The Lessons of London

By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com


Details about last week's disrupted plane-bombing plot are still emerging, but two points already seem clear: American intelligence and police agencies remain far behind their British counterparts in their capacity to crack down on terrorists before they act, and the “legal left” and its media amplifiers deserve much of the blame.

Much has been made of the fact that tips from U.S. intelligence services aided British authorities in foiling last week’s plot. Undoubtedly, this played an important role. At the same time, the operation that culminated with raids on London suburbs and 24 arrests was very much a product of Britain’s tough-minded counterterrorism laws and a more enlightened public attitude about security threats in the post-9/11 era.

Not the least trivial advantage afforded British law enforcement officers is clarity about the nature of the enemy. Read through Britain’s police codes and you will see intermittent concessions to political correctness, as when police officers conducting a search are cautioned “not to discriminate against members of minority groups in the exercise of their powers.” More noteworthy, however, is the acknowledgement that “there are times when it is appropriate for officers to take account of the person’s ethnic origin,” especially since “some international terrorist groups are associated with particular identities.” In focusing their investigation on British Muslims, many of them of Pakistani ancestry, British intelligence services plainly chose the latter approach.

Indeed, they went further than that. British intelligence used an agent to infiltrate the terrorist suspects’ circle in December of last year--a step that proved critical in uncovering the plot. In addition, both Britain’s center-left government and its security agencies have long maintained that Muslim communities and mosques need to be monitored carefully for any connections to terrorism. American politicians, on the other hand, generally avoid raising the issue. Their reticence, though unfortunate, is understandable: Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was pilloried by self-styled civil liberties and Muslim groups last September after daring to suggest that using wiretaps to monitor mosques and their attendees might be a reasonable way of tracking terrorism plots in the planning stages. (Romney, to his credit, did not back down.)

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