From Terrorist Bagman to Homeland Security Overlord: The Curious Career of Peter King

There's only two things wrong with him -- his face: Congressman Peter "Janus" King

In the person of Congressman Peter King (R-New York), the incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, the abstraction called "hypocrisy" has acquired tangible human form. After spending decades canvassing his fellow Irish-American Catholics to raise money for terrorists in Northern Ireland, King has promised to conduct a wide-ranging investigation of American Muslim congregations and cultural organizations in search of people providing "material support" for Islamic terrorism.

"We have to break through this politically correct nonsense which keeps us from debating and discussing what I think is one of the most vitally important issues in this country," King insists. "We are under siege by Muslim terrorists and yet there are Muslim leaders in this country who do not cooperate with law enforcement."

King has also demanded that the WikiLeaks whistleblower organization be designated a terrorist organization. He insists that the group provided "material support" to terrorism by publishing hundreds of thousands of pages' worth of previously classified documents, many of them describing criminal acts and institutionalized corruption on the part of policy-makers in the U.S. government.  It's reasonable to suspect that King's antipathy toward WikiLeaks is inspired, at least in part, by personal concerns. 

Among the documents made public by WikiLeaks is one that could be of particular interest to King -- a February 2010 CIA "Red Cell Special Memorandum" -- an "out-of-the-box" analysis examining "what it would mean for the US to be seen ... as an incubator and `exporter of terrorism.'" For example: "Some Irish-Americans have long provided financial aid and material support for violent efforts to compel the United Kingdom to relinquish control of Northern Ireland.... The US-based Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID), founded in the late 1960s, provided the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) with money that was frequently used for arms purchases."

NORAID was designated by the Justice Department as an arm of the IRA more than thirty years ago. King, whose Long Island district has a large and well-organized Irish-American constituency, was one of the group's most effective fundraisers and one of the IRA's staunchest supporters.

"We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry," King declared during a 1982 rally on behalf of the IRA in Nassau County. The "Provos" heartily reciprocated King's affection.

"During his visits to Ireland, Mr. King would often stay with well-known leaders of the IRA, and he socialized in IRA drinking haunts," recalled Irish journalist Ed Moloney, author of the definitive work A Secret History of the IRA, in a 2005 New York Sun profile written after King's tardy and reluctant break with the group. "At one of such clubs, the Felons, membership was limited to IRA veterans who had served time in jail."

Granted, many honorable and decent men -- both from Northern Ireland and elsewhere -- have become familiar with the inside of a prison cell. But the ex-convicts with whom King socialized during his visits to Ireland generally weren't innocent political prisoners.

King (center) meets with supporters of a  Malachy McAllister, a convicted Irish terrorist.

 King served as chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee from 2005 until the Republicans lost their majority in the 2006 mid-term election. During his last stint in that post, King used his influence to intervene on behalf of Malachy McAllister.

In 1981, McAllister served as an armed lookout during an ambush of a policeman outside a pub in Northern Ireland. The victim, it must be said, was a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a paramilitary force that became notorious for beating and otherwise mistreating innocent people. McAllister served three years in a British prison for his role in the ambush.

In 1988, after McAllister was released from prison, he narrowly escaped being killed by a Loyalist paramilitary gang that opened fire on his family's home in Belfast. The McAllisters fled to Canada, and in 1996 and settled in Wallington, New York. Seven years later the McAllisters' home came under armed siege once again -- this time by agents of the Department of Homeland Security, who carried out a 5 a.m. raid to enforce a deportation order. The family was to be expelled on account of what the agency called McAllister's "terrorist activities" a quarter-century ago.

A stay was issued while the deportation order was examined in the courts. King used the interval to lobby Homeland Security Commissar Michael Chertoff. In a letter to Chertoff, King insisted that McAllister's  family would likely be murdered if they were sent back to Northern Ireland.

McAllister, like many Catholics in Ulster, endured inexcusable treatment at the hands of  British occupation forces and Loyalist thugs. He admits to committing the acts for which he was incarcerated, but describes himself as a combatant in a civil war, rather than a terrorist. That distinction is difficult to defend in light of the fact that McAllister was a member of the Irish National Republican Army (INLA) -- the military wing of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP).

