Safety, Liberty, and Islamist Terrorism

Description

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, produced a revolution in domestic security in the United States. The Bush administration responded quickly by aggressively enforcing existing laws, sponsoring new legislation, overhauling domestic intelligence, and employing the president's executive power in ways that drew criticism from civil libertarians on both the left and right. Many hoped that the succeeding administration would adopt a more 'European' approach to domestic security-an approach typically understood to be more compatible with the rule of law and friendlier to civil liberties. But Europe has suffered major terrorist attacks as well-in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005-and terrorist plots continue to plague America's European allies. Has this shared experience engendered a common approach to domestic security, or, as many believe, is there a transatlantic divide in counterterrorism strategy? In Safety, Liberty, and Islamist Terrorism: American and European Approaches to Domestic Counterterrorism, Gary J. Schmitt leads a group of security and intelligence experts in analyzing the domestic counterterrorism regimes of the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, and the United States. The author's in-depth analysis provides a unique window into the similarities and differences among the counterterrorism efforts of these major democracies and explores the possibilities (and limitations) of applying one country's lessons to another. Safety, Liberty, and Islamist Terrorism concludes with a broad assessment of the changes made to U.S. counterterrorism strategy since 9/11 in comparison with current European laws, institutions, and practices, and with policies instituted during past American domestic security crises. The analysis uncovers evidence of a shared strategic imperative: preemption. For the United States, preemption occurs both at home and on battlefields abroad, while for Europe, preemption is primarily a domestic affair, often resulting in laws that allow more aggressive policing of terrorist actvity than occurs in the United States. The comparison also yields insights about how the transatlantic community has balanced the need to address the jihadist threat with maintaining civic order at home. Although no country has a perfect record, Schmitt contends that changes made to domestic security policy in response to the terrorist threat have not undermined the United States and Europe's shared commitment to democracy and liberty. 'Certainly, tradeoffs have been made between individual liberties and domestic security,' Schmitt writes. 'But if we take the broad view, we are struck by how minimal those intrusions on our liberties have been, given the threat we face.'

Sujets

• Security International
• Security National
• Political Science

Informations

• Publié par: AEI Press
• Date de parution: 16 août 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780844743509
• Langue: English

