[Nasional-e] Watch out for the terror trap

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Comment and Analysis / Watch out for the terror trap /



Timothy Garton Ash Better to run a small risk of being bombed by a terrorist
than accept being bugged by the state

Watch out for the terror trap

S o now we all live in Washington DC. A lone terrorist can pick you off
outside the supermarket, or as you wait for the bus. And if he doesn't get
you at the supermarket, he will kill your daughter at a nightclub in Bali.
In the cold war the enemy was the Red Army. Now it is the professor in
Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent who stalked the streets of London with his
right hand clasped around the India-rubber ball in his trouser pocket, the
detonator of a suicide bomb: "He walked frail, insignificant, shabby,
miserable - and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and
despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed
on, unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men." Or, as
George Bush puts it in the less memorable prose of the US's new security
doctrine: "Now, shadowy networks of individuals can bring great chaos and
suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank."
Meanwhile Tony Blair tells us t!
he war against international terrorism is like the second world war.
There is an atmosphere emerging here, an atmosphere of menace that the media
help to transport and magnify. And don't we know it already from 100 bad
movies? The question now is whether the conduct of the "war against
terrorism" in such an atmosphere might not end up being as much a threat to
our own freedoms as terrorism itself.
Of course, the horrors of Bali, Washington and September 11 were not movies,
even if they resembled them. New technologies give terrorists extraordinary
new chances to do evil. Conrad's professor was dismayed by the thought that
it would take20 seconds between squeezing the India-rubber ball and the
suicide bomb exploding - even then he would only take a few people with him.
No such problem with the explosive found at the nightclub in Bali. More than
180 innocent people at a strike. Poison gas was pumped into the subways of
Tokyo. A suitcase nuclear bomb is a technical possibility.
The obvious fact about the professor's modern counterpart is that he is
incredibly difficult to find. It was much easier to stop the Red Army. One
reason the Bush administration's war against terror focuses so much on
Saddam's Iraq is that this would be a conventional war, which the US has a
reasonable chance of winning.
 Blair tells us that we need to fight a war on two fronts: against Iraq and
against international terrorism. But the front line with international
terrorism is what East Germany's Stasi spymasters used to call "the
invisible front". One of Britain's former spy chiefs, Stella Rimington, has
said this war will be impossible to win unless the underlying causes of
terrorism are addressed. That is plainly true. Some IRA bombings in mainland
Britain were foiled by covert counter-terrorism, but it was the peace
process in Northern Ireland that ended them altogether. The way to stop
Palestinian suicide-bombers wreaking terror on innocent Israelis is to give
the Palestinians a viable state.
Equally, the long-term cure for Islamist extremism is a modernisation of the
Islamic world. In the meantime we have the terrorists. So we do need to be
tough on terrorism as well as tough on the causes of terrorism.
But how do you get tough on an invisible front? In Washington and London the
governments' answer is increased covert intelligence and the skilled
deployment of military and police forces. Last week surveillance planes were
ordered into the skies over Washington to help in the search for the lone
sniper. The British and US intelligence communities must be having a field
day. At the end of the cold war the West's spies had a crisis of identity:
what need for more Smileys if there were no more Karlas to spy against? Ah,
they said, you need us to counter "the new threats" - international crime,
drugs, terrorism. Back then the answer seemed a little forced. But now,
after September 11, after Bali, who can doubt it? The transatlantic
intelligence community must be one of the biggest winners in the
post-September 11 world.
The question then becomes how much surveillance and eavesdropping do you
need to have a reasonable chance of catching the terrorist cells and
professors of today? A great deal, it would seem.
The danger of an overmighty secret state, justified by the threat
 of terrorism, is exacerbated by the very same factor that so much helps
terrorists: advances in technology. For the technical possibilities of
surveillance today are ones of which the Stasi could only dream. Technically
Orwell's 1984 has only been possible since about 1994. Eavesdropping systems
such as Echelon really can pick up all your conversations. If it has the
legal authority, MI5 can read all your emails. Orwell's telescreen is now
there in your home - on your desktop computer.
They can do it, if we let them. So it is up to voters to decide what balance
we want to strike between liberty and security. There is always a trade-off
between the two. Even in the technological bronze age of the cold war we
sometimes got the balance wrong. The final epiphany of John le Carre's
spymaster George Smiley was this: "We've given up far too many freedoms in
order to be free." Now, because of technological advances, the risks of
getting it wrong are larger either way.
In the war against terrorism we should err on the side of liberty. The
 best resistance we can offer to the agents of unfreedom is to continue
having free, vibrant, open societies. What many of these terrorists would
like best is for our own states to become repressive. Even comprehensive
covert invasions of our privacy would not stop those shadowy networks
striking. Nor could they eliminate the risk of a lone bomber. In Washington,
the centre of the most sophisticated intelligence and military machine in
the world, the authorities have so far not been able to stop a single sniper
picking off people at whim. But it also seems to me true, without giving in
to complacency, that the actual danger to most of us from international
terrorism is still relatively small.
To make this choice is to accept a risk: more liberty, less security. But
the balance in this case is clear. Erring on the other side, we would
sacrifice too much liberty for too little added security. Put it like this:
I would rather take a one in 10,000 chance of being blown up by a terrorist
than a one in 10 chance of having my emails read by a spook.

The Guardian Weekly 24-10-2002, page 11


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