____________________________
by David Nordell
(June 16, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) Anyone following the international news a few days ago may have noticed two news items, almost back to back, from London. One reported that a senior civil servant had lost two highly sensitive intelligence briefing documents, classified Top Secret, on the commuter train taking him home. The other was that Gordon Brown’s Labour government had succeeded, by the tiniest of majorities, in getting parliament to approve raising from 28 to 42 days the period for which the police can keep a terrorist suspect in prison for questioning before either charging or releasing him; in fact, by sheer fluke, the vote in parliament coincided almost exactly with a sharp-eyed passenger discovering the secret file on the train.
These two bits of news when taken in isolation should surprise nobody who follows British politics, and in particular the way in which the United Kingdom tries to fight terrorism. The two documents from the Joint Intelligence Centre, a body roughly similar to the National Security Council in the USA, dealt with al Qa’eda in Pakistan and with British troops in Iraq: they were numbered for strictly limited distribution and marked “for UK, US, Canadian and Australian eyes only, a clear indication of their great sensitivity. But the fact that they were taken out of secure government offices, left behind on a train and then handed to the BBC, which made a very public exposé of the scandal, doesn’t come as a huge surprise for the British public, which has become accustomed to a long series of security botch-ups, involving everything from CD-ROMs holding 25 million personal records being lost in the inter-ministry mail to laptops holding sensitive, yet unencrypted, data being stolen from defence ministry officials and serving officers. And Brown’s apparent triumph in extending the interrogation period for terror suspects is just one more step in a consistent Labour policy of tightening state control, ranging from CCTV cameras covering the entire country to a plan to introduce compulsory identity cards.
The problem is that the two incidents, and the overall patterns they represent, are what psychologists would call ‘cognitively dissonant’ with one another. Or, in simpler political language, the Blair-Brown government tries to act tough on terrorism, but its own security – indeed, its entire counter-terrorism policy – is riddled with so many holes that it’s surprising that there haven’t been any successful terror attacks on Britain since July 2005. The fact that there haven’t been any is due entirely to the highly professional police and security service, which managed not only to foil the highly publicized plot two summers ago to blow up several airlines flying from Heathrow to the USA, but also several others that attracted less, or no, publicity.
But the professionalism and dedication of the country’s police and security services, and of the British armed services, survive in something of a vacuum, one created by a political leadership that appears to have no clear understanding of the risks of domestic terrorism, on the one hand, and refuses to invest the money necessary to keep the armed forces even at the limited level needed to fight terrorist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the other. Ministers talk a lot about engaging with the home-grown Muslim community, which is mainly of Pakistani origin, in order to counter the extremist elements within it; and in fact, a national police community action task force has had some success in getting community leaders and activists to understand that there is no reason for collective paranoia. But at the same time, the government engages in verbal acrobatics to avoid acknowledging that Islam presents any problem; and the police not only refuse to protect the majority population, mainly Christian, against violent Muslim extremists, but have even threatened Christian activists with arrest for ‘provoking’ Muslims. The government’s plans for forcing ID cards on everyone are not just hugely unpopular among the public at large, but have attracted flak from security and IT professionals, who correctly point out government IT projects in the UK are so badly planned and managed that that the potential for abuse of the system, especially identity theft that will just exacerbate fighting crime and terrorism, far outweighs the benefits.
The situation of the armed forces is even worse. After key fighting units have already been cut down and amalgamated because of a decade of defence budget cuts, meaning that reserve units have had to be called up for long periods, soldiers are now being killed in Afghanistan and Iraq simply because the army can’t afford the equipment to protect them adequately, whether against IEDs or mere bullets. The Royal Navy, which once ruled the waves worldwide, is not only at its lowest strength ever, but the remaining ships are sent to sea without vital defensive missiles on board, and are banned from firing on pirate ships in the Horn of Africa because of human rights concerns. The Royal Air Force’s Nimrod aircraft, parallel to American AWACS planes, are publicly acknowledged as flying death traps. Morale is at an all-time low: two former commanders of the SAS special forces have resigned from the army in protest against the lack of government support, and drug abuse, something almost unknown in the forces a generation ago, is rife. At a recent conference on terrorism in London that I attended, the defence experts both on the platform and in private conversations were – to use a British understatement – seriously disappointed by the lack of government commitment to national defence.
What might be surprising, then, is that the government’s move to extend the interrogation period for terrorists has produced the same level of disappointment and opposition. But in fact both the general public and experts see it as nothing more than window-dressing that isn’t even based in some clearly understood need to extend interrogation. At that same conference, at the Royal United Services Institution, a defence think-tank located a stone’s throw from 10 Downing Street, one member of parliament well versed in security affairs confirmed privately that the police and security service had not presented any analysis or evidence, even to parliament’s hush-hush intelligence and security committee, showing why 28 days of interrogation was not enough. Lord Carlile, a senior jurist and independent member of the upper house responsible for vetting new security legislation, diplomatically evaded both criticizing and backing the move in his keynote speech to the members of the police and security community gathered at RUSI. And Jonathan Evans, the director general of MI5, the security service, published an unprecedented statement on the service’s web site, saying “a number of media reports have appeared in the last few days on the supposed position that MI5 takes in respect of pre-charge detention time limits. I would like to make the Service's position on this issue clear. Since the Security Service is neither a prosecuting authority nor responsible for criminal investigations, we are not, and never have been, the appropriate body to advise the Government on pre-charge detention time limits.” Short of resignation, that was about as clear a statement as possible that MI5 washed its hands of the government’s policy.
These, and other serious internal contradictions in Britain’s response to the terrorist threat, are not just of academic interest. Britain is a key ally in the US-led military coalition in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and, thanks to strong HUMINT skills and networks, in the intelligence efforts against terrorism worldwide. But, with a political leadership seemingly incapable of developing and sustaining a coherent counter-terrorism policy, or investing the necessary resources is backing it up with military power, Britain’s credibility as an ally remains in the hands of a declining number of professionals, in and out of uniform, whose tremendous dedication is being eaten away by a sense that the government is betraying them. If, as seems likely, one or more of the country’s defence chiefs resigns in protest against government policy, the US administration will be forced to reconsider the long-term value of this alliance.
The other victim of Britain’s schizoid government is national morale in general, whose importance can’t be expressed more succinctly than by Abraham Lincoln: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds opinion is greater than he who enacts laws." Gordon Brown, even more than Tony Blair before him, tries to enact laws that few even believe in, and in doing so, is just destroying public sentiment. If terrorists, whether home-grown or otherwise, succeed in carrying out an outrage as big as that of 7th July 2005, or bigger, the additional blow to national morale, and to what is left of the government’s credibility, is likely to threaten the fabric of Britain as a democratic state. And if a terror attack succeeds in this way in destabilising Britain, it is sure to encourage greatly increased terrorist activity throughout the rest of Europe.
(The writer, Founder and CEO of New Global Markets - A technology start-up developing customer intelligence solutions for anti-money laundering and counter-terror financing. He can be reach at david@newglobalmarkets.com )
- Sri Lanka Guardian
Post a Comment