Haste and leisure in the war on terror

There's a reason why the British play fair, even with terrorists. It gets
better results than US-style rash intervention

Michael Clarke 
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday September 09 2008 22:30 BST 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/09/uksecurity.terrorism

The verdicts in the so-called airline plot and the dismay of the British
security services that an apparently open-and-shut case has not been
accepted by the jury raises some important issues in Allied cooperation
between London and Washington.

It is an open secret that the United States went behind the back of British
officials to have Rashid Rauf arrested in Pakistan and that this risked
alerting the UK plotters and blowing apart a year of surveillance and the
biggest counter-terrorist operation the UK had ever undertaken.

This could be put down to poor allied communications, or to a jittery White
House not trusting the British to keep observing a plot that was not yet
fully mature, but which looked extremely dangerous. But in truth it was a
more fundamental difference between beliefs in America and Britain about
the business of counter-terrorism. 

For the US, a "war on terror" means that enemy soldiers, warriors,
terrorists should be attacked and confronted wherever they gather or plot,
or even chat. For the British, a criminal justice issue – which is what the
terrorist challenge represents – revolves around potentially dangerous
criminals being apprehended along with admissible evidence so that they
will eventually appear in court. 

The criminal evidence is never better than on the eve of the crime itself,
and British security services believe in managing the risks as close to the
eve as they can get. The British and American security services evidently
disagreed along these lines in handling the maturation of what they were
convinced was a highly sophisticated airline plot that would be on the
scale of a 9/11 attack.

There is another, more subtle element to this. If the west is to beat the
terrorists, it has to occupy the moral high ground. That is largely what
the criminal approach is about. If the British thought that targeted
assassinations, torture or extraordinary renditions were effective, they
would probably use them in their counter-terrorist strategy. But they
don't. Such techniques increase the fight and support of the terrorists and
decrease our own. 

Unlike the United States, the British do not generally go for quick fixes or
decisive technological superiority, and though British political leaders
can display any amount of short-term hysteria when they are rattled, the
security services are made of sterner – and more civil libertarian – stuff. 

In the Woolwich case, the prosecution may or may not get a re-trial in the
case of seven of the eight original defendants. They will have to make an
application by the end of this month. But the basic principle still stands.
If the jury at Woolwich made honest and sincere judgments on the basis of
the evidence that was presented to them, the security services may be
privately dismayed and exasperated, but they know that the conclusion of a
court case and the exercise of due legal process is essential to maintain
the moral high ground in the face of the challenges which presently
confront us. As any general worth his salt will attest, failure to occupy
the right ground is one of the major causes of defeat.
-- 
Facts are sacred ... but comment is free

"Robin T Cox"  wrote ...

> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/09/uksecurity.terrorism
:
> For the US, a "war on terror" means that enemy soldiers, warriors,
> terrorists should be attacked and confronted wherever they gather or plot,
> or even chat. For the British, a criminal justice issue - which is what
the
> terrorist challenge represents - revolves around potentially dangerous
> criminals being apprehended along with admissible evidence so that they
> will eventually appear in court.

The difference between "bring them to justice" and "kill the fuckers".

The US loves its extrajudicial killing and extrajudicial punishment but that
just fuels the terrorist cause, it simply shows that the professed moral
authority is no such thing. As always, America makes things worse rather
than better.

The American approach to the so-called war on terror  is equivalent to
taking out a bank robber in a bank by bursting through the doors and machine
gunning everyone there. As long as the robber is dead it doesn't matter how
many innocents were killed in the process. If they got the wrong bank, gee
shucks, but at least it wasn't intentional; everyone should go home happy,
don't bother counting the body bags.

Is it any surprise they are losing their wars ?