on outdated information and not current intelligence. He noted that "no current federal officials" were asked to testify on Wednesday.

"A word of caution is in order," Thompson said. "When we examine our relationship with another country, we cannot look at any particular moment in time and pretend that it tells the whole story. We cannot view the politics, history and culture of any other country clearly by seeing a snapshot version."

Referencing Clapper's earlier testimony, Thompson said the director of national intelligence should be called in for a classified hearing, but added, "We should not engage in a public discussion that creates fear and delivers misinformation."


King rejected the Democrat's objections. "We're not focusing on foreign policy," he said. "We're talking about an internal threat to this country."

Most of the testimony -- which came from former officials at the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and Treasury, among others -- concerned Iranian-linked attacks in other countries that dated back decades in some cases. However, Mitchell Silber, head of the NYPD intelligence unit that has come under fire for spying on the city's Muslim community, said that between 2002 and 2010 his agency and federal authorities detected "at least six events involving Iranian diplomatic personnel that we struggle to categorize as anything other than hostile reconnaissance of New York City."

The suspicious events, some of them publicly revealed for the first time, involved security guards at the Permanent Mission of Iran to the United Nations and Iranian diplomats stationed in New York. Among the cases Silber cited:


..continued

[JK/SEA]

''there..MAY BE hundreds''....good Lord, looks like i better call Brinks Security Systems and have em put in extra alarms...

hundreds i tell ya...hell maybe thousands...we're doomed....please oh please DHS launch those drones now!...ahhhhhhhhh!!!

''i want my mommie''....said rep. King.

[Anti Federalist]

Peter "I openly supported Irish Republican Army terrorists" King?

That fucking guy?



From Terrorist Bagman to Homeland Security Overlord: The Curious Career of Peter King

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2011/01/from-terrorist-bagman-to-homeland.html


In the person of Congressman Peter King (R-New York), the incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, the abstraction called "hypocrisy" has acquired tangible human form. After spending decades canvassing his fellow Irish-American Catholics to raise money for terrorists in Northern Ireland, King has promised to conduct a wide-ranging investigation of American Muslim congregations and cultural organizations in search of people providing "material support" for Islamic terrorism.

"We have to break through this politically correct nonsense which keeps us from debating and discussing what I think is one of the most vitally important issues in this country," King insists. "We are under siege by Muslim terrorists and yet there are Muslim leaders in this country who do not cooperate with law enforcement."
King has also demanded that the WikiLeaks whistleblower organization be designated a terrorist organization. He insists that the group provided "material support" to terrorism by publishing hundreds of thousands of pages' worth of previously classified documents, many of them describing criminal acts and institutionalized corruption on the part of policy-makers in the U.S. government. It's reasonable to suspect that King's antipathy toward WikiLeaks is inspired, at least in part, by personal concerns.

Among the documents made public by WikiLeaks is one that could be of particular interest to King -- a February 2010 CIA "Red Cell Special Memorandum" -- an "out-of-the-box" analysis examining "what it would mean for the US to be seen ... as an incubator and `exporter of terrorism.'" For example: "Some Irish-Americans have long provided financial aid and material support for violent efforts to compel the United Kingdom to relinquish control of Northern Ireland.... The US-based Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID), founded in the late 1960s, provided the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) with money that was frequently used for arms purchases."

NORAID was designated by the Justice Department as an arm of the IRA more than thirty years ago. King, whose Long Island district has a large and well-organized Irish-American constituency, was one of the group's most effective fundraisers and one of the IRA's staunchest supporters.

"We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry," King declared during a 1982 rally on behalf of the IRA in Nassau County. The "Provos" heartily reciprocated King's affection.

"During his visits to Ireland, Mr. King would often stay with well-known leaders of the IRA, and he socialized in IRA drinking haunts," recalled Irish journalist Ed Moloney, author of the definitive work A Secret History of the IRA, in a 2005 New York Sun profile written after King's tardy and reluctant break with the group. "At one of such clubs, the Felons, membership was limited to IRA veterans who had served time in jail."

Granted, many honorable and decent men -- both from Northern Ireland and elsewhere -- have become familiar with the inside of a prison cell. But the ex-convicts with whom King socialized during his visits to Ireland generally weren't innocent political prisoners.

