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8-07-2005 The Scotsman Analysis: Risk of attack is the price we must pay for liberty By Gethin Chamberlain EVER since the attacks on the United States on 11 September, 2001, British and US security officials have been warning that London was an inevitable target for a major terrorist incident. Two years ago, Sir John Stevens, the then Metropolitan police commissioner, noted that al-Qaeda had a "substantial" presence in Britain. Before he retired at the end of last year, he revealed that at least half a dozen serious attacks had already been prevented. "Thank God, to date - and we've had to work extremely hard - we've thwarted attacks. But the risk of an attack to London hasn't changed. An attack is still inevitable," Sir John said. His successor, Sir Ian Blair, is on record as believing that the current threat from terrorism is greater than any danger Britain has faced since the Cold War. He too has conceded that an attempted attack on London was inevitable, though he thought it unhelpful to say that is would inevitably succeed. And only last month Ken Jones, the Association of Chief Police Officers' terrorism committee chairman, warned that Britain remained a prime target. "The threat will endure for the foreseeable future," he said. Earlier this year, US anti- terrorist officials were saying much the same thing. In a series of briefings in Washington, State Department officials voiced concerns that Britain remained a prime and attractive target for attack. But while security services on both sides of the Atlantic have become increasingly alert to the threat, there has been a parallel realisation that there are limits to how effectively they can fight it. As one senior terrorism analyst at the Pentagon cautioned: "We will never stop terrorism or terrorists. As long as there are human beings and disagreements, there will be terrorists." In March, Peter Bergen, a leading independent terrorism analyst, was warning that the future of al-Qaeda lay in Europe, rather than in the US. "The European problem is from within," he said. "The alienation of minorities in Europe is fuelling radicalism. Iraq was a gift for al-Qaeda and Europe is more vulnerable to what is going on in Iraq than the US." Inevitable it may have been, but nearly four years on from 11 September the answer to the question of how to counter such a threat remains elusive. The IRA's old jibe at Margaret Thatcher, that it had to be lucky only once while she had to be lucky all the time, is often trotted out after such attacks, but it remains as true now as it was then. The British security services have scored some remarkable successes and thwarted a number of attacks. Their activities have drawn admiring glances from across the Atlantic, where the US is still struggling to come to terms with the Islamic terrorist threat. There has also been a belief that al-Qaeda in particular has been badly damaged and is no longer able to mount a spectacular attack on the scale of the World Trade Centre attacks. But although it is hard to conceive of how the security services can guarantee success, there are plenty prepared to apportion blame. Charles Shoebridge, a former British counter-terrorism intelligence officer, points out that last year's Panorama programme London Under Attack, on which he was a consultant, predicted just such an attack. "The method is pretty much as expected. It was exactly the scenario - using relatively small devices at rush hour at major intersections to cause maximum death and maximum disruption," he said. "Irrespective of the response of the emergency services, this represents a major intelligence failure, whether it is a failure to collect intelligence, analyse it and put it together, or act upon it," Mr Shoebridge said. But even those who advocate the most restrictive security measures may have to accept that there is a limit to what can be done. Since 11 September, Britain has battened down the hatches. Major public buildings, including Westminster and the new Scottish Parliament, are now protected by blast walls, while the government has spent GBP 56 million on mass decontamination units for use in the event of chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attack. Another GBP 132 million has gone to the fire service for search and rescue, GBP 85 million to the NHS to cope with bio- terrorism and GBP 49 million to the Metropolitan Police's counter-terrorist work. MI5 is taking on 50 per cent more staff and Britain's over- all security spending will be GBP 2.1 billion by 2007-8, up from GBP 950 million before the 11 September attacks. Between those attacks and the end of last year, 702 people were arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000, though only 17 were convicted. And for every door that it is possible to close on the terrorists, there are many more that must, for practical reasons, remain open. While the terrorists would relish the psychological blow attacking a high-profile target might bring, they know they can achieve as much by hitting ordinary people doing ordinary things. The effects such actions can have were demonstrated in Madrid, where they succeeded in swinging an election against the incumbent and indirectly led to the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. Why blow up the Houses of Parliament and rally the people behind the government when you can strike fear into the heart of the population of the country's largest city and drive them to vent their frustrations on those same leaders? A society has to understand that it is not possible to mount a complete defence against terrorism while maintaining the civil liberties to which it wishes to cling. There has to be a level of risk which is deemed acceptable, a level beyond which the adverse effect on the civil liberties of those protected outweighs the effect on those liberties of a terrorist attack. The citizens of every country have their own natural level of acceptance of such threats. That is why, while identity cards are on the way in the UK, in the US opposition to such schemes has outweighed the perceived advantages. Airports introduced sweeping new security restrictions after the 11 September attacks, but the commuters who rely on London's public transport system are unlikely to accept the disruption to their lives that the introduction of airport-style scanners at underground stations would bring. Israelis accept much more overt security measures, but while it might, in theory, be possible to put an armed officer on every London bus, even if there was an acceptance that the enormous cost of such a scheme could be justified, the Israeli example shows that there is no reason to believe that it could deter a determined bomber. Terrorists succeed when their actions have a long term effect on the civil liberties and lifestyles of those who they target. That is the point of such attacks, beyond the initial death and destruction. Ultimately, the only way to effectively counter such attacks is through good intelligence and by actions taken on the broader political and international stage which alter the way in which a country is perceived by its potential attackers. At best, anything else simply delays the inevitable.
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................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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