Rep. Peter King on John King, USA
CNN’s Candy Crowley spoke with Rep. Peter King (R-NY) about the recent breach in TSA security. This interview will air tonight on John King, USA at 7pm ET. A Highlight from the full interview after the jump and a full transcript of John King, USA, will be posted at CNN.com.
MANDATORY CREDIT: JOHN KING, USA
HIGHLIGHTS FROM FULL INTERVIEW
THIS IS A RUSH FDCH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CANDY CROWLEY, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: And if I could, the totality of the picture also includes that this comes in the same week or in the same 10-day period where a 95-year-old woman was stopped and couldn’t get through until the TSA was certain that her adult diaper didn’t contain explosives. Exactly how this all occurred is a little blurry, but nonetheless, a 95-year-old woman in a wheelchair wearing a diaper, the TSA bowed to public outrage, said OK, we’ll do fewer full patdowns of children, and then this happens, it just seems to me that the totality of the picture for a lot of people is something just isn’t working here. There seems to lack some commonsense.
REP. PETER KING (R-NY), CHAIR, HOMELAND SECURITY COMMITTEE: Yeah, I’m not as quick to rush to judgment on the first one. The reason I’m saying that is, last week in Baghdad, there was a man in a wheelchair who had a — he was suicide bomber, I believe he killed 67 people, either Baghdad or Afghanistan, I’m not certain, but they do use people in wheelchairs. We did have a case in Afghanistan of a 7-year-old girl, they strapped explosives to her. So even though they may not have handled it the right way, at least I could understand how that mistake was made. I cannot understand what happened at JFK. That is just indefensible.
CROWLEY: And in your mind, if it is what we are now told it is, if all the facts as we know them bear out, what needs to happen?
KING: I believe that they should take severe action against that employee, and I would believe that the TSA has to implement new training programs, have regimens, have much more inspections going on, having people from the administration monitoring what’s happening, let these employees know that they really are being watched. I mean, this is — this can’t be allowed to happen. This — we’re talking about life and death here. We’re not talking about somebody having a cup of coffee when no one’s looking. We’re talking about you could have a plane full of people getting killed because a person makes such an obvious mistake.
Listen, there’s always going to be mistakes made and you can have a forged ID yet somehow the screener may miss it, but if you have an obvious one of a wrong name, wrong date, wrong boarding pass and that’s not picked up, that’s a terrible sign and it’s — it encourages the enemy, is not reassuring to the American people. And part of the way our system works, is expected to work, is that as a deterrent to the enemy. They have to believe that it’s impossible to break through it. They see something like this, it encourages the enemy to try.
CROWLEY: Let me ask you a broader picture as we head into this July 4th weekend, and that is in the cache of materials that came out of Osama bin Laden’s home in Pakistan there was evidence that as late as February 2010 bin Laden wanted strikes in the U.S., particularly around symbolic holidays. Are you overly concerned or more concerned than you usually would be about this weekend, or are you feeling reasonably steady that — that this looks like a weekend that we’re well prepared for?
KING: I would almost say all of the above. I do feel reasonably secure because we have increased security as far as alerting local governments, alerting the private sector. There’s no doubt that we do know that al Qaeda was talking more about attacking the U.S. on symbolic dates. Also, in the lead-up to 9/11, the 10th anniversary of September 11th, we know that they are considering or are trying to plan attacks now.
Having said that, I’m not aware of any particular attack that’s being planned right now. But we do know they are looking for symbolism, they do want to do something dramatically for September 11th, and obviously the Fourth of July would be a prime time for that. So everyone has been alerted to be on extra guard, to be much more careful. And because of that, I feel reasonably secure.
But, Candy, you know, this is a dangerous world and al Qaeda is a dangerous enemy and we can never let our guard down. They’re waiting for the weekend or the weekday or any time when we don’t let our guard down. While we’re having a barbeque on the Fourth of July, they are plotting somewhere to kill us, and if it’s not the Fourth of July, it’s another date. These people never stop. They’re evil and they want to kill us.
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