King (center) meets with supporters of a Malachy McAllister, a convicted Irish terrorist.
King served as chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee from 2005 until the Republicans lost their majority in the 2006 mid-term election. During his last stint in that post, King used his influence to intervene on behalf of Malachy McAllister.

In 1981, McAllister served as an armed lookout during an ambush of a policeman outside a pub in Northern Ireland. The victim, it must be said, was a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a paramilitary force that became notorious for beating and otherwise mistreating innocent people. McAllister served three years in a British prison for his role in the ambush.

In 1988, after McAllister was released from prison, he narrowly escaped being killed by a Loyalist paramilitary gang that opened fire on his family's home in Belfast. The McAllisters fled to Canada, and in 1996 and settled in Wallington, New York. Seven years later the McAllisters' home came under armed siege once again -- this time by agents of the Department of Homeland Security, who carried out a 5 a.m. raid to enforce a deportation order. The family was to be expelled on account of what the agency called McAllister's "terrorist activities" a quarter-century ago.

A stay was issued while the deportation order was examined in the courts. King used the interval to lobby Homeland Security Commissar Michael Chertoff. In a letter to Chertoff, King insisted that McAllister's family would likely be murdered if they were sent back to Northern Ireland.

McAllister, like many Catholics in Ulster, endured inexcusable treatment at the hands of British occupation forces and Loyalist thugs. He admits to committing the acts for which he was incarcerated, but describes himself as a combatant in a civil war, rather than a terrorist. That distinction is difficult to defend in light of the fact that McAllister was a member of the Irish National Republican Army (INLA) -- the military wing of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP).

Whatever the merits of the Irish Republican cause, the INLA was not created merely to obtain independence for Northern Ireland, or to defend the rights of an abused minority. The group, which budded off from the "official" IRA in 1974, was a tiny, ultra-violent Leninist cell within the IRSP. While the Party specialized in political agitation, the INLA carried out bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, extortion, and other forms of "direct action" that frequently targeted helpless civilians.

It's quite likely that some of the money raised by Peter King on behalf of NORAID wound up funding the INLA's rampage. The group also received financial aid and training from Libya and the PLO.

The group's objective has never been merely to reclaim Ulster from the UK: It is committed to the unification of all 32 counties of Ireland in a socialist "worker's republic" of the kind that has been such an unqualified blessing in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Like other "liberation" movements of a similar vintage, the INLA cynically invested its Leninist political agenda with religious language and symbolism.

The INLA's cadres and supporters saw the group's terrorist campaign as, literally, a holy war. And Peter King, the once and future chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, gave eager and unapologetic material support to that terrorist jihad.

Despite King's backstory, his unqualified support for open-ended war abroad and authoritarian measures at home has made him a favorite of Fox News and other elements of the War Party's media apparatus. Commentator Jim Kouri, a vice president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, commends King for his support for "those on the frontline of the war on terrorism," which supposedly offers a favorable contrast to the record of "`useful idiots' ... such as Rep. John Conyers, who actually supports Fifth-Column Islamic groups against his own nation."

After all, didn't Conyers spend decades raising money for terrorists allied with Libya and the PLO, and then use his political clout on behalf of a would-be cop-killer who belonged to a Leninist criminal gang? No, wait a second: That was King, not Conyers.
"Liberators"? IRA rep Gerry Adams and Fidel Castro.

King's opponent in the recent mid-term congressional election tried, without success, to make an issue of the incumbent's support for Irish terrorism. Some of King's supporters attempted to dismiss the matter by pointing out that the IRA and its offshoots have never been a threat to the United States. Of course, the same is true of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamic terrorist groups that have long considered themselves to be comrades with the IRA in the struggle for global "liberation."

As Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, King will be the tribune of a large and growing "anti-Sharia" constituency, which is composed of people who insist that every mosque should be treated as a jihadist recruitment center and weapons depot. From that perspective -- as articulated by Frank Gaffney, its most forceful exponent -- anybody who believes in and practices the religion of Islam should be presumptively regarded as guilty of sedition.

