Homeland Security in the UK

Future Preparedness for Terrorist Attack since 9/11

Paul Wilkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134176083
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book is a detailed examination of whether domestic security measures are striking an appropriate balance between homeland security and civil liberties in the post-9/11 era.

Professor Paul Wilkinson and the other contributors assess the nature of UK responses to terrorism by key public and private-sector bodies, highlighting how these organizations can prevent, pre-empt, counter and manage terrorist attacks by using a matrix of factors such as types of terrorist networks, tactics and targets. The volume also compares and contrasts the UK's response with cognate states elsewhere in the EU and with the USA.

While improved intelligence has helped prevent a major Al Qaeda attack, the authors conclude that there is still a 'major question mark' over whether the country is adequately resourced to deal with an emergency situation, particularly in major cities other than London. The book also confirms that while the UK faces a 'real and serious' threat of terrorist attack by Al Qaeda, it is better prepared for an attack than other EU member states.

Homeland Security in the UK will be essential reading for all students of terrorism studies, security studies and politics, as well as by professional practitioners and well-informed general readers.

Part I
Introduction

1 Introduction

Paul Wilkinson

What this book is about

‘Homeland security’ is a term which originated in the USA in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to denote the numerous policies and measures undertaken by the US government to enhance the protection of US territory against terrorist attack. The label has not so far become part of the political debate in the UK, although it has been adopted as a useful shorthand for a number of conferences and seminars for a whole variety of specialists in aspects of counter-terrorism, and the Conservative opposition appointed Patrick Mercer MP to speak on homeland security matters and is committed to the idea of creating a Minister for Homeland Security, a proposal discussed later in this book by my colleague, Professor Frank Gregory ( see pp *-**.).

One obvious difficulty about using the term ‘homeland security’, however, is that it could plausibly cover security against a very diverse assortments of threats ranging from a chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) attack by a hostile state to a conventional military attack or even increasing violence by organised crime groups, foreign and domestic.

The authors wish to emphasise the independent nature of the research study on which this book is based. The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is an independent funding body established to support academic research in the social sciences. The present study was not motivated by any vested or partisan interest or by any commercial consideration. We believe that the rigorously independent status of our project was a vital factor in securing the trust and cooperation of both public and private sector organisations and individual spokespersons and officials who were willing to be interviewed or to address our workshops and seminars. In our view this is a good omen for further academic research into policy-relevant areas such as terrorism and counter-terrorism which are particularly liable to be characterised by passionate, often bitter controversy.

The St Andrews/Southampton ESRC project team has not been afraid to tackle key policy issues and the complex moral dilemmas involved in formatting and implementing counter-terrorism strategy and measures. In our brief from ESRC we were asked to pay particular attention to the need to find the right balance between protections of national security and protection of civil liberties. A key part of our project entailed holding a major conference on terrorism and human rights with participants from the UK and 21 other countries. This was held in St Andrews in the summer of 2004 and the academic papers presented at this meeting were published in a special issue of the academic journal Terrorism and Political Violence.¹

A constant concern in the preparation of this book has been to ensure that any material which includes sensitive information for potential use to terrorists is excluded. All members of the research team have taken great care to check their contributions, in addition to the checks by the editor, to ensure that there are no inadvertent errors of this kind.

The concept of terrorism

A great deal of unnecessary confusion has been created as a result of the mass media, politicians and others using the term terrorism as a synonym for political violence in general.² Others seek to ban the word terrorism on the spurious grounds that most of those who use terrorism as weapon prefer to be called ‘freedom fighters’, ‘holy warriors’ or ‘revolutionaries’, depending on the cause they profess to be fighting for. Some so-called ‘post-modernists’ reject the concept of terrorism on the grounds that it is purely ‘subjective’, implying that there are no independent objective verifiable criteria to enable us to distinguish terrorism from other forms of activity. The public would be justifiably puzzled if lawyers and criminologists ceased to use terms such as ‘murder’, ‘serial murder’, and ‘war crime’ and ‘genocide’ simply because those who perpetrate such crimes regard these terms as a pejorative.

As for identifying objective criteria for identifying terrorist activity, common sense indicates that the general public in most countries in the world recognise terrorism when they see campaigns of bombings, suicide bombings, shooting attacks, hostage-takings, hijackings and threats of such actions, especially when so many of these actions are deliberately aimed at civilians.

