Colonel Richard Kemp, a former member of the COBRA committee, Joint Intelligence Committee, and commander of the British Task Force in Helmand, Afghanistan, has called on the Government to deport or intern all foreign nationals on the terror watch list.
“The problem is, there are 3,000 known jihadis on the streets of the UK today,” explained the Royal Anglian Regiment veteran.
“Our intelligence services and police – no matter how good they are – they cannot monitor all of them; they can’t control all of them, and therefore people like the bomber in Manchester and also the attacker in Westminster a couple of months before, these people were known to the security, yet they slipped through the net.
“The reason is because they have to prioritise, and they sometimes get it wrong.”
WATCH | Ex-COBRA chief calls to deport/intern jihadists: "We do not allow them to roam free on our streets to murder and maim our children." pic.twitter.com/KasdMBXoWm
— Leave.EU (@LeaveEUOfficial) May 26, 2017
Col Kemp advocated an unapologetically robust response to the growing threat, stating that it is not the fault of the security services that they are unable to adequately survey all the thousands of potential terrorists in the country, but that, “We need to help them do their job better by removing as many of these people out of this country as we possibly can.”
Echoing anti-terror policies first advocated by Marine Le Pen in the recent French presidential elections, the colonel recommended that, “Every single person who we have intelligence upon, who is known to be involved in terrorism, who is not a UK citizen, and who we cannot prosecute in the courts, we get rid of out this country. We deport them; we send them back to where they came from.”
We should not, he said, “allow them to roam free on our streets and murder, and maim, and disfigure our children in the way they did in Manchester recently”.
How can deporting, excluding & interning terrorists cause division? Majority of Islamic communities oppose terrorism. Don't they?
— Rɪᴄʜᴀʀᴅ Kᴇᴍᴘ ⋁ (@COLRICHARDKEMP) May 25, 2017
Col Kemp also insisted that “those people who are fighting with Islamic State, who have gone out from this country to fight with Islamic State, to murder, torture, and rape, we don’t let them come back. They don’t come back into this country.”
So far, both the Tory Party and the opposition Labour Party have refused to countenance rescinding the citizenship of British Muslims who volunteer with jihadist organisations overseas, citing non-binding United Nations rules against rendering individuals “stateless”.
“Detain, deport, exclude: this is how Britain should respond to terror” by @COLRICHARDKEMP https://t.co/PaMkcBA80W
— Rɪᴄʜᴀʀᴅ Kᴇᴍᴘ ⋁ (@COLRICHARDKEMP) May 26, 2017
More than 400 such volunteers are thought to have returned to Britain from Syria and Iraq, but only an eighth of these have been caught and convicted – and former National Counter Terrorism Security Office chief Chris Phillips says the true figure could be far higher, in any case.
“I don’t believe the UK knows how many people have left for Syria or indeed come back,” he said. “There are many ways of getting back into the UK avoiding checks.”
Henry Bolton OBE, a former British Army intelligence officer, police detective, and head of the Borders Unit at the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), has previously told Breitbart London that Britain’s maritime borders, in particular, have become “porous” after “successive governments … dismantled the layered mosaic of border security” which used to protect them.
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