With Sinn Fein official Martin McGuiness, 2000.
Historian Sharon Davies points out that the unfolding "anti-Sharia" campaign updates and transposes a very similar crusade from a century ago:

"In the early 1900s, many Americans were genuinely frightened by the perceived religious threat of the Roman Catholic Church and the suspected imperialistic intentions of its leader, the Pope. He was plotting the overthrow of the United States, warned the feature, to `make America Catholic.' His foot soldiers, tens of thousands of Catholic men who called themselves the Knights of Columbus, were busily stockpiling arms and ammunition in the basements of their churches, all in preparation for the day when their papist leader would give the signal for the violent insurrection to begin."

Fear of a Papist Holy War was propagated by widely read and hugely influential anti-Catholic publications, promoted by a revived Ku Klux Klan, and coalesced into state "convent inspection laws" permitting warrantless searches of monasteries, chapels, and rectories. Peter King's career almost seems like a perverse attempt to validate the work of those early 20th Century anti-Catholic bigots.

Between 1971 and 2005, about 1,800 people in Ireland were killed by IRA bombers and gunmen; the equivalent death toll in the United States would be 360,000 people. During that generation-long onslaught, the IRA "made the car-bomb the modern terrorist weapon du jour and perfected the manufacture of fertilizer-based home-made explosives of the sort now routinely used by jihadists," observes historian Moloney.

Peter King "owes his political career almost entirely to the ties he forged" with the people who carried out that bloody campaign, Moloney concludes. King's very first act after being elected to his congressional seat "was to jump on a plane to Belfast for a rousing celebration in the Felon's Club."

"Behind every great fortune, there's a crime," wrote Balzac. It's tempting to say the same of political careers, but this isn't strictly true: Crime is integral to politics. After all, politics is the business of managing the State, which as Murray Rothbard pointed out is nothing but organized banditry.

Peter King apparently isn't equipped with either a conscience or a sense of irony, so he isn't likely to appreciate the fact that his political career perfectly encapsulates the process through which petty thugs are transmuted into "statesmen."

[Vanilluxe]

Peter King + a few more burgers = http://images.wikia.com/aliceinwonderland/images/a/ac/Queenofhearts1951.jpg

[LibertyEagle]

Uh, guys, I'm pretty sure Michael Scheuer has said that yes, there are Iranian sleeper agents all over our country who will retaliate IF our government attacks Iran.

[James Madison]

So, let me get this straight.

The West is currently funding sleeper cells within Iran that are killing nuclear scientists = good
The West is currently funding Al Qaeda in Libya and Syria to overthrow secular anti-fundamentalist regimes = good
The West is threatening Iran with pre-emptive war should it continue to honor its national sovereignty = good

Anyone else see the hypocrisy here?

[libertyjam]

Hezbollah, That's that branch of the Mossad right?

And F--- the UK and the R Ulster Constabulary, they can all rot in H---.

[Anti Federalist]

Uh, guys, I'm pretty sure Michael Scheuer has said that yes, there are Iranian sleeper agents all over our country who will retaliate IF our government attacks Iran.

If they are, I'd be willing to bet a month's salary that they are fully known to the government, and they, government, won't do a thing about it.

King is just providing the cover for whatever horrors will come after the fact.

[Tyler_Durden]

If they are, I'd be willing to bet a month's salary that they are fully known to the government, and they, government, won't do a thing about it.

King is just providing the cover for whatever horrors will come after the fact.

My thoughts exactly. It's like a human "Fast and Furious." Let them flow through......

[Agorism]

Well does he look like Chet the toad from WEIRD SCIENCE?

[BlackTerrel]

If they are, I'd be willing to bet a month's salary that they are fully known to the government, and they, government, won't do a thing about it.

King is just providing the cover for whatever horrors will come after the fact.

Really? Our government is that good? They've fully identified every person who is likely to commit violence on US soil? Or every Iranian who is likely to commit violence on US soil?

Reading these forums I sometimes get the impression that the US government is an unstoppable force that literally has intelligence on every man, woman, child on earth and is capable of anything.... to they're the most incompetent idiots on the planet.

The truth is somewhere in between.

Anti-Fed - why is it that you think Iran is incapable of slipping a single terrorist through our border yet we (or Israel) are fully capable of slipping terrorists past Iran borders, overthrow governments in Egypt, set up insurrections in Syria etc...

[Agorism]

King is delusional in general anyways. He's a giant hot air bag and not as credible as Chet the Toad.

I wouldn't believe one word he said.

