Details about last week's disrupted plane-bombing plot are still emerging, but two points already seem clear: American intelligence and police agencies remain far behind their British counterparts in their capacity to crack down on terrorists before they act, and the “legal left” and its media amplifiers deserve much of the blame.
Much has been made of the fact that tips from U.S. intelligence services aided British authorities in foiling last week’s plot. Undoubtedly, this played an important role. At the same time, the operation that culminated with raids on London suburbs and 24 arrests was very much a product of Britain’s tough-minded counterterrorism laws and a more enlightened public attitude about security threats in the post-9/11 era.
Not the least trivial advantage afforded British law enforcement officers is clarity about the nature of the enemy. Read through Britain’s police codes and you will see intermittent concessions to political correctness, as when police officers conducting a search are cautioned “not to discriminate against members of minority groups in the exercise of their powers.” More noteworthy, however, is the acknowledgement that “there are times when it is appropriate for officers to take account of the person’s ethnic origin,” especially since “some international terrorist groups are associated with particular identities.” In focusing their investigation on British Muslims, many of them of Pakistani ancestry, British intelligence services plainly chose the latter approach.
Indeed, they went further than that. British intelligence used an agent to infiltrate the terrorist suspects’ circle in December of last year--a step that proved critical in uncovering the plot. In addition, both Britain’s center-left government and its security agencies have long maintained that Muslim communities and mosques need to be monitored carefully for any connections to terrorism. American politicians, on the other hand, generally avoid raising the issue. Their reticence, though unfortunate, is understandable: Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was pilloried by self-styled civil liberties and Muslim groups last September after daring to suggest that using wiretaps to monitor mosques and their attendees might be a reasonable way of tracking terrorism plots in the planning stages. (Romney, to his credit, did not back down.)
Kindred groups in Britain have made noises but the government remains undeterred. In the wake of last week’s arrests, it has introduced plans for a special screening system that would allow airport security to focus, inter alia, on people of a “certain ethnic or religious background." A commendably realist reading of the terrorism threat may also explain why Britain’s MI5 intelligence service can draw on a deep bench of agents proficient in foreign languages while the FBI, according to the New York Times, “has only a handful of Muslim agents and others who speak Arabic, Urdu, or other languages common in the Islamic world.”
Contrast that with the tolerance-trumps-all political climate of the United States, where profiling would be condemned as racism or worse. Indeed, it already has been. To hear the ACLU tell it, profiling on the basis of ethnic or national origin cannot be explained as a good-faith effort to focus resources on groups statistically more likely to commit terrorism. No, the only conceivable explanation is “racism.” Profiling, the ACLU contends, is a form of “institutional racism and discrimination and owes its existence to prejudice that has existed in this country since slavery.” Amnesty International goes even further, calling selective profiling a violation of “basic human rights and freedoms to which every person is entitled.” (Exactly which “basic human right” allows would-be mass murderers to escape detection is never made clear.) To stress the point, Amnesty in 2004 published a 50-page study on the alleged evils of racial profiling, titled “Threat and Humiliation.” Naturally, the “threat” in question had nothing to do with terrorism. Even President Bush, in one of his more ill-considered political moves, explicitly disavowed profiling during a 2000 presidential debate in a calculated bid for Arab and Muslim votes. Meanwhile at least 29 states, bowing to pressure from left-leaning lobbying groups, have passed laws against profiling.
More pragmatic views prevail in Britain. Beyond homing in on potential terrorists, British laws are designed to keep them from executing their plans. To that end, British officials can arrest and detain terrorism suspects on the basis of “reasonable suspicion.” American investigators must meet the more stringent standards of “probable cause” before acting. British laws also allow suspects to be detained for up to 28 days without charges being filed. Prime Minister Blair, not unreasonably, has advocated that the period be extended to 90 days. The law serves a dual purpose: First, it keeps suspects in police custody. Second, it grants British intelligence officers the latitude to arrest suspects at the last minute, allowing terrorist plots to mature to the point where all participants have been identified and all spin-off plans anticipated. The success of that strategy was in evidence last week: The London plotters were arrested mere days before a planned “dry run” to determine whether they could board flights with liquid explosives, and intended a full-scale attack on as many as 10 flights immediately thereafter.