Whatever the merits of the Irish Republican cause, the INLA was not created merely to obtain independence for Northern Ireland, or to defend the rights of an abused minority. The group, which budded off from the "official" IRA in 1974, was a tiny, ultra-violent Leninist cell within the IRSP. While the Party specialized in political agitation, the INLA carried out bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, extortion, and other forms of "direct action" that frequently targeted helpless civilians.

It's quite likely that some of the money raised by Peter King on behalf of NORAID wound up funding the INLA's rampage. The group also received financial aid and training from Libya and the PLO.

The group's objective has never been merely to reclaim Ulster from the UK: It is committed to the unification of all 32 counties of Ireland in a socialist "worker's republic" of the kind that has been such an unqualified blessing in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Like other "liberation" movements of a similar vintage, the INLA cynically invested its Leninist political agenda with religious language and symbolism.

The INLA's cadres and supporters saw the group's terrorist campaign as, literally, a holy war.  And Peter King, the once and future chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, gave eager and unapologetic material support to that terrorist jihad.

Despite King's backstory, his unqualified support for open-ended war abroad and authoritarian measures at home has made him a favorite of Fox News and other elements of the War Party's media apparatus. Commentator Jim Kouri, a vice president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, commends King for his support for "those on the frontline of the war on terrorism," which supposedly offers a favorable contrast to the record of "`useful idiots' ...  such as Rep. John Conyers, who actually supports Fifth-Column Islamic groups against his own nation." 

After all, didn't Conyers spend decades raising money for terrorists allied with Libya and the PLO, and then use his political clout on behalf of a would-be cop-killer who belonged to a Leninist criminal gang? No, wait a second: That was King, not Conyers.

"Liberators"? IRA rep Gerry Adams and Fidel Castro.

King's opponent in the recent mid-term congressional election tried, without success, to make an issue of the incumbent's support for Irish terrorism. Some of King's supporters attempted to dismiss the matter by pointing out that the IRA and its offshoots have never been a threat to the United States. Of course, the same is true of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamic terrorist groups  that have long considered themselves to be comrades with the IRA in the struggle for global "liberation." 

As Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, King will be the tribune of a large and growing "anti-Sharia" constituency, which is composed of people who insist that every mosque should be treated as a jihadist recruitment center and weapons depot. From that perspective -- as articulated by Frank Gaffney, its most forceful exponent -- anybody who believes in and practices the religion of Islam should be presumptively regarded as guilty of sedition.

With Sinn Fein official Martin McGuiness, 2000.

Historian Sharon Davies points out that the unfolding "anti-Sharia" campaign updates and transposes a very similar crusade from a century ago:

"In the early 1900s, many Americans were genuinely frightened by the perceived religious threat of the Roman Catholic Church and the suspected imperialistic intentions of its leader, the Pope. He was plotting the overthrow of the United States, warned the feature, to `make America Catholic.' His foot soldiers, tens of thousands of Catholic men who called themselves the Knights of Columbus, were busily stockpiling arms and ammunition in the basements of their churches, all in preparation for the day when their papist leader would give the signal for the violent insurrection to begin."

Fear of a Papist Holy War was propagated by widely read and hugely influential anti-Catholic publications,  promoted by a revived Ku Klux Klan, and coalesced into state "convent inspection laws" permitting warrantless searches of monasteries, chapels, and rectories. Peter King's career almost seems like a perverse attempt to validate the work of those early 20th Century anti-Catholic bigots.

Between 1971 and 2005, about 1,800 people in Ireland were killed by IRA bombers and gunmen; the equivalent death toll in the United States would be  360,000 people. During that generation-long onslaught, the IRA "made the car-bomb the modern terrorist weapon du jour and perfected the manufacture of fertilizer-based home-made explosives of the sort now routinely used by jihadists," observes historian Moloney.

Peter King "owes his political career almost entirely to the ties he forged" with the people who carried out that bloody campaign, Moloney concludes. King's very first act after being elected to his congressional seat "was to jump on a plane to Belfast for a rousing celebration in the Felon's Club."

"Behind every great fortune, there's a crime," wrote Balzac. It's tempting to say the same of political careers, but this isn't strictly true: Crime is integral to politics. After all, politics is the business of managing the State, which as Murray Rothbard pointed out is nothing but organized banditry.

