Tackling terrorism, British style

08/13/2006

U.S. officials say they would never let a terrorist plot advance to its final stages, for fear that it could not be stopped in time.

Philip Shenon and Neil A. Lewis,
New York Times
Last update: August 12, 2006 – 7:49 PM

WASHINGTON - The disclosure that British officials conducted months of surveillance before arresting 24 terrorism suspects last week highlighted what many terrorism specialists say is a central difference between American and British law enforcement agencies.

The British, they say, are more willing to wait and watch.

Although details of the British investigation remain secret, Bush administration officials say Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, was for at least several months aware of a plot to set off explosions on airliners flying to the United States from Britain, as well as the identities of the people who would carry it out.

British officials suggested that the arrests were delayed to gather as much information as possible about the plot and the reach of the network behind it.

The Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have suggested they would never allow a terrorist plot discovered here to advance to its final stages, for fear that it could not be stopped in time.

In June, the FBI arrested seven people in Florida on charges of plotting attacks on American landmarks, including the Sears Tower in Chicago, with investigators acknowledging that the suspects, described as Al-Qaida sympathizers, had only the most preliminary discussions about an attack.

“Our philosophy is that we try to identify plots in the earliest stages possible because we don’t know what we don’t know about a terrorism plot,” Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said at the time. “Once we have sufficient information to move forward with a prosecution, that’s what we do.”

Two very different systems

The differences in counterterrorism strategy reflect an important distinction between the legal systems of the United States and Britain and their definitions of civil liberties, with MI5 and British police agencies given far greater authority in general than their American counterparts to conduct domestic surveillance and detain terrorism suspects.

Britain’s newly revised terror laws permit the detention of suspects for 28 days without charge. In the United States, suspects must be brought before a judge as soon as possible, which courts have interpreted to mean within 48 hours. Law enforcement officials have detained some terrorism suspects designated as material witnesses for far longer. (The United States has also taken into custody several hundred people suspected of terrorist activity and detained them at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as enemy combatants.)

Andrew McCarthy, a former terrorism prosecutor at the Justice Department, said he believed that British authorities were willing to allow terrorist plots to progress further because, if an attack appeared imminent, they could immediately round up the suspects, even without formal criminal charges.

“They have this fail-safe,” he said. He said FBI agents, who are required to file criminal charges if they want to arrest a suspect, had a justifiable fear that they might be unable to short-circuit an attack at the last minute.

There is a difference, too, in how information is shared, with American law enforcement officials typically communicating much more fully with the news media and other agencies than their British counterparts do. In one case in particular, last year after the London bombings when New York police officers traveled there to pitch in, the different working style created tension.

A senior federal law enforcement official said MI5 also had a distinct advantage over the FBI in that it had a greater store of agents who speak foreign languages. The FBI still has only a handful of Muslim agents and others who speak Arabic, Urdu or other languages common in the Islamic world.

An American MI5?

Justice Department officials and others involved in developing American counterterrorism strategies, however, say it is wrong to suggest that the FBI always moves hurriedly to arrest terrorism suspects.

John O. Brennan, a former official of the Central Intelligence Agency who set up the government’s National Counterterrorism Center two years ago, said he had been involved in a number of recent cases—most of them still classified—in which the FBI had placed suspected terrorists under surveillance rather than arresting them.

He said the bureau’s willingness to wait reflected a new sophistication as supervisors adapted to the rhythm of terrorism investigations. “Especially given the history of 9/11, of course the bureau wants to move quickly and make sure there is no risk of attack,” he said. “But over the past two years, I think the bureau has become much more adept at allowing these operations to run and monitor them.”

Others are less certain that the bureau has overcome its traditional desire to make quick arrests.

Daniel Benjamin, a counterterrorism specialist in the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, said the apparent success of the British surveillance operation—and the failure of the FBI to identify and disrupt any similar terrorist cell in the United States since Sept. 11—argued for creation of an American counterpart to MI5.

But MI5 has its own critics who note that it had some of the suspects in last summer’s bombings in the London subway and on a bus under surveillance before the attacks.

‘It’s not like television’

John Timoney, the Miami police chief who also has served in the No. 2 post in the New York department, has worked extensively in Britain on policing matters. He noted that in Britain the Metropolitan Police is the dominant national law enforcement agency and is served by MI5, while in the United States, there is intense competition among various federal agencies and state and local forces.

But neither approach is guaranteed to succeed. In June, about 250 police officers stormed an East London rowhouse looking for chemical weapons and arrested two brothers, Abul Koyair and Mohammed Abdul Kahar. Kahar was shot and wounded during the operation. But the two men were later released without charge after the authorities failed to find any evidence linking them to terrorist activities.

David N. Kelley, a former U.S. attorney in Manhattan who has overseen a range of international terrorism cases, including prosecuting the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, said, that said the longer investigators waited to take down a case, the greater the risks that they might lose track of suspects.

“People think when you have someone under surveillance, it’s a fail-safe, but losing someone is a real fear in these things,” he said. “It’s not like television. It’s a real juggling act. You’ve got to keep a lot of balls in the air and not let any of them drop.”