By contrast, American laws all but prohibit such tactics. Suspects cannot be detained for longer than 48 hours without criminal charges being filed, according to recent court rulings. Consequently, American authorities cannot allow a plot to progress because of the necessity of filing criminal charges before apprehending suspects. The result is that American intelligence agencies both have a more difficult time rounding up domestic terrorist suspects and, as the ongoing vilification campaign against Guantanamo Bay illustrates, keeping those captured abroad in custody.
What is most telling about Guantanamo’s critics is their penchant for condemning the facility while pardoning its inhabitants. Among the more committed opponents of the facility, it is now an incontestable truth that keeping suspects there is a form of “unlawful detention” (Amnesty International) and that the Bush administration is engaged in a “transparent effort to circumvent the requirement of international human rights law.” (Human Rights Watch). Both groups withhold judgment about the guilt of the detainees.
Adding its voice to the anti-Guantanamo chorus, the United Nations this February issued a report that denounced indefinite periods of detention and prolonged solitary confinement as tantamount to “torture” and called for its immediate closure. Absent from the critics charges is any thought to the consequences for the broader war on terrorism of freeing over 500 terrorist suspects, many of them captured on the battlefield and trained to deceive interrogators.
As unscrupulous as the ongoing attacks against Guantanamo Bay has been the crusade, led most prominently by the New York Times, to expose government monitoring initiatives like the once-classified National Security Agency’s program to track terrorist communications in the US and abroad without warrants, and the Treasury Department’s SWIFT system to monitor banking transactions. Seizing on the Times’ report, the ACLU has already dismissed SWIFT as a “spying program” that subjects all American citizens to scrutiny and has called on Congress to hold the administration to account for its supposed “abuse of power.” In truth, the SWIFT program collects no information on ordinary transactions, limiting its focus solely to terrorism investigations. Further, as with the NSA program, the administration had in fact briefed appropriate members of Congress.
Interestingly, while ideologues on the left labored to cast both programs as sinister threats to democracy, British intelligence agents were using strikingly similar efforts to close in on the London plotters. Using vehicles equipped with GPS tracking systems, British investigators monitored calls from cell phones and pay telephones and hacked into e-mails sent to Pakistan, Europe and Iran. According to news reports, they also shadowed the suspects, monitoring their conversations and poring over their bank accounts, essentially charting their every move. For the New York Times and its ideological allies, however, it is the U.S. government whose actions are always suspect.
In a time when police may be the last line of defense against acting terrorists, Britain’s expansion of police powers has been instructive. Following last year’s July 7 train bombings, for instance, British authorities put into practice a little-known law, devised in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, that allows officers to "aim for the head" of a suspect they believe is about to commit a suicide bombing, Codenamed “Operation Kratos,” this shoot-to-kill policy allows police to stop terrorists instantly, preventing them from triggering their explosive devices.
Not so in the United States. Here the shoot-to-kill policy has met with relentless opposition from legal-Left organizations and, revealingly, Muslim groups. Human Rights Watch, to cite a representative instance, maintains that “[p]olice abuse remains one of the most serious and divisive human rights violations in the United States.” Topping HRW’s list of grievous abuses is what it calls “excessive use of force by police officers,” particularly “unjustified shootings.” HRW’s proof for the pervasiveness of such shootings is conspicuously thin. Indeed, the organization admits that police officers who commit abuses are a “small minority who taint entire police departments” and furthermore complains about the “scarcity of meaningful information about trends in abuse”--a scarcity that does not prevent HRW from dramatically exaggerating the problem of police brutality and arousing groundless resentment to police powers essential to combating terrorism. As a result, American police officers are broadly instructed to "shoot to stop" or "shoot to neutralize.“ But this measure is not without dangerous drawbacks of its own: Aiming at the body does not necessarily prevent a suicide bomber from exploding his lethal accessory and, at the same time, risks doing it for him.