[Anti Federalist]

Anti-Fed - why is it that you think Iran is incapable of slipping a single terrorist through our border yet we (or Israel) are fully capable of slipping terrorists past Iran borders, overthrow governments in Egypt, set up insurrections in Syria etc...

Precedent.

We have long history of it, going back over 100 years now.

And the fact that, as I've made clear many times before, government may be bungling and ineffectual in other realms, but when it comes to waging war, subterfuge, killing and destroying stuff, it is a precise and punctilious engine of death.

No to mention the fact that we spend 698 billion a year on defense.

Iran spends 7 billion.

Government ought to know where every single Iranian citizen in the whole world is for that kind of money.

They know that about us.

And let's assume for a second you're right, and that there are Hezbollah sleepers behind every rock and tree, just waiting to get the word from The Ayatollah's High Command, shout "Allah Akbar" and slit our throats and rape our women.

Do you really want King's solutions?

Do you know what his solutions are?

Should the NYPD continue to target Muslims and Iranians in NYC for unconstitutional surveillance and searches?

[oyarde]

All the money King raised went to Ghadaffi in arms purchase deals. How do you know when the world has turned to crap ? When you give a dollar to a drunk Irish guy on the East Coast of the US and it ends up in the middle East with your tax dollars.

[Anti Federalist]

///

[BlackTerrel]

Precedent.

We have long history of it, going back over 100 years now.

And the fact that, as I've made clear many times before, government may be bungling and ineffectual in other realms, but when it comes to waging war, subterfuge, killing and destroying stuff, it is a precise and punctilious engine of death.

No to mention the fact that we spend 698 billion a year on defense.

Iran spends 7 billion.

Government ought to know where every single Iranian citizen in the whole world is for that kind of money.

How much of that is spent on tracking individuals and how much is spent on arms, fuel, salaries etc.?

Tracking every single Iranian citizen is an impossible task. No one would even attempt such a thing.


And let's assume for a second you're right, and that there are Hezbollah sleepers behind every rock and tree, just waiting to get the word from The Ayatollah's High Command, shout "Allah Akbar" and slit our throats and rape our women.

That's a bit of hyperbole. You're of the opinion that there are NONE (or that we know about every single one). I'm saying it's not an absurd possibility that there are SOME sleeper cells in this country.


Do you really want King's solutions?

Do you know what his solutions are?

Should the NYPD continue to target Muslims and Iranians in NYC for unconstitutional surveillance and searches?

No. But I also don't think we should downplay it and act like it's completely made up.

I'm against government intrusion but I would never claim "there is not a single American citizen who is a rapist or murderer".

[ctiger2]

It's baffling that people like King get elected and re-elected. Yes, Americans are THAT dumb.

[ExPatPaki]

Tracking every single Iranian citizen is an impossible task. No one would even attempt such a thing.


This is something you are pulling out of your ass, troll. You have nothing to back this up.



That's a bit of hyperbole.

No it's not. Why do you lie so much? Is this what Jesus teaches you?


You're of the opinion that there are NONE (or that we know about every single one).


You don't know AF's opinion. There's no way an illiterate like you can know anyone's opinion.


But I also don't think we should downplay it and act like it's completely made up.

Of course not, because you are the prime example of someone who wishes genocide on people who are not Christian.

[BlackTerrel]

You don't know AF's opinion. There's no way an illiterate like you can know anyone's opinion.

Yes I can. Because he stated it.


Of course not, because you are the prime example of someone who wishes genocide on people who are not Christian.

I enjoy the fact that you're stalking me on every thread because I said it is wrong to kill people who convert to Christianity. Whereas you have stated numerous times that conversion to Christianity is treason and should be punished by death. I've never wished physical harm on anyone for their religion - ever. Show me where I have.

For the record my current girlfriend is Hindu.

[ExPatPaki]

Yes I can. Because he stated it.


Sorry, but an illiterate troll like yourself cannot.


I've never wished physical harm on anyone for their religion - ever. Show me where I have.


Says the troll who supports religious apartheid.

[economics102]

I'm sure every country and/or organization of any size and sophistication has sleeper cells in every other major country or strategically relevant country. There are over 300 million people in the United States, and we don't even protect our borders well. How about we focus on not being hated instead of on trying to find needles in poorly guarded haystacks?