Peter King apparently isn't equipped with either a conscience or a sense of irony, so he isn't likely to appreciate the fact that his political career perfectly encapsulates the process through which petty thugs are transmuted into "statesmen."

Your donations help keep Pro Libertate on-line. Thanks, and God bless!

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Plunderbund's Persecution of Phil Hart (Good News Update, July 30)

See the update below.

The memory of man runs not to a time when an elected representative faced an ethics inquiry over official actions involving the theft and redistribution of the property of other people. 

By way of illustration, consider -- if you can stand to -- the career of the late Robert Byrd. The former Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan "redeemed" himself by spending more than a half-century building monuments to himself out of wealth pillaged from other people. Byrd's memorials include a statue of himself he inflicted on the West Virginia state capitol, in violation of a law forbidding such acts of taxpayer-funded narcissism by living politicians. 

Former Exalted Cyclops, now immortalized in bronze.

During his long reign as West Virginia's pompadoured paladin of pork, Byrd never
faced an ethics inquiry. This is because the erstwhile Klansman was a dutiful servant of the Plunderbund. 

By way of contrast, Idaho state representative Phil Hart finds himself arraigned before the ethics commisariat because he provoked the hostility of the tax-extraction bureaucracy.

His "offense" was to questioning the constitutional and legal premises on which that bureaucracy was built. Quixotic though his campaign might be, Hart has never been guilty of corruption or criminal conduct. Yet his supposed allies in the state Republican Party seem determined to expel him from the legislature.



Rep. Hart, who represents a northern Idaho town called Athol in the state legislature, has been uniformly execrated in the courtier press as a "tax cheat" and "scofflaw" by the media in both Idaho and Washington. 

It is true that Hart -- an engineer by education and professional background, a reluctant politician by conviction -- withheld tax payments while mounting a constitutional challenge to the federal income tax. However, after exhausting his judicial remedies in 2004, Hart filed a tax return and has since then paid more than $120,000 in combined taxes, interest, and penalties. 

This isn't the behavior of a determined "tax cheat" (an expression that connotes a moral delinquency on the part of someone trying to protect his honestly earned wealth from the designs of government-sanctioned robbers). Furthermore, there's nothing criminal or corrupt about mounting a constitutional challenge and losing in the courts.

Rep. Hart's actual offense was not withholding payment of taxes, but rather refusing to surrender to the IRS the names and contact information of the thousands of people who purchased his self-published book Constitutional Income: Do You Have Any?, a detailed, scholarly examination of the history of the federal income tax.  

In writing that book, Hart applied the mental discipline of a trained engineer to the task of examining the convoluted legal and political history of the income tax.  This included a study of every available legislative debate over the 16th Amendment, as well as contemporaneous media accounts and the official transcripts of the relevant Supreme Court decisions. Many of the documents Hart examined were found only through exceptionally devoted research and had never been read by eyes other than his. 

Hart's conclusion was that "there is no evidence upon which the government can rely for their claim that the American People desired to have their wages and salaries taxed.... It was never the intention of the American People for the 16th Amendment to confer the new power upon Congress that the bureaucracy says it has."

"Among the states which purportedly ratified the 16th Amendment, at least four of them have overturned state income taxation on the basis that earning a living is a fundamental right which cannot be taxed," continues Hart. A tax on one's wages is a form of slavery; it is literally a tax on a person's right to exist.


The original intent of the 16th Amendment, as one Congressman pointed out during a 1943 congressional on the House floor (see Congressional Record, March 27,1943, p. 2580), was not to impose a tax "on income as such," but rather to impose an "excise tax with respect to certain activities and privileges which is measured by reference to the income which they produce." In other words, the income tax was applied to income derived from the privilege of acting as a government-created corporation. 

As is the case with much of what happened in annus horribilis 1913 -- the Federal Reserve System being the most notable example -- the income tax was sold to the public as a way of protecting the common people from the predations of the super-wealthy. 

Currently burning in hell: Nelson Aldrich.

At the time, the Republican-created tariff system that amounted to "a tax placed on the American people not by government, but by business," writes Hart. 

