Rep. Peter King Praises NYPD, FBI for Catching Faisal Shahzad
The ranking member of the Homeland Security committee in the House of Representatives had a lot to say this morning, just hours after a suspect was apprehended in the attempted bombing of Times Square last Saturday night. So it was fitting that Rep. Peter King, a Republican from New York, was made to wait.
Luckily, King moved on, praising the “first rate” police work of the NYPD and the FBI in catching Faisal Shahzad as he was about to fly off to Dubai. But praise quickly turned to criticism, which he directed at the federal government.
“Maybe some day soon people will realize that New York really is the number one target,” he said, unhappy that the Obama administration has slashed funding to the city. “A number of us have been saying for quite a while that the next attack on Manhattan would come from the outer-boroughs, or the suburbs, or Connecticut or New Jersey, and the bomb would be transported into the city.”
And that’s exactly what happened: Shahzad drove a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder stocked with gasoline, fertilizer, and other scary stuff into the city from Connecticut, where he lived until recently. Not to mention…
“There’s the Pakistani link,” said King, referring to the recent months-long trip Shahzad took there. “On Sunday you had people saying they were convinced it was a lone wolf, this was too amateurish to be part of any terrorist act.”
Though no links have been proven yet, King believes, “you have to assume he’s Al-Qaeda, and work your way back,” because terrorist organizations these days are not able to train their recruits in the sophisticated manner of just a decade or so ago.
“They’re not able to bring them over as easily to Afghanistan and train them and send them back here,” said King. Skills and sophistication have diminished, but such “homegrown” terrorists are more difficult to track because, King said, “They’re not on our radar screens.”
He’s concerned about a follow-up to the failed attack, since a similarly foiled incident in London in 2007 was followed by a successful attack at the Glasgow airport days later. King warned, “These bombs are unsophisticated, until they go off.”
NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly “is a zealot” on anti-terrorism, said King, with around 1,000 cops assigned to that task, compared to just a handful devoted to it in Chicago. “Outside New York, this is somewhere way in the back of their minds,” said King. “September 11 is like Gettysburg or Pearl Harbor: it’s an historical event. And they don’t realize that everyday, there’s an Islamic enemy which is trying to kill us.”
Sort of like how King and other faraway lawmakers shouldn’t be so quick to criticize Arizona’s recent hard-line approach to immigration control. He supports it on the grounds that Arizona’s situation is much more dire than in the rest of the country.
“It’s not just a question of having illegal immigrants overcrowding a city,” he said. “We’re talking about almost an invasion in parts of Arizona right now.”
When Imus blamed him and the rest of Congress for not securing the borders, King protested that he had tried to begin the process in 2005 by passing a bill in the House that never made it through the Senate. Not that it would have made much of a difference.
“Immigration reform is a euphemism for amnesty,” he told Imus. “All immigration reform would do is legalize the illegal immigrants that are here, and they can say, ‘We don’t have any more illegal immigrants!’”
-Julie Kanfer
Reader Comments (1)
Peter King is a hypocrite, phony, and stupid person. If he weren't a NINE TERM Congressman, I might be inclined to think
he had some genuine sense of public service. His support of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) would seem to contradict
his current -- more politically expedient positions -- regarding terrorism. And his MinuteMan strategy just a joke.
The I-Man needs to drop this loser from the rotation.