O'SULLIVAN ELECTION DIARY
by John O'Sullivan
Benador News
April 19, 2005

In the midst of a generally lackluster British election campaign, Mr. Kamel
Bourgass has suddenly emerged as a major figure dramatizing the issues of
immigration and terrorism. He may even swing the election. Yet the voters
do not even know his name for certain.
He left his native Algeria--if he is in fact a native of Algeria--in
January 2000 under the name Nadir Habra. One month later he arrived in
Northern France where he was helped by smugglers to enter Britain hiding in
the back of a lorry. Once safely in Dover he sought political asylum under
the name Kamel Bourgass and, pending a decision, was given accommodation in
Manchester by the immigration authorities.
He felt "lonely" in Manchester, so he now says, because there were no other
Arabs there (hhmmnnn), and moved down to the Finsbury mosque famous for its
extremist mullah and inflammatory sermons. (Shoe-bomber Richard Reid was
another member of the congregation there.) He got various low-level jobs.
In August 2001, after he had been in Britain for eighteen months, his
application for asylum was turned down. But he was allowed to stay in
London while deportation arrangements were made. Still, he put his notice
of rejection to good use: he used it to file his recipe for ricin (a poison
that destroys the immune system and kills within days.)
In November 2001 he appealed against the asylum rejection at the
Immigration Appellate Authority in London.
In December-- two years after he entered Britain and the immigration
system--Bourgass's appeal was rejected.. He promptly disappeared and went
"illegal." A month later he moved into a North London flat shared with
another Algerian and thoughtfully provided by the Islington Council's
Asylum team. For a while he was cautious--we hear nothing of him.
Then, seven months later, in July 2002 he was arrested in a shop east of
London for stealing six pair of jeans. He gave his name as Bourgass but was
found to be holding a passport in another name--no, not Nadir Habra, but a
third name. The police, suspecting he might be an illegal immigrant,
informed the immigration authorities. But no immigration officer bothered
to attend his trial. He was fined and set free.
A further six months on the police received a tip from Algerian police who
were interrogating a terrorist suspect, Mohammed Mergueba, about an Al
Qaeda poison factor in a north London apartment. They raided it and duly
found ingredients and equipment for making ricin, cyanide, and explosives,
with Bourgass's fingerprints on them.
He himself had fled to Manchester where he stayed in what are alleged to
be Al Qaeda flats.
Finally he was discovered by police who raided a Manchester apartment
looking for other suspects. The raid was bungled. Bourgass who had not been
handcuffed according to the rules, attacked and killed Detective Constable
Oake. He has now been convicted of murdering the policeman and of being
part of a conspiracy to manufacture and spread ricin among the population.
He is serving a 17-year prison term.
In addition to murdering Oake and makng his wife a widow and three children
fatherless, Bourgass is estimated by the Daily Mail to have cost Britain
approximately $100 million in police, immigration, court and prison costs.
But is this small beer compared to what he might have accomplished?
There is a dispute (not between the major parties but between Blair's New
Labor government and its left-wing anti-war critics) about whether Bourgass
was a serious terrorist. Was he part of a international Al Qaeda
conspiracy to poison millions of Brits as the government and the security
services maintain? Or was he a lonely Islamist nutter using internet
recipes to distill poisons from ordinary groceries and posing a threat to
dozens at worst, as the anti-war camp argues?
No-one knows for certain. The jury acquitted Bourgass's seven alleged
accomplices--which supports the "lonely nutter" thesis. But Bourgass's
multiple identities fit the terrorist profile; the full security evidence
was never presented; and all in all the trial seems to have been bungled as
badly as the initial police raid. So the argument over anti-terrorism
policy is moot.
But the argument over immigration policy--one between all other parties and
the Tories whose manifesto calls for stricter immigration controls--is only
just beginning. What the Bourgass case shows is that someone whom the
security services believe to be a major terrorist was able to enter Britain
illegally, stay for two years before his asylum appeal was rejected,
disappear into the community thereafter, live in government sponsored
accommodation as an "illegal," survive an arrest and criminal trial even
though the police suspected his illegal status, and finally be captured
largely by accident. If Bourgass had murdered thousands in a terrorist
poison bomb, or even merely five or six neighbors by smearing ricin on
their doorknobs, the British government would have been his unwitting
accomplice.
Bourgass might not matter too much if he were plainly an exceptional case..
But the evidence is mounting that Bourgass is one among--quite
literally--hundreds of thousands. A leak to the weekend newspapers
revealed that Labor ministers had suppressed an official estimate that at
least 500,000 illegal immigrants and failed asylum seekers on the Bourgass
model were living in Britain. That is almost certainly an underestimate.
The think tank, Migration Watch, estimates that failed asylum seekers(and
their families) alone account for between 300,000 and 500,000 people. The
total of people illegally in Britain is probably well over one million.
Not all of them are terrorists, of course, or even would-be amateur
terrorists. But if the government doesn't know who they are, then it
plainly cannot know why they are in the country. The Tories are hammering
that point home in their election propaganda. It is almost the only thing
they say that wins votes.
If this were a purely British problem, then the U.S. might offer help but
be otherwise relaxed. From the terrorists' standpoint, however, Britain is
merely the Little Satan. It is the U.S. that is the Great Satan. Al Qaeda
and other terrorists are almost certainly trying to smuggle other Kamel
Bourgasses into America. The U.S. population of illegal immigrants of at
least eleven million is far easier to swim unnoticed in than the British
million and the U.S.-Mexico border is easier to cross than the English
channel.
But Washington treats illegal immigrants in the U.S. with the same relaxed
tenderness as Official Britain treated Bourgass. The Bush administration
refuses to staff the border patrol properly. The president himself
denounces as "vigilantes" those law-abiding private citizens on the border
who inform the overstretched border patrol of approaching illegals. If the
illegals get through to "the interior" anyway, they are quite safe from
deportation unless they commit a crime far more serious than Bourgass's
shoplifting. And the president's current official policy is to solve the
problem of the eleven million illegal immigrants in the U.S. by making
their presence legal!
Easy though he had it, Bourgass in his prison cell must sometimes think he
came to the wrong country.


The NMA: Opening Up Newspapers:
http://www.nmauk.co.uk

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