GOP address: King says attack should sway Gitmo decisions

The failed Christmas Day attack should convince President Barack Obama to keep
Guantanamo detainees out of the U.S., Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) said
Saturday.

King, the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the failed attack should remind the president that the U.S. is at war.

{mosads}”This is about whether we’ve learned our lesson,” King said in the weekly GOP address. “Terrorists still have innocent people in their sights and the will to murder them. They are always working on the next attack, refining their methods, searching the globe for new recruits.”

King called for Congress to pass the “Keep Terrorist Out of America Act,” a Republican-sponsored measure that would make it harder to transfer detainees at Guantanamo into U.S. facilities.

“There’s a good reason why the government has had such a hard time transferring these terrorist detainees to other countries,” King said. “They are the worst of the worst. No one should want them.”

King also repeated the GOP’s position that Obama should try suspected terrorists in military tribunals instead of civilian courts. Democrats have argued that civilian courts are capable of handling high-profile cases and that such trials won’t hamper intelligence gathering.

King claimed that granting suspected terrorists the rights involved in a federal trial would hamper interrogations.

“We can’t gather the intelligence we need to foil future attacks if we are blindly granting terrorists the right to remain silent,” he said. “But for some reason, we’ve already done that with the terrorist who tried to bring down Flight 253.”