Welcome back and I hope you enjoyed the previous read.
Please bear with me, I think I need to reiterate previous issue I touched upon some more and then I’ll move on to my thoughts about what possible solutions there are.
My major problem with these and any of the current legislation we have in effect is that these Anti-terror laws do nothing. As such they could be called post facto laws, or in other words laws that will only apply to you after you have committed a crime. Now you could argue justly that almost all criminal laws can only be acted upon after a crime has been perpetrated and I agree this is the case but none the less we still act in an attempt to prevent the crimes from happening before hand.
But in dealing with a crime like terrorism this is in my opinion akin to trying to shut the barn door after the horses have bolted and particularly ineffective when dealing with people for whom death is not to be feared. If they’re not scared of dying I doubt they’ll be that terrified of sitting in prison for the rest of their lives.
What this means is that us trying to find even more ways to make sure we can keep these people in jail for what conceivably will be capital crimes in countries which still practice capital punishment or life sentences in others will not be much if any kind of deterrent.
So where does this leave us?
As I said before and has been uttered by many doctors throughout the world, “Prevention is better than the cure.� We must start utilising our intelligence gathering capabilities in a much more intelligent and targeted fashion. Whilst I disagree with racial/ethnic profiling on principle, I do also agree and understand that in limited, please note that I did say limited, and certain circumstances it could be a valid tool amongst others. Also increasing the funding that we have for our human intelligence gathering functions and relying less upon our electronic information gathering capabilities (Which we relied upon to almost certain disaster previously, is in my opinion foolish and dangerous.) You can’t beat a good pair of eyes and a smart brain on the ground. We need to start increasing the HUMINT (Human Intelligence) gathering capabilities a lot. We can do this a variety of ways and means and using the methods that work, we’ve got to stop recruiting fresh eyed faces from the university campuses who will only ever end up as paper pushers sitting behind desks without a real understanding of the risks involved and start using retired police officers and detectives, people who will already have a very good idea and understanding in how to go out into the world, work with a broken and fractured picture of events that have just happened and try to piece them together into something that can work. These people already work under stringent evidentiary procedures and understand and know how important it is to get it right or a major criminal case could fall apart. (Yes I do admit to ripping this idea off and if you recognize where I got it from congratulations. But a good idea, no matter where it comes from, is still a good idea.)
I’m not completely blind either to how an organisation like this could become perverted and a danger to the society they wish to protect but that is why governments and their agencies have checks and balances. It would be hard to do this in a way without stifling the organisation or creating a group without peer that is open to abuse but something that is worthwhile is never easy.
Secondly we need to start using our security forces in a better manner than in the way they have been deployed. I would like to impress a point here in that I do not agree with the view that the press has taken upon our situation in Iraq in that everything is falling apart. I disagree. I will however come forth and say that in my honest opinion things in Iraq are not going as well as we could be doing them. We need to understand from the lessons we learned in the past in how to deal with an insurgency situation. There are many experts from previous campaigns by insurgent forces, for example in the UK from dealing with the IRA and the Irish republican cause regarding Northern Ireland, mistakes in the past were made but please let us at least try and use some of the lessons we learned there and try to see if we can apply them there.
On another note please give me any feedback on what I write here at all it’s hard to write about these things in a vacuum. I need ideas and viewpoints to bounce of off and to react to and to make me think.