Ross Clark
assessed as not a risk, were swiftly released and others kept under close observation. National security was the first priority. But that is not how things seem to work now. Remarkably only 14 of those 400 Britons who have returned home after joining IS have been jailed. Yet all of them have surely committed a criminal offence on account of having joined a terror group.
What about the others? Are they being closely enough observed so as to prevent their doing what their IS masters have implored them to do and launch terror attacks on us? Don’t bet on it. The security services have as much as admitted they do not have the resources properly to keep tabs on all suspects.
According to Professor Peter Neumann of King’s College, London, an expert on the security services, MI5 can maintain round-the-clock surveillance on a maximum of 50 people at one time. That explains why several terror attacks in recent years have been carried out by people whom the security services had been monitoring at one stage but who dropped off the radar because others were considered a greater threat.
Where security services suspect British citizens living in Britain of terrorist sympathies you can understand their problem: it is very difficult to establish the intentions of someone who is living an outwardly normal life. But where people have made the clear decision to travel to IS territory and join what everyone knows is a terror group, there should be absolutely no question about it. These people should not be allowed back into the country.
Ideally their passports should be cancelled so as to make it difficult for them to travel anywhere. Let them face justice in Syria and Iraq. I appreciate that under international law we cannot leave people stateless but that isn’t the same thing as cancelling their passport. The Government now has temporary exclusion orders to prevent terrorists returning to Britain. It should be using them enthusiastically.
As for those who do somehow manage to return to Britain, they should be detained and interned and either tried for terror offences or if, as in the case of children taken to IS territory under duress, released and put on a deradicalisation programme.
There is a bizarre disparity between how we treat British IS fighters when they are in Syria and Iraq and how we treat them when they have returned to Britain.
IN the first case we are happy to vaporise them via drone strike. Yet if they manage to make it back to Britain we seem to go all soft. They are treated like victims who were too impressionable to know what they were doing and who can be turned into good members of society. Maybe some can be – eventually. But it is madness to take the risk of allowing them back into the general population when IS is still sending them instructions to launch terror attacks.
As a civilised society we are not going to do as IS do: behead terror suspects in public. Their human rights must be respected. But so too should the more fundamental rights of the rest of us to go about our business without being shot, blown up or run over by people whom we knew had thrown in their lot with IS.
‘Madness if they rejoin general population’