The income tax was designed to target those who profited from government-created and tariff-assisted monopolies. This was the "bait." The "switch" came once the 16th Amendment was ratified, when legislators in thrall to what used to be called the Money Power (with the detestable Nelson Aldrich playing a key role, as he did in the creation of the Federal Reserve) retrofitted language into the tax code that defined "wages" as the revenue source targeted by the income tax. 


Hart's analysis is similar to, but more comprehensive than, many other critiques of the income tax system. He is optimistic that the system can be reformed if he and others can cultivate sufficient awareness of the original intent behind the income tax, and the institutionalized fraud committed by the current tax bureaucracy. 

Unfortunately, he seems to have radically overestimated the system's capacity for institutional reform, while radically underestimating its capacity for institutionalized malice toward those who pose a substantial threat.




"I read your book `Constitutional Income: Do You Have Any?'" Hart was notified in a letter from IRS agent Barbara Parks announcing that the state-sponsored terrorist clique employing her was beginning an "investigation" of the book. The purpose of that inquiry, she continued, was "to determine whether or not your statements are commercial speech and whether this activity causes harm to the government." 

With the help of the Center for Individual Rights, Hart successfully sued the IRS to interdict the agency's demand that he turn over the names of everybody who had purchased his book. Four years later, the IRS retaliated against Hart by issuing a final audit report denying all of his business deductions for eight years, hitting him with an additional tax liability of roughly $125,000. When he protested his treatment to the IRS, an official with the agency gloatingly explained: "When you don't give us everything we ask for, you get all of your deductions denied."

"During [my] four year audit, I provided the IRS with all my canceled checks, receipts, invoices and so on -- boxes worth," Hart recounts. "Yet these deductions were denied solely for political reasons." 

Certified Public Accountant Paul J. Desfosses, a retired U.S. Treasury Agent residing in Pocatello, Idaho, sustains and elaborates on Hart's conclusion that he has been targeted for retaliation by the IRS "for failing to `snitch' on and provide the names of those Citizens who might have dared to buy and read [his] book with its critical history and assessment of Federal Income Tax Law."

"I wish I could say that Representative Hart is wrong and that the IRS does not demand the names of Citizens who read disparaging comments about the Federal Income Tax, the IRS, or `big brother government' in general," writes Desfosses. "The truth is, that does happen...."


"While assigned to the Internal Revenue Service Idaho District, I was a National Treasury Employees Union Official and I routinely acted as the Union Steward in situations involving IRS employees who had been ordered to commit reprehensible and often felony criminal actions by their IRS managers or other IRS top officials," Desfosses elaborates. The agency "collected and compiled huge lists of citizens who were then targeted for audit and harassment for having bought and read a book such as Representative Hart's," or because they were perceived to be "a `threat' to the Federal Government's power" by IRS supervisors.


Representative Hart isn't the only recent victim of this treatment, Desfosses continues. "In April I attended a U.S. Tax Court trial involving an Idaho State University Professor who had obviously been targeted by [the] IRS at the request of a Federal District Court Judge whose past criminal actions the professor had exposed in a newsletter," thereby resulting in the denial of an appointment to the Appeals Court. But abuses of this kind -- against both tax victims and IRS employees still burdened with a functioning conscience --are commonplace, Desfosses concludes.


In persecuting the Plunderbund's enemies, the IRS can rely on the support of minor-league predators in state-level positions. So it's not surprising that the Idaho Tax Commission, after learning of the IRS's assault on Hart, gleefully piled on, demanding its cut of the fraudulently inflated "taxable income" and barraging him with tax liens. 

Since abandoning his constitutional challenge, Hart ruefully observes, none of the more than $120,000 he has paid "has been used to offset any of the lien amounts." His ongoing legal struggle with the Tax Commission provided the pretext for the ethics investigation against Hart. 

In Idaho, as in other states, legislators are protected from any "civil process" while the legislature is in session (vide the Idaho State Constitution, Art. III,  Sec. 7: "Senators and representatives in all cases ... shall not be liable to any civil process during the session of the legislature, nor during the ten days next before the commencement thereof....") 