If I could respond to Peter King in person, I'd say, "you know what? Even if you found all these sleeper cells and deported/arrested them, I'd still feel just as unsafe because for me feeling safe means living in a country where outsiders don't want to attack us, not living in a country where I have to hope that our defense is always better than our enemies' offense."

And as someone who works in the computer world, I know that defense almost ALWAYS outpaces offense, because attacks are the primary driver of innovation in security.

[oyarde]

I do not feel Hezbollah will attack me . if they do , they better get me in the first few seconds ;)

[oyarde]

I was all over the property today , armed with only a pocket knife , axe and shovel. I felt very secure , did some work in the garden , lookedfor some mushrooms , poached a few daffodils near the property line near an old burned down homestead . Issued a few Fatwas to the squirrels ...... :)

[DerailingDaTrain]

Peter "I openly supported Irish Republican Army terrorists" King?

That fucking guy?



From Terrorist Bagman to Homeland Security Overlord: The Curious Career of Peter King

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2011/01/from-terrorist-bagman-to-homeland.html


In the person of Congressman Peter King (R-New York), the incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, the abstraction called "hypocrisy" has acquired tangible human form. After spending decades canvassing his fellow Irish-American Catholics to raise money for terrorists in Northern Ireland, King has promised to conduct a wide-ranging investigation of American Muslim congregations and cultural organizations in search of people providing "material support" for Islamic terrorism.

"We have to break through this politically correct nonsense which keeps us from debating and discussing what I think is one of the most vitally important issues in this country," King insists. "We are under siege by Muslim terrorists and yet there are Muslim leaders in this country who do not cooperate with law enforcement."
King has also demanded that the WikiLeaks whistleblower organization be designated a terrorist organization. He insists that the group provided "material support" to terrorism by publishing hundreds of thousands of pages' worth of previously classified documents, many of them describing criminal acts and institutionalized corruption on the part of policy-makers in the U.S. government. It's reasonable to suspect that King's antipathy toward WikiLeaks is inspired, at least in part, by personal concerns.

Among the documents made public by WikiLeaks is one that could be of particular interest to King -- a February 2010 CIA "Red Cell Special Memorandum" -- an "out-of-the-box" analysis examining "what it would mean for the US to be seen ... as an incubator and `exporter of terrorism.'" For example: "Some Irish-Americans have long provided financial aid and material support for violent efforts to compel the United Kingdom to relinquish control of Northern Ireland.... The US-based Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID), founded in the late 1960s, provided the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) with money that was frequently used for arms purchases."

NORAID was designated by the Justice Department as an arm of the IRA more than thirty years ago. King, whose Long Island district has a large and well-organized Irish-American constituency, was one of the group's most effective fundraisers and one of the IRA's staunchest supporters.

"We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry," King declared during a 1982 rally on behalf of the IRA in Nassau County. The "Provos" heartily reciprocated King's affection.

"During his visits to Ireland, Mr. King would often stay with well-known leaders of the IRA, and he socialized in IRA drinking haunts," recalled Irish journalist Ed Moloney, author of the definitive work A Secret History of the IRA, in a 2005 New York Sun profile written after King's tardy and reluctant break with the group. "At one of such clubs, the Felons, membership was limited to IRA veterans who had served time in jail."

Granted, many honorable and decent men -- both from Northern Ireland and elsewhere -- have become familiar with the inside of a prison cell. But the ex-convicts with whom King socialized during his visits to Ireland generally weren't innocent political prisoners.

King (center) meets with supporters of a Malachy McAllister, a convicted Irish terrorist.
King served as chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee from 2005 until the Republicans lost their majority in the 2006 mid-term election. During his last stint in that post, King used his influence to intervene on behalf of Malachy McAllister.

In 1981, McAllister served as an armed lookout during an ambush of a policeman outside a pub in Northern Ireland. The victim, it must be said, was a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a paramilitary force that became notorious for beating and otherwise mistreating innocent people. McAllister served three years in a British prison for his role in the ambush.

In 1988, after McAllister was released from prison, he narrowly escaped being killed by a Loyalist paramilitary gang that opened fire on his family's home in Belfast. The McAllisters fled to Canada, and in 1996 and settled in Wallington, New York. Seven years later the McAllisters' home came under armed siege once again -- this time by agents of the Department of Homeland Security, who carried out a 5 a.m. raid to enforce a deportation order. The family was to be expelled on account of what the agency called McAllister's "terrorist activities" a quarter-century ago.

