As a European who has studied counter-terrorism tactics for more than two decades, I find the 'debate' over whether to grant terrorists the 'right' to a criminal trial to be rather peculiar.
From a European perspective it appears to me rather obvious that the Obama administration is adopting the 'criminalization' tactics successfully pioneered by the West German authorities in response to the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof) attacks of the 1960-70s and subsequently adopted by every other European country because they worked.
The British experience of applying tactics similar to those endorsed by the Bush administration is particularly striking. The troops were originally sent into the province to protect the Catholic population from sectarian attacks by 'loyalist' Protestants. After a few years of arbitrary searches, imprisonment without trial and torture-lite, the IRA and INLA had a sufficiently large constituency to carry out a major terrorist campaign.
The British adopted a policy of criminalization with the election of the Wilson government in 1974 and by 1976 the level of violence was markedly down. The terrorists wanted to be treated as political prisoners, not common criminals. That was the issue that Bobby Sands and the other IRA hunger strikers were protesting about. Yet if you look at a graph of the number of deaths due to terrorism in the province over the period of the trouble you will see that they dropped sharply in 1976 when the criminalization policy took force and stayed at around 30% of the previous level until the Good Friday peace process began at which point they dropped again.
Looking round the world it is pretty hard to see an example of the Bush administration counter-terrorism tactics having worked. But despite that fact the debate we see starts from the presumption that there is a conflict between the constitution and effective counter-terrorist policy.
The only area where I can see a conflict is in the area of jury trials. These were abandoned for terrorist trials in the UK after the terrorists threatened to murder the jurors.
From a European perspective it appears to me rather obvious that the Obama administration is adopting the 'criminalization' tactics successfully pioneered by the West German authorities in response to the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof) attacks of the 1960-70s and subsequently adopted by every other European country because they worked.
The British experience of applying tactics similar to those endorsed by the Bush administration is particularly striking. The troops were originally sent into the province to protect the Catholic population from sectarian attacks by 'loyalist' Protestants. After a few years of arbitrary searches, imprisonment without trial and torture-lite, the IRA and INLA had a sufficiently large constituency to carry out a major terrorist campaign.
The British adopted a policy of criminalization with the election of the Wilson government in 1974 and by 1976 the level of violence was markedly down. The terrorists wanted to be treated as political prisoners, not common criminals. That was the issue that Bobby Sands and the other IRA hunger strikers were protesting about. Yet if you look at a graph of the number of deaths due to terrorism in the province over the period of the trouble you will see that they dropped sharply in 1976 when the criminalization policy took force and stayed at around 30% of the previous level until the Good Friday peace process began at which point they dropped again.
Looking round the world it is pretty hard to see an example of the Bush administration counter-terrorism tactics having worked. But despite that fact the debate we see starts from the presumption that there is a conflict between the constitution and effective counter-terrorist policy.
The only area where I can see a conflict is in the area of jury trials. These were abandoned for terrorist trials in the UK after the terrorists threatened to murder the jurors.
