Rep. Peter King Wants Treasury Dept. To Put Wikileaks On Terrorist List

from the overreact-much? dept

Apparently Rep. Peter King is in a competition with Senator Joe Lieberman to see who can overreact more to Wikileaks. It seems like a neck-and-neck competition, with Peter King’s brand of craziness potentially taking the lead. King, of course, was the guy who insisted that Wikileaks should be declared a terrorist organization and claimed (with nothing whatsoever to back this up) that the cable leak was worse than a military attack. His latest move is to ask Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to add Wikileaks to the Treasury Department’s “Specially Designated National and Blocked Persons List,” which is usually used to designate terrorist and organized crime operations.

So while Lieberman merely used political pressure to get companies to block or censor Wikileaks, King wants it to become official government policy that no US companies or individuals should be doing anything with Wikileaks. Overreact much?

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Companies: wikileaks

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Comments on “Rep. Peter King Wants Treasury Dept. To Put Wikileaks On Terrorist List”

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61 Comments
Derek Bredensteiner (profile) says:

Peter King's point of view

The only verifiable evidence that I can see in Peter King’s open letter that he uses to back up his claims regarding the danger of WikiLeaks is half a sentence from a New York times article. Here’s one larger quote from the same article:

“Administration officials said they were not aware of anyone who has been attacked or imprisoned as a direct result of information in the 2,700 cables that have been made public to date by WikiLeaks, The New York Times and several other publications, many with some names removed. But they caution that many dissidents are under constant harassment from their governments, so it is difficult to be certain of the cause of actions against them.”

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:3 Re:

… if [police] walked up and shot someone, they would go to jail…

You are not describing reality.

Read the news much? Recently, in Long Beach, CA police walked up to a man sitting on a porch and shot him without warning. In Seattle, WA, police walked up to a deaf guy, and shot him four seconds later for not listening. These are not isolated instances.

It’s not illegal when the cops shoot people. That’s the real law: The law that gets enforced.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:2 Re:

Awe, isn’t that cute. An AC trolling. Stick around. I think Darryl is taking a few days off, so you can fill in for him.

That’s funny, one anonymous poster calling another one out for being anonymous. Pot, meet kettle.

Still, no denying it though, huh? Thank goodness for anonymous posters, otherwise I imagine you and your buddies would like to track a few of them down and put bullets in their heads. Gee, now wouldn’t that be “cute”?

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

The best thing about putting them on the terrorist watch list is that we will no longer have to hear about how much it sucks that their staff and simps are getting hassled at the border.

I feel much more terrorized by certain gov’t officials, agencies and politicians (such as Peter King) than just about anyone else. I we start by putting THEM on the TERRORIST list.

J Bauer says:

He's a terrorist...

Any threat to the established, cover-up, deals in the dark administration seems to be a terrorist.

It’s a far cry from our founding fathers, who wanted to make sure states and local militias would exist to overthrow the federal government if they overreached the authority granted by the Constitution.

Sadly, I think our founders would reech if they saw what their United States had become.

Michial Thompson (user link) says:

Maybe the Watch list NEEDS this

As useless as the Terrorist Watch List is, maybe it needs this type of watering down to finaly stop them from trying to waste time and harrass honest citizens with it.

Never could figure out how a list of names was remotely useful in a world where fake IDs are so readily available, and any terrorist worth being scared of probably has a stock pile of them sitting in his closet.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

Well, well, well. Whatever’s in those cables about him, he’s so terrified of it that he thinks people at large are going to be out for his blood when they find out about it. I’m pretty sure he was thinking of saving his own hide when he wrote a law to keep everyone with a gun 1000′ away from “certain high-profile government officials”.

Like Lieberman before him, I’ve got to ask: Just what are these particular politicos so rabid over everyone potentially finding out about? Did they bring some of those “tribal dance” kids home for a private showing or something?

Gwiz (profile) says:

Re: Re:

Like Lieberman before him, I’ve got to ask: Just what are these particular politicos so rabid over everyone potentially finding out about?

This has me curious too. Probably a lot of others also. And I normally wouldn’t care, because politicians are, well, politicians.

It’s akin to the Streisand Effect, but not quite the same. We might need a new name for this type of thing.

Anonymous Coward says:

Someone should make a law to put Rep. Peter King and Senator Joe Lieberman and a terrorist list for trying to break Freedom, also someone should make a public announcement to call all nutjobs out there to target Mr. Lieberman, make sure he understands what he said before calling for the assassination of a public figure really means.

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