Peter King's Terrorism Problem (Mother Jones)

Tim Murphy - Editorial fellow at Mother Jones
Wed Jan. 19, 2011
Mother Jones

When it comes to matters of national security, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) has never been accused of holding back. So when the political world suffered a collective freak-out over leaked diplomatic cables late last year, King, the top Republican on the House homeland security committee, naturally led the charge. In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, King warned that WikiLeaks' release of the classified documents amounted to supporting terrorism.

But according to experts in counterterrorism law, if the tough-on-terror policies King trumpets today had taken effect a few decades earlier, King himself might have been subject to prosecution. Over parts of three decades, from his days as an aspiring politician in Long Island through his early years in Congress, King was one of the nation's most outspoken supporters of the Irish Republican Army and a prolific fundraiser for the Irish Northern Aid Committee (NorAid), allegedly the IRA's American fundraising arm. The IRA waged a paramilitary campaign against the British presence in Northern Ireland for decades before peace accords were signed in 1998. Part of that effort included bombings and shootings that resulted in civilian deaths in England and Northern Ireland. During the period of King's involvement, the US government accused both NorAid and the IRA of links to terrorism...

King isn't the only conservative who says one thing and does another when it comes to material support. Last month, a panel of Bush-era luminaries—Rudy Giuliani, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey—traveled to Paris to speak at a conference in support of Mujahideen-e-Khalq, an Iranian Marxist group that's opposed to the Ahmadinejad regime but has landed on the State Department terror list (the designation cannot be challenged in court). Because the event's organizer, the French Committee for a Democratic Iran, was formed to build support for the MEK, Cole says the trio's advocacy constituted a clear breach of federal law...