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Drooling on the Pillow

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Business or Pleasure, Mr. Ressam? 

The invaluable Mark Steyn tells a remarkable story in the London Spectator about how democracies protect themselves (or not) in an era of terrorism. To me, the questions about privacy and government intrusion versus security are difficult and complicated and need the vigorous input of all points of view to be resolved. What we don't need are idiots in charge.
Mr Ressam, incidentally, is a very instructive case of
how easy it is to proceed through modern Western "security"
systems. He was traveling under a false name on a genuine
Canadian passport which he obtained by forging a Quebec
baptismal certificate: the passport is high-tech, computer-
readable, hard(ish) to fake, but the document you need to
produce in order to get the hard-to-fake document is much
easier to fake. Mr Ressam was originally from Algeria and
when he landed at Montreal he was admirably straightforward.
He told officials he'd spent five months in jail back home for
being an Islamic terrorist. But Immigration Canada declined
to take him at his word. According to spokesperson Huguette
Shouldice, many asylum-seekers try to pass themselves off
as terrorists to "exaggerate the persecution they fear in their
homeland in order to impress Canadian immigration officials".
Read that again slowly: according to Mme Shouldice, claiming
to be a terrorist increases your chances of being admitted to
Canada, so immigration officials have learnt to disregard it as
no more than a little light resumé-padding. Yawn: here's
someone trying to slip in on the mad-bomber fast-track
admission quota again.
The front end of this article dismisses the notion, apparently still abroad in some parts, that the Clinton administration's vigilance at the millennium prevented a disaster.
Posted by: Sluggo / 1:49 PM
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