Terrorism can be conceptually and empirically distinguished from other modes of violence and conflict by the following characteristics:

• it is premeditated and designed to create a climate of extreme fear;
• it is directed at a wider target than the immediate victims;
• it inherently involves attacks on random or symbolic targets, including civilians;
• it is considered by the society in which it occurs as ‘extra-normal’, that is in the literal sense that it violates the norms regulating disputes, protest and dissent; and
• it is used primarily, though not exclusively, to influence the political behaviour of governments, communities or specific social groups.³

It is true that in the burgeoning of modern international terrorism in the late 1960s and early 1970s many efforts to obtain international agreements and conventions on the prevention and suppression of terrorist crimes were stymied by governments which, for their own political and ideological reasons, wished to block such measures by claiming that there was no internationally accepted definition of terrorism. Since then almost all the major democracies have developed national anti-terrorist legislation and many individuals have been convicted of terrorist offences. We have also seen a considerable amount of international law on terrorist offences developed before and since 9/11.⁴ Moreover, in October 2004 the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1566 which defines terrorism and declares that in no circumstances can terrorist acts be condoned or excused for political or ideological reasons:

Criminal acts, including [those] against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organisation to do or to abstain from doing any act, which constitute offences within the scope of and as defined in the international conventions and protocols relating to terrorism, are under no circumstances justifiable by considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other similar nature.

It is true that we may have to wait some time before we see a UN General Assembly definition. However, governmental and inter-governmental conferences on problems of terrorism no longer waste days in definitional issues: they have made genuine progress in improving cooperation against terrorism, and those who dismiss the national and international efforts to develop a legal regime to deal with various aspects of terrorism as nugatory are simply wrong. The legal framework to deal with terrorist crimes is far from perfect and very difficult to apply effectively because the more sophisticated and dangerous groups have become more skilled at evading detection, but despite this there have been some major successes in bringing terrorists to justice (for example, Ramzi Youssef, Shoko Asahara, Abdullah Ocalan, Abimael Guzman, Carlos the Jackal). Terrorism is not simply a label; it is a concept which has proved indispensable in legal and social science discourse to deal with a complex global phenomenon.

The key statutory definition of terrorism in the UK legislation is contained in the Terrorism Act (2000):

1. In this Act ‘terrorism’ means the use or threat of action where–
   1. the action falls within subsection (2),
   2. the use or threat is designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and
   3. the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.
2. Action falls within this subsection if it–
   1. involves serious violence against a person,
   2. involves serious damage to property,
   3. endangers a person’s life, other than that of the person committing the action,
   4. creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public, or
   5. is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.
3. The use or threat of action falling within subsection (2) which involves the use of firearms or explosives is terrorism whether or not subsection (1)(b) is satisfied.
   (Terrorism Act 2000, Part 1, (1)–(3))

The US government has employed the definition contained in US Code Title 22, Section 2656f (d) since 1983 as follows:

The term ‘terrorism’ means premeditated politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.

The term ‘international terrorism’ means terrorism involving citizens or the territory of more than one country.

The term ‘terrorist group’ means any group practicing, or that has significant sub groups that practice, international terrorism.

(US Code Title 22, Section 2656f (d))

Typology, with historical and current examples

Terrorism is an activity or a ‘weapon-system’ as Brian Jenkins has termed it, which has been used by an enormous variety of non-state groups, regimes and governments. (Historically, the use of terror by regimes has been infinitely more lethal than that of non-state groups, because, by definition, regimes/governments are likely to have control of far greater supplies of weapons and manpower to implement their policies of terror in the course of internal repression or foreign conquest.)

However, in an operative democracy the major threat of terror is posed by non-state movements or groups seeking to destroy or undermine democratic government and to impose their own agenda by coercive intimidation.

Another basic division is between international terrorism which involved the citizens or jurisdiction of more than one country, and domestic terrorism which is confined within the borders of a single state and involves no foreign citizens or property. This distinction is useful for statistical purposes, but we should bear in mind that almost all protracted domestic terrorist campaigns targeting a specific state develop an important international dimension through their creation of an overseas support network aimed at raising finance, recruits, weapons and other resources for their colleagues leading the struggle against their chosen ‘enemy’, state authorities and security forces.

One useful way of categorising non-state terrorist movements or groups is by their political motivation: Ethno nationalist groups, for example ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna or Basque Homeland and Liberty), which has waged terrorism for 40 years in a struggle to establish an independent Basque state; Ideological groups, for example the Red Brigades, which waged a campaign against the Italian Republic in the 1970s and 1980s with the aim of creating a neo-communist state and socio-economic system; Religio-political groups, for example Hamas, which aims to create an Islamic Republic of Palestine and ultimately to dismantle the state of Israel; single issue groups, such as animal rights extremists linked to ALF (Animal Liberation Front) aim to change one aspect of government policy and social behaviour rather than to remodel the political and socio-economic order as a whole. While most members of the animal welfare movement are committed to restricting themselves to non-violent protest, the extreme militants are prepared to engage in arson and bomb attacks on the premises of commercial firms they wish to target and to engage in threats, and in some cases attacks, on people they describe as animal ‘abusers’. It should be borne in mind that campaigns by animal rights extremists against specific firms and projects such as the Cambridge animal laboratory have caused industry research labs to lose millions of pounds.

