OPINION:
President Trump says he was “surprised” that on Monday, Britain released on bail five suspected terrorists.
The suspects were arrested after a farmer saw the masked men and several vans 100 yards from a British air base, which the U.S. has used to conduct bombing runs on Iran.
British authorities said tests on the vehicles did not reveal any “viable explosives.”
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Maybe not, but such suspicious behavior might have been a test run ahead of an attack on the base.
Predictably, Iran, which has threatened to retaliate against any nation aligning itself with the U.S. attacks, has denied any connection to the men. Did we expect Iran to tell the truth?
Why not wait until the investigation is complete before considering releasing the suspects on bail? The public does not know the names of the five men because British laws restrict such disclosures, so their backgrounds cannot be independently investigated.
More evidence that Britain is letting down its guard — if it ever had it sufficiently up — comes with news that London granted refugee status and later citizenship to a former bodyguard of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, though the bodyguard’s ties to terrorist groups were publicly known.
Britain kept on hosting the former bodyguard even after he was accused of participating in a German terrorist plot.
One might think that Britain, which suffered its own 9/11 on July 7, 2005, when terrorists targeted London’s public transportation system, killing 52 innocent victims and injuring more than 700 others, might take subsequent threats more seriously and not have released the five men on bail.
Human nature and extremist ideology suggest that these men are unlikely to show up for their court date and could flee the country.
Though America has not experienced another terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11, Britain has been the target of several other catastrophic attacks. Unfortunately, the power of political correctness and the desire not to call the motivation behind these attacks what it is overcame common sense.
There was the Manchester Arena bombing on May 22, 2017, at an Ariana Grande concert. Twenty-two people were killed.
On March 22, 2017, there was an attack on London’s Westminster Bridge. The driver of a vehicle struck people walking on the bridge, then got out and stabbed a police officer. Five people died before police shot the attacker dead.
Then there was the attack on London Bridge on June 3, 2017. The vehicle and knife attack in Borough Market killed eight people. It appeared to be a copycat of the March 22 attack.
What does it say about Britain’s seriousness in fighting terrorism when it took a farmer, not the police, to discover suspicious activity so close to an air base? Did the base not have cameras or military patrols? Was anyone paying attention besides the alert farmer?
Britain has been in decline for years, struggling with high levels of cross-border asylum seekers. Across the Atlantic, the United States faced a similar immigration crisis at its southern border under the Biden administration before Mr. Trump moved to tighten restrictions.
To his credit, Mr. Trump effectively closed the southern border to asylum seekers and unauthorized migrants and has deported thousands of criminals who violated U.S. immigration laws, potentially making the country safer.
Letting these five men out on bail was a major mistake that could come back to haunt the British government. If terrorists or any like-minded people manage to attack the air base and innocents are killed, it will be the government that will have blood on its hands.
• Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book, “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (Humanix Books).
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