A stay was issued while the deportation order was examined in the courts. King used the interval to lobby Homeland Security Commissar Michael Chertoff. In a letter to Chertoff, King insisted that McAllister's family would likely be murdered if they were sent back to Northern Ireland.

McAllister, like many Catholics in Ulster, endured inexcusable treatment at the hands of British occupation forces and Loyalist thugs. He admits to committing the acts for which he was incarcerated, but describes himself as a combatant in a civil war, rather than a terrorist. That distinction is difficult to defend in light of the fact that McAllister was a member of the Irish National Republican Army (INLA) -- the military wing of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP).

Whatever the merits of the Irish Republican cause, the INLA was not created merely to obtain independence for Northern Ireland, or to defend the rights of an abused minority. The group, which budded off from the "official" IRA in 1974, was a tiny, ultra-violent Leninist cell within the IRSP. While the Party specialized in political agitation, the INLA carried out bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, extortion, and other forms of "direct action" that frequently targeted helpless civilians.

It's quite likely that some of the money raised by Peter King on behalf of NORAID wound up funding the INLA's rampage. The group also received financial aid and training from Libya and the PLO.

The group's objective has never been merely to reclaim Ulster from the UK: It is committed to the unification of all 32 counties of Ireland in a socialist "worker's republic" of the kind that has been such an unqualified blessing in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Like other "liberation" movements of a similar vintage, the INLA cynically invested its Leninist political agenda with religious language and symbolism.

The INLA's cadres and supporters saw the group's terrorist campaign as, literally, a holy war. And Peter King, the once and future chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, gave eager and unapologetic material support to that terrorist jihad.

Despite King's backstory, his unqualified support for open-ended war abroad and authoritarian measures at home has made him a favorite of Fox News and other elements of the War Party's media apparatus. Commentator Jim Kouri, a vice president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, commends King for his support for "those on the frontline of the war on terrorism," which supposedly offers a favorable contrast to the record of "`useful idiots' ... such as Rep. John Conyers, who actually supports Fifth-Column Islamic groups against his own nation."

After all, didn't Conyers spend decades raising money for terrorists allied with Libya and the PLO, and then use his political clout on behalf of a would-be cop-killer who belonged to a Leninist criminal gang? No, wait a second: That was King, not Conyers.
"Liberators"? IRA rep Gerry Adams and Fidel Castro.

King's opponent in the recent mid-term congressional election tried, without success, to make an issue of the incumbent's support for Irish terrorism. Some of King's supporters attempted to dismiss the matter by pointing out that the IRA and its offshoots have never been a threat to the United States. Of course, the same is true of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamic terrorist groups that have long considered themselves to be comrades with the IRA in the struggle for global "liberation."

As Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, King will be the tribune of a large and growing "anti-Sharia" constituency, which is composed of people who insist that every mosque should be treated as a jihadist recruitment center and weapons depot. From that perspective -- as articulated by Frank Gaffney, its most forceful exponent -- anybody who believes in and practices the religion of Islam should be presumptively regarded as guilty of sedition.

With Sinn Fein official Martin McGuiness, 2000.
Historian Sharon Davies points out that the unfolding "anti-Sharia" campaign updates and transposes a very similar crusade from a century ago:

"In the early 1900s, many Americans were genuinely frightened by the perceived religious threat of the Roman Catholic Church and the suspected imperialistic intentions of its leader, the Pope. He was plotting the overthrow of the United States, warned the feature, to `make America Catholic.' His foot soldiers, tens of thousands of Catholic men who called themselves the Knights of Columbus, were busily stockpiling arms and ammunition in the basements of their churches, all in preparation for the day when their papist leader would give the signal for the violent insurrection to begin."

Fear of a Papist Holy War was propagated by widely read and hugely influential anti-Catholic publications, promoted by a revived Ku Klux Klan, and coalesced into state "convent inspection laws" permitting warrantless searches of monasteries, chapels, and rectories. Peter King's career almost seems like a perverse attempt to validate the work of those early 20th Century anti-Catholic bigots.

