The big change was what happened in May 1997, when Tony Blair was elected Prime Minister. Under Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990) there was a whole series of terrorist attacks in Britain, including the assassination of a number of senior political figures (and personal friends of the Prime Minister) and an attempted assassination of the PM herself. On one occasion while John Major was PM (1990-97), the IRA managed to bombard 10 Downing St while Cabinet was in session (nobody was hurt). What didn't happen between 1979 and 1997 was the introduction of any significant new counter-terrorist measures. When Thatcher became PM, the main counter-terrorist Act was the Prevention of Terrorism Act, passed (under Labour) in 1974. Thatcher's and Major's governments made some minor additions to the PTA, but they didn't feel the need to pass a counter-terrorist Act of their own, or to respond to each attack by bringing in a new law.
In 1997 Blair became Prime Minister. In 1998 the IRA signed a peace deal - the Good Friday Agreement - which effectively ended the main threat of terrorism at that time. Over the next ten years, Blair's government passed
- the Criminal Justice, Terrorism and Conspiracy Act 1998 (in response to the Omagh bombing carried out by a dissident Irish republican group)
- the Terrorism Act 2000
- the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (ATCSA) (in response to 11/9/2001)
- the Terrorism Act 2005 (in response to ATCSA being found illegal)
- the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2006 (in response to 7/7/2005)
- the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 (in response to the Glasgow Airport attack of 30/6/2007)
Why is there such a big difference between the records of the Conservative governments of 1979-97 and the Labour governments of 1997-2010? There are a number of different ways of looking at it, but I think a key difference is that the Blair government used the precautionary principle when thinking about terrorism. The usual way to think about security risks is to quantify the severity of the danger and the probability of it happening, and multiply the two together. Something that only has a 1% chance of happening, but which will cause £10,000 worth of damage if it does, has a projected cost of 1% x £10,000 = £100; as such, it has exactly the same importance as something which will only cause £200 worth of damage but has a 50% chance of happening. The same calculations can be done using projected deaths, if you're feeling macabre.
Using the precautionary principle in this context means taking terrorism very seriously indeed - seriously enough, perhaps, to think in terms of emergency. And in an emergency drastic measures can be taken...
Awake, arise, you drowsy sleeper
Awake, arise, it’s almost day.
No time to lie, no time to slumber,
No time to dream your life away.It was a gorgeous summer's morning
It was a gorgeous summer's day.
His cotton jacket was all he carried
As he walked out to face the day...
Changing gear a bit, here are a few questions about the shooting of Jean-Charles de Menezes in July 2005.
What if they'd got the right man?
The operation which led to the shooting of de Menezes was a horrific example of poor communication and lack of co-ordination. The initial failure to identify de Menezes was compounded by failures of leadership and organisation, culminating in the public execution of an innocent man. Public opinion was outraged, and counter-terrorist policing has never been quite so aggressive since. But what if the man the police shot in the head had been Hussain Osman - perhaps Hussain Osman on the run, unarmed, without any explosive, posing no danger to anyone? Would the police have faced any kind of prosecution, or even criticism?
Shouldn't somebody have said he wasn't the right man?
On the face of it, this seems to be a very straightforward failing: nobody (up to and including Cressida Dick) was willing to step up and say, "I don't think this is our man, everybody stand down". The trouble is that nobody knew that de Menezes wasn't the right man. Members of the surveillance team expressed doubts, but nobody was prepared to say that they were absolutely certain. Back in the operations room, Cressida Dick heard the reports that people were doubtful, but she wasn't prepared to convert that doubt into certainty either. The underlying problem was that the stakes were too high - see above re: 'precautionary principle'. If there was any realistic possibility that de Menezes was one of the bombers from the day before, and that he was planning another explosion, the police couldn't take the risk of letting him go. But they could only establish that he wasn't Hussain by stopping and questioning him - and they weren't about to do this, because this was a Kratos operation.
Or was it?
Apparently a Kratos codeword was never given, so strictly speaking this wasn't a Kratos operation. However, what happened when the firearms unit got to the tube station suggests very strongly that they, at least, were thinking in terms of a Kratos operation: in other words, intelligence tells you who the suspect is, and you neutralise the suspect without trying to make an arrest (since if you try and arrest a suicide bomber he's likely to blow himself up, taking you with him).
Whether Kratos was officially invoked or not, the de Menezes shooting demonstrates the awful contradiction at the heart of Kratos and similar policies. On one hand, suicide bombers can't realistically be arrested, so identifying somebody as a suicide bomber is essentially a death sentence (something which suicide bombers, by definition, can't really complain about). On the other, suicide bombers can do a great deal of harm, so even the smallest suspicion that somebody is a suicide bomber should make the police take action. But what can that action be? Arresting the suspect or even talking to him or her is a risk that the police can't afford to take, if they're dealing with an actual suicide bomber - but they can't always know for certain whether they are. In effect, Kratos means that the police are committed to using lethal force with imperfect information. Sooner or later it was bound to go horribly wrong. Perhaps we were lucky that it was 'sooner'.
There's one more unanswered question:
What was actually going on when de Menezes was shot?
We don't know what was going through the minds of the main participants, and it's quite hard to reconstruct. If "Ivor" thought that de Menezes was a suicide bomber, why did he sit so close to him - and why, in particular, did he drag him back onto the seat and hold him down? Wouldn't that be insanely dangerous? But if he didn't think de Menezes was a suicide bomber, why did he point him out to the armed officers (instead of, perhaps, shaking his head) - and why did he then, essentially, hold de Menezes down to be executed? The questions for the armed officers are similar: if they didn't think de Menezes was a suicide bomber, why did they shoot him repeatedly in the head? And if they did think he was a suicide bomber, why on earth did they get so close? A related question has to do with policy and training. Presumably what they did on the tube train wasn't something the firearms officers thought up themselves on the spur of the moment; presumably they were following procedure. Does police procedure for dealing with suicide bombers involve executing the suspect at point-blank range?
It was a gorgeous summer's morning
It was a gorgeous summer's day.
His cotton jacket was all he carried
As he walked out to face the day.
Jean-Charles de Menezes, 1/7/1978 - 22/7/2005
No comments:
Post a Comment