The damage and disruption caused by violent single issue groups should not be underestimated, but so far, at least in the UK, they have not succeeded in killing anyone.

One distinction which is worth adding to our typology is that between potentially corrigible terrorism where there is a real possibility of finding a political/diplomatic pathway out of the conflict by addressing its underlying causes, thus very probably reducing if not ending the terrorist violence spawned by the conflict and incorrigible terrorism. In the latter case, the movement/group has such absolutist and maximalist aims and poses such a major threat to the lives and wellbeing of civilian communities that the only recourse is to use all possible measures to suppress the group before it can wreak more mayhem.

In order to begin to understand the implications of recent changes in the nature of international terrorism, it is essential to grasp the major differences between the new terrorism of the Al-Qaeda network of networks and more traditional terrorist groups such as the ETA and FARC.⁵ Al-Qaeda is not simply another group like ETA but under a different label. ETA has certainly committed hundreds of brutal killings. However, unlike Al-Qaeda, ETA did not explicitly adopt a policy of mass killing as an integral part of its strategy. As Brian Jenkins so aptly observed, terrorists in the 1970s wanted ‘a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead’.⁶

By contrast Al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, issued a ‘Fatwa’ on 23 February 1998 which announced the setting up of a World Islamic Front for Jihad and declared that ‘it is the duty of all Muslims to kill US citizens – civilian or military, and their allies – everywhere’.⁷ The brutal language of this ‘Fatwa’ is one way in which the sheer ruthlessness and lethality of this movement is reflected.⁸ Their track record of brutal mass-killing in New York, Washington, Kenya, Bali, Casablanca, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and many other places is proof positive of their remorseless use of mass terror.

Moreover, whereas ETA and other more traditional groups have limited their aims to bringing about radical change in one particular state or region, Al-Qaeda has an uncompromising/absolutist commitment to changing the entire international system. The Al-Qaeda movement aims to expel the USA and other ‘infidels’ from the Middle East and from Muslim lands generally. They also want to topple Muslim regimes/governments which they accuse of betraying the ‘true Islam’ and of collaboration with the US and its allies. Ultimately, their aim is to establish a pan-Islamist Caliphate uniting all Muslims.⁹ These aims may appear grandiose in the extreme, but we need to bear in mind that bin Laden and his followers fanatically believe that they will prevail in their Jihad because Allah is on their side.

A major difference between the new terrorism of the Al-Qaeda network and more traditional groups is precisely its global network of networks, including affiliates, cells and support. These networks provide the movement with a presence and a capacity to act in at least 60 countries. It is the most widely dispersed nonstate terrorist network ever seen and this is what gives the movement ‘global reach’.¹⁰

‘Traditional’ terrorist movements generally confine themselves to mounting attacks in one country or region, though in some cases they do develop sophisticated overseas support networks to obtain finance, weapons, recruits, safe haven and the opportunity to enlist wider support for their cause.

The opening chapter of Part II of this book will assess Al-Qaeda’s current strategy, modus operandi, targets and tactics and ask to what extent the War on Terrorism can be judged successful in its efforts to crush Al-Qaeda.

Theory and methodology

There is no universally accepted general social scientific theory of terrorism, or of counter-terrorism. This is not so surprising when one considers the extreme difficulty of developing and validating theories of other aspects of human society. On the other hand we do have a variety of different hypotheses, models and partial or limited theories derived from politics, strategy, history, ideology, psychology and sociology, for example, which can provide useful insights and understanding of aspects of terrorism and its associated activities.

The St Andrews/Southampton project team made a firm decision to allow members to draw on the theories, models and hypotheses which they found to be most valuable in their work on their specialist tasks. This proved to be the most practical and effective approach in our holistic research framework. UK preparedness was not something which could be adequately assessed simply by examining ‘consequence management’ and ‘resilience’, important though these aspects may be. To do our job properly we clearly needed to reassess the threat posed to the UK by the Al-Qaeda network of networks and other terrorist groups. How effective were the UK’s intelligence agencies in gathering high-quality intelligence on Al-Qaeda and its affiliates? How far were the USA and other allies prepared to go in sharing intelligence on terrorism in the UK? How good was the analysis of intelligence? Did the newly established Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre make a significant improvement in threat assessment for government and the counter-terrorism agencies? What of the role of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the UK diplomatic efforts: to what extent do they assist British preparedness? Are the UK police forces adequately trained and resourced to undertake a major task in preventing terrorism, pursuing terrorists and how effective is cooperation between police and the Security Service (MI5), with the armed forces, and with other emergency services?

What is the appropriate role of the British Army in preventing and combating terrorism and in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Threat assessment
• Part III UK efforts to enhance preparedness since 9/11
• Part IV Civil contingencies and emergency response
• Part V International dimensions and main conclusions of authors
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2