Britain's Terrorism Derangement Syndrome

 
Mr Clarke, what kept you so long?

Today’s article in the Telegraph by Peter Clarke, the former Metropolitan Police officer who was until recently national co-ordinator of terrorist investigations, is a straightforward and sensible endorsement of the government’s embattled proposal to extend the detention period for terrorism suspects from 28 to 42 days. The opposition to this measure, when it is not merely playing mischievous politics, borders on the hysterical. Opponents shriek that it is internment by another name, and that if it is passed Britain will have destroyed its ancient liberties and handed victory to the terrorists. They also declare triumphantly that, since no-one can identify a case that has already occurred where 42 days was necessary and its absence caused terrorists to be released, this clinches the argument that it is totally unnecessary.

What utter drivel. Pointing out how the then 14-day limit almost caused the police in 2004 to release the plotters of a dirty bomb attack who were planning to blow up huge numbers of Britons, and who were eventually convicted, Clarke writes:

When I was asked, in 2005, by the home affairs select committee how many terrorists I had been obliged to let go through lack of time to investigate, I inwardly despaired. It was the wrong question. We should look forward, not back. The fact that we have been able to convict more than 60 terrorists in the last year or so is irrelevant. The better question would have been: ‘Is it likely that there will come a time when the present 28-day limit is insufficient?’ The answer would have been, ‘undoubtedly’. That is why we should legislate now, and not in panic in an emergency.

Precisely. The inescapable implication of the opponents’ argument is that they will only change their minds when there is conclusive proof that the current limit is inadequate – ie, when a terrorist atrocity takes place because the police were unable to detain suspects long enough to nail down enough evidence to charge them. The original police paper making the case for extending the detention limit to 90 days made what I thought then and still think was a compelling case that the changed nature of the threat to this country and the unprecedentedly complex mechanisms of that threat made the detention limit dangerously inadequate.

Previously, the police had waited before making arrests until at or near the point of a terrorist attack, so that they could assemble enough evidence to make the case stand up in court. But unlike previous terrorists, the Islamists give no warnings and seek to inflict as many casualties as possible. So the police can no longer afford to take the risk of waiting. To protect the public, they are therefore forced to arrest suspects well before they have finished their investigations. Given the global nature of the terrorist networks, those investigations can involve inquiries on several continents, involving hundreds of computers and with many different languages to be translated. In the light of the close shaves they had already endured and the complexity of the plots they had already been dealing with, in 2005 the police settled upon 90 days as their best guess of what they might need. True, 42 days is an arbitrary figure, but nevertheless dictated by the necessity to improve the current limit of 28 days – itself the arbitrary compromise figure settled upon in 2005 --within the political reality that Parliament won’t hear of 90 days.

I wrote here about the original 90 days’ detention proposal in 2005; and here is what I wrote after Tony Blair was defeated in Parliament over it:

Those who say the problem is that the police show a high level of incompetence in using -- or not using -- laws that currently exist undoubtedly make an important point. But true as that may be, it does not address the argument the police have made that current provisions under terror law do not enable them to protect the public against a changed and unprecedented terrorist risk. They may be -- indeed have been -- faced with situations where they have good reason to suspect someone of being part of a human bomb plot but cannot assemble in time the evidence to sustain any charge because of the time it takes to collect and decipher encrypted information or computer programmes in many languages for which they have to find translators...

We now have the astonishing political situation in Britain where a Labour Prime Minister represents the country’s overwhelming desire for appropriate laws to protect itself, and as a result loses his authority in Parliament as a result of an alliance between the left of the Labour party and the Conservatives on the grounds that measures to prevent atrocities amount to a ‘police state’. What on earth are the Conservatives for if they can’t even defend the country’s security because they now line up with the left in assuming that the police are a conspiracy against personal freedom, and refuse to acknowledge the implications of the changed nature of the terrorist threat? The Tories have now lined up with those claiming fatuously that the 90-day provision would have introduced ‘internment’ or a ‘police state’. Thus does Britain now describe sensible provisions to defend itself.

The number of days has changed but the politics have not. Britain’s political class is still in a state of reckless denial about the nature and scale of the threat this country faces. It still doesn’t understand how asymmetric warfare has changed the rules of the game. It remains mired somewhere between bone-headed stupidity, ‘human rights’ as drafted by Lewis Carroll and a total suspension of reason.

Which brings me to my original question: why didn’t the despairing Peter Clarke speak up loud and clear well before now? The police case is compelling; yet ever since 90 days went down in flames, the police have behaved like Trappist monks. Their silence has enabled opponents to claim that the police are not asking for any extension to the 28 days’ detention limit. The answer almost certainly lies in something else Clarke wrote today:

It is now difficult for counter-terrorist professionals to offer a view without being accused of political partiality.

This is the poisonous legacy of Britain’s (separate but related) Iraq Derangement Syndrome, which has caused the country to write off everything security professionals say in support of government measures to beef up public protection against terrorism as yet further evidence of a politicised security world mouthing the lies their political paymasters instruct them to say in order to project a hyped-up threat to this country, which in turn is being used retrospectively to justify the fact that we were ‘taken to war on a lie’. The hysterical and venomous name-calling generated by this ludicrous belief appears to have caused the police to decide to say nothing at all in public and to let the government fight on alone. Mr Clarke should have broken his silence far earlier.