Security and intelligence - new material (13)
01 January 2010
Preventing What? How the Prevent anti-terrorism programme will affect Scottish Society, Richard Haley. Scotland Against Criminalising Communities Briefing, 3.11.09, pp. 13. This report accurately concludes that the government’s “Prevent” anti-terrorist programme is racist as “it almost exclusively targets the Muslim community.” It argues that Muslim opposition to the war in Afghanistan is treated as if it were linked to violent extremism, even though most people in the Britain oppose the war, and says it exposes professionals involved in implementing it “to indoctrination with Islamaphobic and pro-war attitudes.” It concludes that prevent “makes it more likely that some Muslims may turn to terrorism, because of the way it manipulates and censors Muslim participation in civil society.” Available as a free download at: http://www.sacc.org.uk/sacc/docs/preventingwhat.pdf
EU mulls unified intelligence service plan. Jane’s Defence Weekly 28.4.10. The new European External Action Service (EEAS) fuses the military, diplomatic, crisis management and humanitarian services into a single structure. There are four EU units engaged: The Council’s Joint Situation Centre, the Commission’s Crisis Room, the Watch Keeping Capability located within the Council and the intelligence unit of the EU Military Staff. An “EU military official” said that the EEAS plan “still has to be defined regarding intelligence. That’s a challenge”.
Minister hoping to approach surveillance from a different angle, Lord West. Police Product Review April/May 2010, p 11. This article, based on a talk on airport security to the Home Office Scientific Development Branch in March, argues that “the best way to ensure that terrorists are detected was an effective surveillance system that links up CCTV, behavioural science, explosive detection devices and more traditional security measures such as sniffer dogs”. West envisages this as follows: “We need to tackle it as a totality. We have launched an initiative that was focused on behavioural science – the way people act in crowds – so you can conduct surveillance of the airport concourse area on that basis. When a car arrives, we have automatic number plate recognition – you know whether the car belongs to the plate and where it has come from on the journey. If someone gets out of the car and starts behaving differently [to other airport users] that is immediately flagged up by your system. There may be check-points that they need to go through that swab for explosives, and scanners and sniffer dogs. All of these measures have to interlock because you put them together you get towards that 100 per cent security people talk about.”
Pursue Prevent Protect Prepare: the United Kingdom’s strategy for countering international terrorism. Annual Report. HM Government (March) 2010 (Cm 7833). This annual report summarises the development of programmes set out in CONTEST, the UK’s counter-terrorist programme. Available as a free download at:
http://merln.ndu.edu/whitepapers/UnitedKingdom2009.pdf
MI5 woz ‘ere, Aisha Manair. Labour Briefing, March 2010, p. 6. Manair on the cases of Binyam Mohammed and the High Court’s recent confirmation that the intelligence services were aware that Binyam had been tortured on behalf of the USA and Shaker Aamer, where evidence “shows that MI5 agents were present during and after interrogations in Pakistan in 2001” and calls for a full independent judicial inquiry into the UK’s involvement in torture.