Is Britain a Role Model for U.S. in Fight Against Terrorism?
Counterterrorism
New Hampshire Union Leader
Kendra Gilbert
Boston University Washington News Service
12-14-06
WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 – New Hampshire Republican Sen. Judd Gregg is looking to the British for some answers on how to catch terrorists.
A month after British officials foiled a terrorist plot to attack U.S. airliners bound for the states from London’s Heathrow Airport, Gregg chaired a hearing to examine what the United States could learn from Britain’s counterterrorism methods. What he heard at the hearing prompted him to include $1 million in the 2007 Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill for a study to be conducted next year on the feasibility of adopting some of the United Kingdom’s methods.
In a phone interview, Gregg said the United States could learn a lot from the British and that their methods were “worth looking at.”
Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H., supports his colleague’s interest in improving counterterrorism methods, saying that the hearing Gregg chaired “brings attention to the importance of constantly evaluating our laws and regulations to make sure they continue to provide government officials the tools they need to prevent future terrorist attacks.”
Despite a shared cultural heritage, Britain, unlike the United States, has no written constitution that sets forth basic principles of law governing the country. Britain also lacks a counterpart to the U.S. Bill of Rights, which grants protections and freedoms to individuals. Instead, protections are established through legislation, which, in Britain, has evolved over the years and now includes several laws defining terrorism and regulating counterterrorism procedures.
At the top of the list in any discussion of revamping U.S. counterterrorism methods to be more like those of the British is the comparison between the FBI in the United States and the Security Service (commonly known as MI5) in Britain.
MI5 is a domestic security agency that gathers intelligence with a view toward countering terrorism and other threats to British security. It has no arrest powers and works closely with local police in Britain to prevent terrorist attacks.
“There was a lot of discussion after 9/11 about whether the United States needed a domestic intelligence agency like MI5,” said Ian Cuthbertson, director of the Counterterrorism Project at the World Policy Institute, a university-affiliated think tank in New York City.
The Department of Homeland Security was created following 9/11 as an umbrella agency to oversee security issues involving ports, immigration, transportation and emergency response but does not have authority over the nation’s intelligence gathering agencies.
At the FBI, Cuthbertson said, “Counterintelligence and counterterrorism have always played second fiddle in the FBI to crime fighting.”
The FBI has tried to reorganize in the wake of 9/11 but, “you still have a bureau that is culturally attuned to not prevention but investigation post event,” said Roger Cressey, a former National Security Council staff member in the Clinton and current Bush Administrations.
The question of the FBI’s role split witnesses at the hearing of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security that Gregg chaired in September. John Yoo, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley and a former Justice Department official in the Bush administration, argued for reorganizing the FBI to isolate its crime-fighting responsibilities from its counterterrorism functions.
U.S. Court of Appeals Judge and University of Chicago Law School senior lecturer Richard Posner, however, countered that a separate agency similar to MI5 is needed.
“I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t have a counterpart” to MI5, Posner said in an interview. “I think we need a new organization.”
However, Posner said, he realizes that should a similar agency be established in the United States, adjustments would have to be made to satisfy the constitutional constraints of the U.S. legal system.
In Britain, MI5 agents and police officers are given greater freedom than American counterintelligence officers in the methods they employ to gather intelligence and question suspects.
“Things like profiling aren’t illegal in Britain,” said Cuthbertson, who is Scottish and has lived in London. “They profile the airports and on the subway and in train stations and that kind of thing.”
He added that “the British police and intelligence services routinely tap telephones without any problem in Britain.”
Phone tapping is more controversial in the United States, as witnessed by the criticism of President Bush’s authorizing wiretaps on citizens after 9/11.
But at Sen. Gregg’s September hearing, witnesses and subcommittee members focused specifically on the U.S. policy of holding terrorism suspects who are U.S. citizens without charges for no more than 48 hours. The witnesses agreed that U.S. officials should consider following the British model, which has a 28-day limit.
In his written statement to the committee, Posner concluded that one of the primary lessons the United States could take from the British is “the need for detention of terrorism suspects beyond the conventional 48-hour limit.”
When asked whether the longer time limit was crucial to Britain’s success, Cressey replied, “I think it gives them time, and whenever you’re doing counterterrorism work, it’s a race against time.”
But Cressey said he didn’t see the United States ever adopting a detention time similar to Britain’s 28 days.
That’s a flexibility that you’re never going to see in the U.S. system,” Cressey said. “I think it would immediately provoke a court challenge, and I would be very surprised if the Supreme Court upheld it.”
While Britain’s methods are seen as more intrusive by people in the United States, Cuthbertson said “people [in Britain] are much more tolerant of government interference in their lives” because it is seen as necessary.
“People don’t have the knee-jerk suspicion of government and counterintelligence and counterterrorism that you have here,” Cuthbertson said.
Cuthbertson attributed this to Britain’s “longer history of dealing with terrorism,” and he recalled his experiences living in London during an Irish Republican Army bombing attack.
In the United States, terrorism was not considered a threat until the mid-1980s, Posner said, and “there wasn’t widespread recognition of this threat until 9/11.”
Cressey stressed that the British success hinges on “their intelligence collection that they have on the ground: penetration of suspect locales, the ability to go into mosques and identify individuals who are gathering outside of mosques and a network of, not just informants, but relationships that generate information for them.”
“There is recruitment of individuals there [Britain] that if we don’t figure out a better way to get a handle on it, we’re going to miss opportunities to disrupt potential terrorist cells,” Cressey said.
Good communication between U.S. intelligence gathering agencies and the estimated 800,000 local police is another lesson to be learned from the British, some witnesses said.
Local police officers “ought to be the eyes and ears of the intelligence community,” Posner said. They should, he said, be “the major gatherers of domestic intelligence.”
In his written statement, Tom Parker, a witness at the September hearing and a former member of MI5, said “the greatest single strength of the British approach to counterterrorism is the high degree of coordination that now extends throughout the national security hierarchy.”
Similarly, Gregg praised MI5’s “focused approach to anti-terrorism,” calling the agency “one shop committed to coordinating counterterrorism efforts.”
The answer to America’s counterterrorism problems may ultimately lie within the country’s boarders. Both Cuthbertson and Cressey praised the intelligence-gathering methods of the New York Police Department.
Of local police forces in the United States, Cressey said, “the NYPD is the best of the best when it comes to intelligence collection on the ground and counterterrorism capability.”
Compared to the British, “the NYPD is a better example because their approach already factors in the civil liberty concerns that are unique to the U.S. and certainly different from Britain,” Cressey said. “It’s already demonstrated that it can work within the requirements of the U.S. legal system.”
We need to be constantly looking at our intelligence gathering methods and looking for areas of improvement, Gregg said.
“I just want to find out if there’s a better way to do things.”
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