(Spirit Lake)—The closure of a number of U.S. embassies out of fear of a possible terrorist attack is drawing fire from Congressman Steve King. In an interview this morning with KUOO news, King said it’s sending the wrong message…(click here for comment.) “These are sovereign territories each of these embassies. We should reinforce them, we should defend them. If we decide we want to pull an ambassador out of an embassy for a security reason there’s no reason for us to tell the enemy that we’re pulling people out of these embassies. And if you want to pull an ambassador out because you don’t think it’s safe just let him be in another country for while. You don’t have to tell them. And you don’t have to tell them where he is, either. So what this is is it’s signaling to our enemies our tactics.”
King adds that the decision to close the embassies begs the question at which point are they safe to reopen?…(click here for comment.) “I don’t think that you can declare it very easily that now their safe after the internet chatter goes down. Is that our needle? Somehow a barometer if the internet chatter goes down we decide they’re safe so we’ll send our ambassadors back in? I don’t agree with the tactic and I think it shows an America weak. And as Bill Kristal said a year ago the President said Osama Bin Laden is dead, we have Al Quaida on the run. Bill Kristal said well, they have us on the run today”.
King says the attack at Benghazi renewed Al Qaeda and its sympathizers…(click here for comment.) “They demonstrated for them that’s a huge victory. It surpassed their planning capabilities or what they planned. They had the capabilities to plan, but it surpassed what they had planned. And so now with that it energizes them to attack more Americans. We have resolve. Americans are not the kind of people that shrink from that kind of a task. We have people that want to be there that want to be defending our embassies and this message is a message of weakness, not of strength.”
King made his comments this (Mon.) morning during at stop at the KUOO studios while he was en route to an event in Estherville.