Extrait

Safety, Liberty, and Islamist Terrorism
American and European Approaches to Domestic Counterterrorism
Gary J. Schmitt, Editor
The AEI Press Publisher for the American Enterprise Institute
WASHINGTON, D.C.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schmitt, Gary James, 1952– Safety, liberty, and Islamist terrorism : American and European approaches to domestic counterterrorism / Gary J. Schmitt. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8447-4333-2 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-8447-4333-X (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-8447-4349-3 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-8447-4349-6 (pbk.) [etc.] 1. United States—Foreign relations—Europe. 2. Europe—Foreign relations— United States. 3. National security—International cooperation. 4. Security, International. I. Title. JZ1480.A54S38 2010 363.325'16094—dc22
2010018324
13 12 11 10 09 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Cover photographs: Double Decker Bus © Stockbyte/Getty Images; Freight Yard © Chris Jongkind/Getty Images; Manhattan Skyline © Alessandro Busà/ Flickr/Getty Images; and New York, NY, September 13, 2001—The sun streams through the dust cloud over the wreckage of the World Trade Center. Photo © Andrea Booher/ FEMA Photo News
© 2010 by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing from the American Enterprise Institute except in the case of brief quotations embodied in news articles, critical articles, or reviews. The views expressed in the publications of the American Enterprise Institute are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, advisory panels, officers, or trustees of AEI.
Printed in the United States of America
Acknowledgments
This book owes its origins to long and fruitful conversations with Reuel Marc Gerecht, my former AEI colleague. Much of the initial spadework for the volume was a joint effort. In particular, the chapter on France owes much to Reuel’s insights into French security politics. I would also like to thank Abram Shulsky of the Hudson Institute and John Yoo of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law for taking the time and effort to read the manuscript and provide me with their thoughts and suggestions. In addition, I would like to thank the numerous government officials, scholars, and policymakers from Spain, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom who agreed to share their thoughts on their countries’ respective security practices and policies. Allied relations have gone through a particularly rough patch since the Iraq War, but cooperation in the field of intelligence and counterterrorism remains a solid cornerstone of transatlantic ties. Finally, I would like to thank Philipp Tomio, my research assistant, for seeing this project through and providing invaluable research help.
Gary J. Schmitt, May 20, 2010
Introduction
Gary J. Schmitt
This volume owes its genesis to several long discussions with a former AEI colleague, Reuel Gerecht. Gerecht, a Middle East scholar and former operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had lived in Europe for extended periods and had worked Middle East “targets” for much of that time. I, on the other hand, was trained as a scholar in presidential studies and worked in both Congress and the White House in senior positions overseeing the U.S. intelligence community. What struck us both in the wake of the attacks on 9/11 was the general failure to put recommended changes to our domestic counterterrorist efforts into proper historical and comparative perspective. It was as though the United States had never in the past dealt with a security threat on its own soil, or democratic allies had not faced or were not facing similar problems from jihadist terrorists.
This observation led us to publish an initial paper that looked at France’s success in meeting its own Middle East terrorist problem and at the possible “lessons learned” for the United States. 1 It also led us to think that a broader set of country studies might be useful; hence, this volume, with chapters on France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Germany, as well as a chapter detailing the U.S. counterterrorism regime. These individual country studies describe the nuts and bolts of current domestic security laws, institutions, and practices and place those elements in the unique political and historical context of each nation. Each country study also looks at what changes have been made since the attacks of 9/11 and, in the case of the European allies, what changes have followed the bombings in Madrid (March 11, 2004) and London (July 7, 2005). The final chapter draws together these earlier analyses and considers what broader points can be drawn from comparing the counterterrorism practices of the United States with those of other democratic states, while at the same time considering the changes in U.S. laws and practices since 9/11 within the broader sweep of American history.
All too often, the debate in the United States over its post-9/11 policies looks only at U.S. policies and practices, and through the lens of the past three decades. Although stated in different forms, the underlying question derived from this narrowed perspective is whether we have moved too quickly and too aggressively to undo the regulations put in place to keep the American intelligence community under greater control in the wake of the investigations of the mid-1970s into intelligence practices—or, less often, whether we have not moved quickly and decisively enough. Not only does this time-constrained focus do little justice to our own history of dealing with serious domestic security issues, but it ignores the efforts by long-time allies—all of whom have had to deal with serious terrorist challenges in the recent past—to find the proper balance between safety and liberty. If nothing else, being clear about the lines being drawn by other liberal democracies between, say, the right to privacy and the need for surveillance, between law enforcement and intelligence gathering, and between free speech and incitement, makes for a more meaningful and more useful debate here in the United States.
The time is right for such a debate, given the change in the U.S. administration. Certainly, as a candidate and senator, Barack Obama promised to rethink the Bush administration’s policies on the “global war on terror,” which he described as “dangerously flawed” and as “undermin[ing] the very values we are fighting to defend.” 2 As president, he has pointedly characterized the previous administration’s decisions as “hasty,” “based on fear rather than foresight,” and he has criticized its “ad hoc legal approach . . . that was neither effective nor sustainable.” 3 Few were surprised then when the new administration moved swiftly and dramatically to distance itself from the policies of the previous White House: on his third day in office, the president issued executive orders to close the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, renounced the use of torture, and shut down the CIA’s network of secret detention facilities. 4 And while controversial, other decisions by the administration are hardly surprising either, given candidate Obama’s rhetoric about Bush administration policies: for instance, the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, along with four other detainees associated with the attacks on 9/11, in a federal court rather than before a military tribunal, and to treat the case of would-be Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as a criminal matter rather than one involving an unlawful enemy combatant. These changes in policies are significant—if for no other reason than the signal they are designed to send abroad: that the Obama administration will rebalance America’s approach to the jihadist threat to be more in line with what allied, especially European, publics believe should be a less warlike, more law-bound approach to counterterrorism. The goal was, as one advisor put it, to change the “mood music” for allies and the Muslim world by recalibrating presidential rhetoric and expanding the use of the criminal justice system in cases of terrorism. 5
But reality being what it is, there has been less change than perhaps many of the president’s supporters, both here and abroad, expected. For example, the Obama administration has not abandoned the option of indefinite detention without (civilian or military) trial for captured members of the Taliban or al Qaeda; it has modified but not eliminated the use of military commissions to try some of those same detainees; it continues to use—indeed, has expanded—targeted killings against suspected terrorists; it has retained the option of rendition, that is, capturing terrorist suspects in one country and then handing them over to the government of another; it has reaffirmed the principle of “state secrets,” in which the government can prevent the disclosure of certain information on the grounds that it would harm national security; it has argued against expanding habeas corpus rights to captured Taliban and al Qaeda members under U.S. military control in Afghanistan. 6 And, finally, of course, the president has added—perhaps reluctantly, but added nevertheless—tens of thousands of ground troops to Afghanistan in an effort to prevent the return of the al Qaeda–friendly Taliban.
Many of these policy decisions flow from the fact that the Obama administration sees the nation as still being “at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred,” 7 even if it does not wish to call its efforts a “global war on terror.” As the pres