The trouble with tracking terrorists...

Is that law enforcement agents are expected to arrest them before they carry out their intentions. This means that investigators have to rely on intelligence as opposed to evidence, which posses an irreconcilable dilemma as Sandra Bell, head of Homeland Security for Britain's Royal United Services Institute, explains in yesterday's Wall Street Journal.

To give you some idea of the scale of the problem Britain faces, Bell says there are currently around 40 terror trials pending, involving some 100 defendants. Couple this with the news that the head of Britain's MI5 released in November - that British intelligence estimates that there may be as many as 200 active terror networks in Britain, involving some 1,600 individuals.

Because law enforcement is expected to disrupt terror plots before they occur, police have to rely on intelligence - intelligence that can be easily manipulated, misinterpreted, and difficult if not impossible to cross check. The consequence of this inevitable dilemma, Bell observes, is that innocent people can be arrested or detained; and guilty people may go free.

To illustrate her point, she cites two examples. The first is the case of the two Muslim brothers whose home some 250 police stormed in June 2005 under suspicion that they were plotting to use chemical weapons. During the raid, one of the brothers was shot in the shoulder. Apparently the intelligence the police were relying on was mistaken as the brothers were later released. Though an independent investigation exonerated the police of any wrongdoing in the case, as Bell writes, "[this] did little to dispel Muslim complaints that they are being unfairly singled out."

While this case was indeed unfortunate, as Bell continues:

Now consider the other extreme: the case of Mohammad Sidique Khan, a Leeds born primary school teaching assistant and the ringleader of the July 7, 2005, bombings that killed 52 people in London. Khan had come to MI5's notice more than a year before the bombings when he was spotted in the company of other terrorist suspects. He was, however, just one of hundreds of suspects caught up in one of many surveillance operations. At the time he was nothing more than a blurred image on a surveillance tape. Investigators did not even know his name. Since the intelligence services had substantial information on the other terror suspects but not on Khan, he was left alone. Given their finite resources, investigators had to prioritize.

Again, investigators were later exonerated of any wrongdoing but, as Bell points out, this did little to mollify public outrage that "[such] a major intelligence gaffe" could occur, and one that resulted in the loss of 52 lives.

Unfortunately, as Bell points out, no new laws or tougher prison sentences "will change the underlying dilemma: the need for the police to act on intelligence rather than evidence to stop potentially devastating attacks."

What to do? Bell''s only recommendation is that authorities should be more open and the public should be more understanding:

They [the authorities] need to have the courage to acknowledge that mistakes will be made and the humility to apologize for them when they occur. And the British public needs to understand that we are moving into a new, grim normality.

While her advice may not seem all that brilliant, does anybody have a better suggestion?

No more safe haven in Britain for Abu Qatada, Al Qaeda's "spiritual advisor"

The New York Times reports that a British court has finally ruled that the government can deport a leading Al Qaeda spiritual advisor to Jordan, even though the country doesn't have a human rights record that would meet European standards.

Al Qaeda's advisor in this case is Abu Qatada who was convicted in absentia in his homeland of Jordan on bombing and conspiracy charges (along with his devoted follower, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq until his death in 2006).

Abu Qatada's significance to the organization can be deduced by the fact that tapes of his sermons were found in the possession of lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta, as well as Richard C. Reid, the would-be shoe bomber. He was also the person the Madrid train bombers tried to call to get permission to kill themselves before they blew themselves up to avoid being arrested, according to Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker.

Abu Qatada also ran what Wright describes as the "first jihadi think tank," a magazine that was published out of London during the 1990s called Al Ansar. As the magazine was a vocifierous proponent of the jihad in Algeria, Abu Qatada came to be identified with the GIA, the outfit that gained notoriety for slitting the throats and otherwise massacring tens of thousands of Algerian villagers who the organization deemed to be insufficiently helpful to the jihad.

It was during his tenure at the magazine that Abu Qatada became familiar with Zarqawi, incidentally, when he covered Zarqawi's sedition trial in Jordan. According to Seif al-Adl, another Al Qaeda leader, it was Abu Qatada who introduced Zarqawi to Bin Laden and Zawahiri.

Zarqawi ran Al Qaeda in Iraq and was the person responsible for most grisly attacks against civilian targets from 2003 until his death in June last year. His attacks included the Samarra mosque bombing, the event which finally pitted the Shiites against the Sunnis and launched what many describe as Iraq's civil war.

It was also Zarqawi who was behind most of the hostage beheadings, including those of the American contractor, Nicholas Berg and Ken Bigley, the British hostage, which he personally carried out. He also orchestrated the 2005 hotel bombings in his native Jordan, suicide bombings that killed some 70 people, mostly members of a Palestinian family attending a wedding.

Given that these were the types of seeds Abu Qatada has sown, it should not be entirely surprising that Britain would want to be rid of this person. But it wasn't until the July 7, 2005 subway and train bombings, that the British government felt that Abu Qatada's right to live in Britain safely away from Jordanian authorities weighed less than the personal security of Britons, whose lives he was putting in danger with his fiery sermons and various writings.

Human rights advocates and Abu Qatada's attorneys, however, argued until the very last moment that au contraire, the human rights of men like Abu Qatada should prevail over any national security concerns. In particular, they objected to the fact that upon his return to Jordan where he would be headed for prison, he could likely be subject to torture.

The court rejected the defense's arguments in the end, saying that given that Jordanian authorities had promised to refrain from torturing returning terrorism suspects, and had further agreed to monitor the conditions of those incarcerated that should be all the protection that Abu Qatada should require.

Indeed.