Invoking that long-established principle, Rep. Hart sought to postpone his protracted legal struggle with the Idaho Tax Commission until after the end of the legislative session. This was somehow transmuted by his critics into an attempt "to obtain special treatment from the Idaho Tax Commission." Likewise, Hart's service on the tax policy committee was described as giving the appearance of an attempt "to set aside the tax law and obtain personal financial benefit."

The second charge is facially ludicrous. In describing Rep. Hart's supposed offense, Idaho House Minority Leader John Rusche complained that the committee assignment creates "the perception of a conflict of interest." But neither he nor any of Hart's other critics can specify the "financial benefit" Hart supposedly receives from that post. Indeed, Hart's service has done nothing to stanch his financial hemorrhage, much less provide him with some ill-obtained emolument. 

As Washington state legislator Matthew Shea observes in a tightly-reasoned essay examining the principle of legislative immunity in light of precedent and practices in other states, Rep. Hart's legal position is unassailable. 

"Rep. Hart has relied on the legislative immunity provision of the Idaho Constitution to postpone working on his own tax issues, which have been ongoing for a few years," writes Rep. Shea, who is also a practicing attorney. "There is no question that it is within the sovereign power of the states to afford this protection. Furthermore, the law seems to be clearly on Rep. Hart's side. So why does the witch hunt continue?"

"Not only are Rep. Hart's accusers in error," concludes Rep. Shea, "but the entire situation substantiates the very reason legislative immunity was written into the constitution in the first place -- to prevent political persecution." 


In an interview with Pro Libertate Rep. Hart -- a political ally of several insurgent candidates in the recent Idaho Republican primaries -- expressed the view that the ethics complaint was confected by enemies within the statist elements of the state's Republican establishment. This is an entirely plausible explanation for the otherwise inexplicable decision of the Republican-dominated legislative leadership to stage an ethics inquisition on the basis of terminally flimsy charges. 

Already under siege by the world's most despicable terrorist syndicate (no, not al-Qaeda -- the IRS),  Hart now has to contend with spurious charges of seeking "special treatment" and "financial gain." Yet state Rep. Ken Roberts remains secure within the Idaho Republican Party in spite of the fact, recently disclosed by the Lewiston Tribune, that Roberts has received nearly $370,000 in farm subsidies since 1995. 

Roberts, who ritualistically reviles subsidies directed at others, insists that when he's on the receiving end of plunder he's not redistributing wealth, but rather "recycling wealth." Predictably, nobody in the state Republican leadership has proposed that Roberts be subjected to an ethics inquiry. 


The Idaho Falls Post-Register notes that "three of the four members of the House GOP leadership team have cashed federal farm checks." A total of 36 current members of the state legislature have received federal agriculture payments (including disaster assistance and conservation reserve payments) since 1995. Of that number, 19 received subsidies -- and 18 of the Welfare Queens are Republicans, the people who "led the mostly ceremonial fight against the federal government during the 2010 legislative session," observes the Post-Register.


Phil Hart's fight against federal tyranny was substantive, not ceremonial -- and that's why he's taking fire not only from the agents of the Plunderbund who confront him, but also from the less principled Republicans who are cowering behind him. 

                                     UPDATE, July 30: "I believe it's over." 

After a three-hour inquest in which Rep. Hart's votes, tax controversies, and personal actions were subjected to minute scrutiny, all of the ethics charges dealing with supposed conflicts of interest were dismissed. 

The only remaining charge -- namely, that Hart may have "abused" his office by seeking to postpone tax litigation during the legislative session -- has been postponed and "could result in a legal challenge that would take years if they pursuit it," Hart informed Pro Libertate. 

"Deputy Attorney General Brian Kane said that the complaint was filed and then `we went on a fishing expedition,'" Hart recalls. "They weren't able to catch anything, but they certainly tried."

As for the remaining charge, "I'm in a rock solid position," Hart continues, "the same one that's been followed in 11 other states. I wouldn't have proceeded as I did unless my legal position was as solid as it is." This may result in litigation, and if it does, Hart predicts, "I'll win." In any case, "it looks like it will be a little harder to throw me under the bus." 



If you can, please help keep Pro Libertate on-line. Thanks, and God bless!

Please join me Saturday evenings from 8:00-11:00 Mountain Time for Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!