Between 1971 and 2005, about 1,800 people in Ireland were killed by IRA bombers and gunmen; the equivalent death toll in the United States would be 360,000 people. During that generation-long onslaught, the IRA "made the car-bomb the modern terrorist weapon du jour and perfected the manufacture of fertilizer-based home-made explosives of the sort now routinely used by jihadists," observes historian Moloney.

Peter King "owes his political career almost entirely to the ties he forged" with the people who carried out that bloody campaign, Moloney concludes. King's very first act after being elected to his congressional seat "was to jump on a plane to Belfast for a rousing celebration in the Felon's Club."

"Behind every great fortune, there's a crime," wrote Balzac. It's tempting to say the same of political careers, but this isn't strictly true: Crime is integral to politics. After all, politics is the business of managing the State, which as Murray Rothbard pointed out is nothing but organized banditry.

Peter King apparently isn't equipped with either a conscience or a sense of irony, so he isn't likely to appreciate the fact that his political career perfectly encapsulates the process through which petty thugs are transmuted into "statesmen."

I thought they were fighting to be free from the British ruling over them?

[Jusenkyo]

I thought they were fighting to be free from the British ruling over them?

I think the point is his hypocrisy on the matter. Complain about Hezbollah but support the IRA.

[oyarde]

I thought they were fighting to be free from the British ruling over them? They have harmed many innocents , and , are , mostly a bunch of commies .

[VanBummel]

Precedent.
And the fact that, as I've made clear many times before, government may be bungling and ineffectual in other realms, but when it comes to waging war, subterfuge, killing and destroying stuff, it is a precise and punctilious engine of death.

No to mention the fact that we spend 698 billion a year on defense.


Some months ago I racked my brain trying to think of anything and everything that the US government actually does a really good job at. The only things I could come up with were wasting money and killing people. :(

[DerailingDaTrain]

They have harmed many innocents , and , are , mostly a bunch of commies .

I know that in recent years they have harmed civilians but shouldn't Ireland be free from British rule?

[azxd]

When you consider that our DEA/BP/Customs agents claims to only apprehend/confiscate an estimated 10% of the people/drugs that cross our Southern border ... Well, let's just say that YES, absoultely there are people in this country who are not here to become good American citizens.

[eduardo89]

Uh, guys, I'm pretty sure Michael Scheuer has said that yes, there are Iranian sleeper agents all over our country who will retaliate IF our government attacks Iran.

As they should if the US attacks.

But I'm willing to bet an 80mpg Ford that should the US attack Iran there will be more CIA perpetrated attacks on Americans blamed on Iran than attacks by actual Iranian sleeper agents.

[AGRP]

Can we drug test these people? For all we know hes experiencing hallucinations.

[DerailingDaTrain]

As they should if the US attacks.

But I'm willing to bet an 80mpg Ford that should the US attack Iran there will be more CIA perpetrated attacks on Americans blamed on Iran than attacks by actual Iranian sleeper agents.

Come on...

If I get killed by an Iranian sleeper agent attack I hope you feel so guilty.

[MoneyWhereMyMouthIs2]

I wonder if this is why Obama sighed the "we'll take over everything" executive order the other day. This - being the notion that we will attack Iran and they will attack us from the inside. (or false flag attacks from the inside, whichever, whatever)

[azxd]

It's baffling that people like King get elected and re-elected. Yes, Americans are THAT dumb.Reconfirming my belief that there is little to hope for in this nation ... Thanks !!!

[azxd]

I wonder if this is why Obama sighed the "we'll take over everything" executive order the other day. This - being the notion that we will attack Iran and they will attack us from the inside. (or false flag attacks from the inside, whichever, whatever)
http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-ash2/50266_272510813388_3771607_n.jpg

[azxd]

Come on...

If I get killed by an Iranian sleeper agent attack I hope you feel so guilty.
If you get killed, it's because being armed and situationally aware is not a top priority ;)

[DerailingDaTrain]

If you get killed, it's because being armed and situationally aware is not a top priority ;)

But how can I protect myself from bomb attacks with a gun?What if I'm walking through the mall one day and an Iranian agent detonates a bomb in a store right next to me and I die? Answer that one :)

[MoneyWhereMyMouthIs2]

If you get killed, it's because being armed and situationally aware is not a top priority ;)


Not really true when you are talking about people with car bombs or people that wear body bombs. Not if you're involved in a populated area, anyway.