To be sure, some critics aren’t interested even in debating the merits of the policy. The fact that Britain’s shoot-to-kill policy was inspired by Israel’s counterterrorism forces is enough to render it irredeemable in the eyes of some radical Muslim groups. Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, has justified CAIR’s opposition to shoot-to-kill policies in the United States with the following explanation: “I don't think that we want to be replicating the actions of a foreign government engaged in a brutal occupation of another people.” Whether the method is effective is entirely beside the point. Killing terrorists before they have a chance to act, according to Hooper, “sends the wrong message to the Muslim world.” Noted terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman has described using ordinary police methods to stop a suicide bomber as the equivalent of “signing your own death warrant.” Better, by CAIR‘s lights, than offending Muslim sensibilities.
Now that even an innocent-seeming carry-on item can be a vessel for liquid explosives, one might think that expanding police search powers would prove less controversial. So it has been across the pond. Britain’s Terrorism Act of 2000, which made last week’s arrests possible, included Section 44, which empowers police officers to stop and search any vehicle or person so long as the aim is “the prevention of acts of terrorism,” and to seize “articles of a kind which could be used in connection with terrorism.”
It’s easy to see how analogous search powers could be useful in the US. Yet the American equivalent of Section 44, Section 213 of the Patriot Act, is one of the act’s most bitterly contested measures. Specifically, section 213 allows for “delayed notification warrants,” which allow police to conduct searches and to seize criminal property and materiel--like liquid explosives, for instance--without notifying suspects. Predicated on the sound grounds that would-be terrorists could use any advance warning to flee or destroy evidence, the measure is also designed to prevent abuse: all searches must be approved by a court and suspects must subsequently be notified in a timely fashion.
Not that mere facts have stopped the ACLU from misrepresenting the section’s contents. In the run-up to the 2004 election, for example, the ACLU sank $1.52 million into a national ad campaign that portrayed the warrants, sneeringly labeled “sneak and peak” by critics, as a radical departure from American legal precedent. (In fact, as the non-partisan FactCheck.org pointed out, federal courts had allowed such warrants before the Patriot Act.) Far from focusing on terrorists, the ad charged, the secret warrants were “treating us all like suspects.” Taking a similar tack, People for the American Way has denounced Section 213 warrants as an attack on “fundamental rights” because it does not give terrorist suspects the option of obstructing a search. The PFAW additionally claims that secret warrants are issued on the basis of “very vague criteria.” The reality is altogether different: Section 2705 of the Patriot Act spells out a number of conditions that any request for a warrant must satisfy, among them a danger to safety, the possible flight of a suspect, and destruction and tampering with evidence--criteria that are hardly inapplicable to terrorist suspects.
Underlying the left’s opposition is an ideological perversity that sees tougher counterterrorism measures and expanded police powers as the single greatest threat to American democracy. The posture was memorably summarized by a 2005 New York Observer article by prominent First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus. “The expansion of Presidential powers and the expansion of police powers is the single most important issue facing this country,” Garbus opined. Full of unmeasured contempt against “authoritarian government” and in the grip of paranoia about the onset of “fascism,” Garbus revealingly saved his scare quotes for another, apparently minor, enemy of American democracy: “terrorists.” This attitude, predominantly confined to the Left, has also found its champions on the paleoconservative-right. Thus Reagan conservative turned raging conspiracy theorist Paul Craig Roberts sees the Bush administration as the greatest threat facing the United States and asserts that it’s warning about terrorism have “no purpose other than to build a police state that is far more dangerous to Americans than terrorists.” Few who have traveled on airplanes in recent years would agree.
There is ample room for disagreement, of course. To spotlight the more extreme opponents of vigorous counterterrorism strategies is not to trivialize the fine balance between security and civil liberties that must be struck during wartime. But if last week’s thwarted terrorist plot teaches any lessons it is that the enemy is becoming increasingly sophisticated and that the state of counterterrorism and policing must keep up. That requires a certain seriousness on the part of the public--a seriousness that, on large precincts of the left and some corners of the right, is nowhere to be found.
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