British Counterterrorism Tactics Looked at as a Model
Terrorism
New Hampshire Union Leader
Kendra Gilbert
Boston University Washington News Service
9-14-06
WASHINGTON — Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., called Thursday for a counter-terrorism system in this country that places greater focuses on prevention of attacks rather than prosecution after the fact.
Gregg and witnesses appearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Homeland Security Subcommittee, which he chairs, discussed the British counterterrorism system, with a separate domestic intelligence agency at its heart, as a potential model.
“Obtaining the intelligence to stop an attack before it occurs” is our primary goal, Gregg told a panel of witnesses. “This is a war of intelligence,” he said of the struggle against global terrorism.
While the FBI is a crime-fighting agency that traditionally focuses on building cases for criminal prosecution, Britain’s MI5 is a domestic security agency that gathers intelligence with a view toward proactively combating terrorism and other threats to British security. As a result, MI5 has far more latitude on domestic intelligence gathering and ability to detain suspects than does the FBI.
Gregg and the witnesses argued that the FBI’s purview is too broad, often dealing with criminal justice cases unrelated to terrorism, and a new, more focused intelligence agency is needed.
“The FBI is torn,” U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner told the committee.
Witnesses disagreed, however, on how to best achieve a more-focused domestic intelligence agency. John Yoo, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley and a former adviser to the Bush administration on counterterrorism and the law, proposed reorganizing the FBI to focus solely on intelligence-gathering and counterterrorism aims. Posner, however, proposed the creation of an entirely new agency, similar to MI5.
Gregg said that inside the FBI, the “culture is resistant” to changing over to the kind of mission required for domestic counterterrorism.
Posner, in his written statement to the committee, argued for the need for an MI5-type group, “which should encounter no obstacle based on our Constitution, for a domestic intelligence agency separate from the FBI.”
Testimony and discussion focused specifically on the U.S. policy of holding terrorism suspects without charges for no more than 48 hours. The witnesses agreed that U.S. officials should consider following the British model, which has a 28-day limit.
Some of the witnesses also advocated that the U.S. government emulate Britain’s more lenient restrictions on data mining and surveillance, as well as its separation between its intelligence agency and its local law enforcement agencies.
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