British police want tough new powers
Police want power to hold suspects for up to 3 months, and to crack down on extremists' websites.
In the wake of Thursday's
failed bombing attempts in London, and the attacks two weeks ago that killed 56 people, British police have asked Prime Minister Tony Blair for new powers to help them battle extremists.
The
Guardian reports that The Association of Police Chief Officers want to be able to hold terror suspects for
up to three months without laying charges - the current period if 14 days. British law enforcement wants to be able to shut down websites, and to create a new crime for using the Internet to prepare a terrorist attack
They also want to make it a criminal offence for suspects to refuse to cooperate in giving the police full access to computer files by refusing to disclose their encryption keys.
The police would also like to see much clearer information given to the public about the threat level, the creation of a specialist border security agency and further discussions about the use of phonetap evidence in terrorist cases.
Security and intelligence officials, meanwhile, told Mr. Blair that they would like to see a new system of plea bargaining. Convicted terrorists would be given lighter sentences if they provided information to authorities during special "intelligence only" interviews, where any information they did give could not be used against them in court.
SKY-TV reports that many security and intelligence agents in Britain are saying that Thursday's would-be suicide bombers
will most likely be caught. (It's not known at the time of writing if
the man shot in London on Friday was one of these bombers.) John O'Connor, a former member of London's famous police 'Flying Squad' said the terror group operated like a franchise, and that while cells shared common beliefs, they seldom knew about the existence of each other.
"It is impossible to get into the mindset of these people," he said. "They are utterly ruthless people and have to be dealt with in a ruthless way."
Paul Wilkinson, Professor of International Relations at St. Andrews University and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, writes in the
Independent that Britons do
need to be worried about further attacks. He points out that while most Muslims in Europe want no part of these attacks, it only takes a few to carry out these bombings.
We should never have thought that European Muslim communities would be immune from penetration by Al Qaeda. All European countries have Al Qaeda networks. They are a tiny – but dangerous – minority of Muslims. It does not require huge numbers of people to create attacks – the 11 September attacks in America only involved 19 suicide hijackers. Ahmed Rashid writes in
The Daily Telegraph that the four July 7th bombers did not have to "enroll in a Pakistani religious school or madrassa to learn about Islamic extremism, because it was available in Yorkshire." But while British Muslims "must share a great part of the blame for failing to speak out against the extremists living in their midst," and Britain itself needs to look at why only feeble attempts have been made to intergrate Muslims of Southeast Asian descent, in particular, into British life, you cannot ignore
what is happening in Pakistan when it comes to extremism around the world.
[In
a televised address Thursday night, President Pervez Musharraf] still failed to order the closure of madrassas controlled by extremist groups. The promised reform in 2002, which Musharraf pledged at meetings with Bush and Blair in Washington and London, has not been implemented. Until the London bombings, neither leader had bothered to ask Musharraf why not, although both have given funding for education ...
The enormous Islamic extremist infrastructure that the military maintained before September 11 to fight its wars in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and Indian Kashmir have not been broken up, only put to temporary sleep while clandestine training camps still spring up at new locations. Some militant groups have been banned three times, only to re-appear under different names.
Meanwhile, British employment minister Margaret Hodge said
more had to be done to find jobs for promising young Muslim graduates. There is an 11 percent gap between Muslims and others graduates finding jobs in Britain. Discrimination is one part of the problem, but an unwillingness to relocate and strong family ties may be part of the problem as well. "It is important to find ways of encouraging young Muslims to feel integrated into British society, in the light of the terrorist attacks in London on July 7," said Hodge.
Finally, the attacks on London may do something else that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has always claimed as one of his aims -
hurt the country finacially. The
BBC reports that British Tourism Industry Emergency Response Group says the attacks could cost Britain up to 300 million pounds (or about US $530 million) in lost tourism. In particular, Thursday's attacks could create the impression that London is just not a safe place to go, the group says.
Also...
•
Al Qaeda: Wrong answers to real problems (
Al Jazeera)
•
Deal with your own militants before blaming us, Pakistan tells Britain (
Daily Telegraph)
•
Concern at rise in racial attacks in Britain (
BBC)
•
Iraq and US uncooperative on border control says Syria (
The Daily Star, Lebanon)
•
Saddam Hussein's fall leads to an economic renaissance in Kuwait (
The Daily Star, Lebanon)
•
Vietnam is re-enacted in Iraq (
The Gulf News, UAE)
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Tom Regan
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