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April 24, 2009
Another Fine Anti-Terror Mess
It’s some small comfort at least that Lord Carlile, the sensible terrorism law watchdog, has taken a personal decision to conduct a review of the debacle in which 12 men, 11 of them Pakistani students plus one British national, were arrested a fortnight ago in Manchester, Liverpool and Lancashire amid claims of an enormous Easter terrorist bomb plot, but are not to be charged at all and with the 11 facing instead deportation on national security grounds.
This looks like a fiasco of no small proportion. The police operation appeared to founder when the former head of the Metropolitan Police Counter-Terror Command, Bob Quick, inadvertently revealed details of the impending arrests on a carelessly exposed folder as he emerged from his car. He promptly fell upon his truncheon, and the story was that as a result of his carelessness the arrests had to be brought forward by 12 hours, thus causing police and intelligence officials to scramble to reel in all 12 suspects in what was described by the Prime Minister as
a very big terrorist plot.
But now this whole operation has unraveled. The police have no evidence against any of these men, it seems, that could stand up in court. As a result they will not be charged but instead all but one are to be deported – and predictably, their lawyers are already digging in for a major legal fight on the grounds that their clients pose no threat to national security at all. Given the extreme difficulty in deporting any terror suspects anywhere thanks to the fanatical obstructionism of the “human rights” obsessed English judges (although there are signs that under the pressure of public fury their attitudes might just be changing) we could be in for another judicial and security farce. And meanwhile –equally predictably – Muslims in these northern towns are seizing on the fiasco to claim that the men are totally innocent and that the whole thing was “political.”
So was Bob Quick’s blunder responsible for the collapse of this operation? Not necessarily; the real story may well be far worse. A further story which surfaced soon after the arrests suggested that the “12 hours” line had been a blind thrown out by the police to cover up major disagreements about the conduct of the operation and the timing of the arrests amongst the various police and intelligence agencies involved – the Met, Greater Manchester Police and the Security Service. The Times blog Crime Central is repeating this line:
The blame game over the North-West terror arrest fiasco is in full swing. The intelligence folks say the cops went too early. Scotland Yard says that despite Bob Quick's infamous blunder all the operational decisions were down to Greater Manchester Police, who run the North-West Counter-terrorism Unit. Greater Manchester says there are no disagreements and it acted to protect the public.
The Times, meanwhile, carried a piece by Andy Hayman, the Met’s former Assistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations, who suggested something else again – that the police had made the arrests before having enough evidence to stand up in court because they feared an atrocity was about to happen:
The difficulty with investigating the threat posed by al-Qaeda, as I found it, is knowing when to make your move. It is one thing to eavesdrop on telephone calls or e-mails. It is a completely different discipline to turn those conversations, which are not admissible in court, into evidence that passes the jury test.
The huge responsibility that goes with the job of fighting terror is judging the balance between when to intervene to stop a possible attack and when to wait, to allow events to unfold so that incriminating evidence can be collected. If you wait too long, there is the danger that public safety is threatened; but waiting that extra hour could be the key to getting the golden nugget that secures a conviction. It is a test of nerve...In this case, it appears that the authorities moved to the arrest phase because they thought that an attack was imminent. That was at the expense of waiting a little bit longer to collect evidence, or to establish the lack of it.
This of course was precisely the argument made by the police to support the introduction of a “90-days” period of detention before charge. The point they made then was that, given the unprecedented character of Islamic terrorism, they feared situations where they might have no time to collect court-ready evidence because of the literally suicidal and thus much more volatile and unpredictable nature of the attacks. That was why they wanted more time to assemble court-ready evidence after arrest. That argument was widely scorned in the enormous row that blew up over “90 days” (later reduced) in which the civil liberties lobby ridiculed the proposal as an attempt to terrify the public in order to advance towards a police state – but not scorned, interestingly, by Lord Carlile, who understood that this was indeed a very real dilemma and concern.
So was this just such a situation – or was it simply yet another example of crossed wires and institutional incompetence? We eagerly await Lord Carlile’s verdict.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor Melanie Phillips is the author of the powerful and frightening Londonistan, and she blogs at The Spectator.
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