"We can't gather the intelligence we need to foil future attacks, if we are blindly granting terrorists the right to remain silent. But for some reason, we've already done that - with the terrorist who tried to bring down Flight 253." -- Peter King
Peter King (born June 10, 1957 in Springfield, Massachusetts) is the author of five books, most notably Inside the Helmet, as well as a TV analyst and reporter.
Since 1992 King has been a member of the Board of Selectors for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Since 2006, he has been a part of Football Night in America, NBC's Sunday night NFL studio show.
"Again, we saw in Bosnia - we had U.N. peacekeepers tied to trees, being taken hostage. The fact is they don't have the type of deliberate and authoritative rule that I think is needed to get the job done.""And I think people who sort of glibly say, 'Well, you know, they're not going to handle security, UAE is a great ally,' four and a half years ago, they were not an ally, they were working with the enemy, and if those same people are still there today that were there then, these are real serious issues.""And if the imam and the Muslim leadership in that community is so intent on building bridges, then they should voluntarily move the mosque away from ground zero and move it whether it's uptown or somewhere else, but move it away from that area, the same as the pope directed the Carmelite nuns to move a convent away from Auschwitz.""As far as Iraq, the important thing is that the Taliban is gone in Afghanistan, three-quarters of the al-Qaida leadership is either dead or in jail, and we now have Saudi Arabia working with us, Pakistan working with us.""Ask Bill Clinton about Yasir Arafat. Clinton and Barak did everything they could in 2000 at Camp David. Arafat walked away from it.""But 85 percent of the mosques have extremist leadership in this country. Most Muslims, the overwhelming majority of Muslims, are loyal Americans.""George Bush, Dick Cheney, every one of the speakers praised John Kerry's war record. No one said he was unfit. They said he has terrible judgment, and that's his record as a senator. Nobody questioned his military record.""I don't know anyone at the highest levels who approved Abu Ghraib. If President Barack Obama for a moment thought that somebody at a high level had approved it, he would go after them.""I mean, I really don't want the federal government to be determining whether or not a person who feels certain ways about the environment or about animals or about certain religious issues should be considered an extremist. That to me is a type of thought control, mind control, which is very dangerous.""I support mosques, obviously. We need churches, temples, mosques. Whatever people use to speak with their god or to receive spiritual inspiration is good for the country. But the symbolism of it at ground zero, within two blocks or three blocks, I believe is wrong.""I think if we're going to live in this - in this world - in this technological world where information can be disseminated so quickly, we have to be serious and take firm, strong action against those who are putting American lives at risk. Because this will put people's lives at risk.""I think there has been a lack of full cooperation from too many people in the Muslim community.""If we have another 2,000 people killed, I want Nancy Pelosi and George Soros, John Conyers and Pat Leahy to go to the funeral and say, 'Your son was vaporized because we didn't want to dump some guy's head under water for 30 seconds.'""In the post-9/11 world you cannot give him the benefit of the doubt. As a result of our going into Iraq, not only is Saddam Hussein gone, but Qaddafi has given up his weapons of mass destruction and tremendous progress is being made in Iraq.""Just several years ago, Shaykh Kabbani, who is the head of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, when he was speaking at the State Department, said that more than 80 percent of the mosques were controlled by extremists. And from all I've seen over the last four or five years, the situation has even gotten worse.""My legislation would cut off all funding for trials of anyone from Guantanamo in any court in the United States of America. This bill would help stop the misguided plan to put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 terrorists on trial in Downtown Manhattan.""The Democrats in the Senate adopted a resolution, an amendment, saying that there should be no Guantanamo detainees brought into this country. So, more and more, we're finding the American people on one side, the ACLU and the troglodytes from the New York Times on the other, where they belong.""The department was set up primarily to protect us from another terrorist attack from Islamic terrorists, and yet they talk about everything but that.""The Muslims have, as everyone else says, the right to practice their religion and they have the right to construct a mosque at ground zero if they wish. What I am saying, though, is that they should listen to public opinion, they should listen to the deep wounds and anguish that this is causing to so many good people.""The party has to be rebuilt on all levels. In a way, maybe it's to be expected when you've had a governor in office for 12 years and he and his people are stepping down.""The president's dream of a worldwide liberal utopia is going to undermine the security of the United States.""The U.N. is capable of endless process and mindless psychobabble, but as far as getting the job done on the ground, I just don't see them doing it.""The whole idea of a nuclear system is to have a deterrent where we decide if we're going to use it.""There are too many people sympathetic to radical Islam. We should be looking at them more carefully and finding out how we can infiltrate them.""We are a nation at war - and we should act like it.""We went into Iraq because Saddam Hussein refused to account for his weapons of mass destruction, consistently violated UN resolutions and in a post-9/11 world no American president could afford to give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt.""Well, first, the situation in Afghanistan is much better than it was. But there is no comparison between Afghanistan and Iraq. Iraq has a bureaucracy, Iraq has wealth. Iraq has an educated class of people who are positioned to come in and take over.""WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States."
After attending Enfield High School in Enfield, Connecticut, King graduated from Ohio University in 1979, and following graduation, began working for The Cincinnati Enquirer, where he covered college sports and professional football from 1980 to 1985. He was an NFL beat writer for Newsday from 1985 to 1989, when he joined the staff of Sports Illustrated. He currently writes columns that partly cover the NFL for the magazine, and appears frequently as a commentator on radio, telegram, and TV talk shows across the nation.
King also writes the popular Monday Morning Quarterback column for SI.com as well as a "Monday Morning Quarterback: Tuesday Edition" edition. Typically, King will elaborate on the game or event he attended in person that weekend. Several recurring features are contained in the online column, including "The 10 Things I Think I Think", where he summarizes the highlights and lowlights of the prior week. He also makes personal observations on non-NFL issues, such as Starbucks (his favorite national chain coffee shop), other sporting events (often with respect to his favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox), his daughters, and travel and lodging (he has an issue with the Providence Westin and its policy of charging extra for use of the fitness room). King has also been outspoken in his columns - for example, he chided the Fox Network for putting a show such as Temptation Island on the air and for exploiting overweight people and midgets on various reality dating shows. "Monday Morning Quarterback: Tuesday Edition" is a mailbag column by King in which he typically answers four or five reader questions.
He also joined the HBO show Inside the NFL in 2002 as a managing editor and reporter. With the return of NFL programming to NBC at the start of the 2006 season, NBC started a new studio show called Football Night in America, set between the end of the Sunday afternoon games, and the primetime Sunday Night Football. King joined Bob Costas, Cris Collinsworth, Sterling Sharpe and Jerome Bettis, serving as a special "insider" reporter and analyst for the show, typically highlighting one or two major topics from that day in football.
During the 2008 offseason, he became co-host of The Opening Drive on Sirius NFL Radio. During the season, he co-hosts the show on Wednesday mornings with Randy Cross and during the offseason he co-hosts on Monday & Wednesday with Randy Cross and Bob Papa. The show is available on SIRIUS and XM Radio on channel 124.
In 2005 the governor of New Jersey appointed him to a fact finding task force in an attempt to end steroid and human growth hormone use in high school athletics.
He is the author of five books on football: 'Inside the Helmet' (1993), 'Football: A History of the Professional Game' (1993), 'Football' (1997), 'Greatest Quarterbacks' (1999) and 'Sports Illustrated Monday Morning Quarterback: A fully caffeinated guide to everything you need to know about the NFL'
In 2009 he was awarded the Dick McCann Memorial Award for his work in professional football.
King lives in Boston, with his wife Ann. He has two daughters, Laura, who attended Tufts University and Mary Beth, who attended and played field hockey at Colgate University.
