While the system is sometimes criticized from the human rights' and civil liberty's perspectives, France, indeed, has been successfully preventing terrorist attack in homeland since the late 1990's and contributing to allied states' fight against terrorism in terms of information sharing. For example, '[i]n December 1999, Ahmed Ressam, and Algerian trained in Afghanistanm was arrested after attempting to enter the United States from Canada; he was convicted for the so-called Millennium Plot that planned bombings in Los Angeles' (Rollings, 2011:21). The governemt of France conveyed the intelligence about the plot to the Canadian authority, which gravely contributed to thwarting the plot.
I think French counterterrorism policy and system are very good example, because they imply that their measures are empirical efficacy in combating against the linkage of terrorism and crime, and that counterterrorism are wide variety and different from states to states, rather than one-size-fit-all policy.
'French policymakers decided to vastly increase the French capacity to suppress attacks on French soil by strengthing the French police and judicial apparatus in the field of counter-terrorism. While suppression of terrorism can never be a perfect science, the French efforts addressed two interrelated problems that had made suppression particularly difficult in France: a lack of coordination and centralisation of anti-terrorist policies internally; and politicisation of the struggle against terrorism' (p.75).
'New and specialised organizations were created within the interior ministry (Unite de Coordination de la Lutte Anti-Terroriste - UCLAT) and the justice ministry (Service pour Coordination de la Lutte Anti-Terroriste - SCLAT), and were specifically charged with maintaining relationsips and information flows. The purpose of these organisations is to make connections between all of the various intelligence and police services with the French governement bearing on the question of terrorism....According to one of the authors of the legislation, this system was in part explicitly modelled on the US National Security Council and the interagency process it oversees' (pp.76-77).
'The 1986 legislation...centralised proceedings relating to terrorism in the existing Trial Court of Paris and left to normal judges the ultimate decision as to the outcome of the cases.' 'Under this system, a local prosecutor decides if a crime committed within his geographic area of responsibility is related to terrorism, based on a definition of terrorism as "acts committed by individuals or groups that have as a goal to gravely trouble public order by intimidation or terror". If an incident meets that definition, he refers the case to specialised prosecutors or magistrates within the Paris court' (p.77).
"The networks of thte diverse armed Algerian groups supported themselves through armed robberies and trafficking in credit cards and false documents such as passports. New legislative initiatives in 1995 and 1996, while not making any major changes to the French counter-terrorism system, helped the magistrates to target the logistics networks by codifying he notion that conspiracy to commit to terrorism was itself terrorism" (p.82).
'The magistrates consider the system a success: even though it is impossible to prevent all attacks, they nevertheless possess the means to generate a broad picture of the Islamist movement, one that permits them to dismantle networks very rapidly, to prevent many attakcs and to anticipate the evolution of a constantly mutating threat.' 'Two areas in particular have been the object of acerbic criticisms: the preventative round-ups and the associated indiscriminate detention fo suspects; and the broad powers given to the magistrates to conduct these sweeps and detentions with very little oversight' (p.84).
'[A]rresting a large numbe of people, in the view of the magistrates, makes it possible to carry out corroborated interrogations to maintain knowledge of perpetually evolving networks' (p.85).
'The Roubaix (gang) affair began with several leavily armed robberies in the Roubaix region in the period January-February 1996. The robberies originally appeared to have no relation to international terrorism. On the eve of the G-7 summit at Lille on 29 March 1996, however, the gang put a bomb in a car near police station; the bomb was discovered and dismantled. In the subsequent investigation, one of the members of the gang was identified....A subsequent investigation determined their link to the Islamist movement, but, despite this connection, the Roubaix gang were not typical Algerian guerrilla fighters. Rather, they were native-born French citizens and second-generation French North Africans who had converted to radical Islam in France and made their connections with the terrorist movement in Bosnia and Afghanistan' (pp.86-87).
'France and the United States, in particular, have numerous differences in their capacities, their cultures and the types of terrorist threats that they face. These differences mean that institutions cannot and should not simply be copied from one to the other, regardless of their efficacy in their original context.' 'From an historical standpoint, Fracne's experience with the threat of internal subversion has long allowed and even demanded the existence of powerful domestic intelligence agenies. As a result, the French intelligence services have built up an extensive system of domestic monitoring, particularly in the Arab community.' 'Finally, because France has lived so long under the spectre of terrorism at home, neither state officials nor the public views the problem as transitory or fixable, but rather sees political terrorism as an inevitable and permanent feature of modern life. French system therefore seeks to manage and minimise the problem rather than solve it' (p.88).
'Thus, for example, on lesson the magistrates were able to glean from this experience was the importance of attacking logistical and financing networks. Terrorist attakcs do not happen in vacuum. They are often prepared over a fairly long period, and require people in place to provide documents, shelter and directions, as well financing and the colleciton of intelligence on the target' (p.90).
'French authorities have been careful not to claim that al-Qaeda has no cells in France and, to the contrary, repeatedly assert that they believe al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups are active in France and indeed are targeting France' (p.94, note).
In fact recently, 'French officials declared that France is "at war Al Qaeda" following AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb)'s murder of a French hostage and AQIM issued several calls for attaks on France. A Franch national critical terrorism threat alert in September 2010 was attributed, in part, to a rise in AQIM threats, and in October, a message attributed to Osanma Bin Laden justified AQIM and other Al Qaeda attacks on France' (Rollings, 2011:19-20).
References
- Rollings, J. 2011. Al Qaeda and affiliates: Historical perspective, global presence, and implications for U.S. policy. CRS Report for Congress, 25 January, R41070. Congressional Research Service.
- Shapiro, J and Suzan, B. 2003. The French experience of counter-terrorism. Survival, 45(1), pp.67-98.
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