I was shocked-appalled really-by the revelations in a recent National Geographic documentary showing what happened when Britain had to deal with the 2006 liquid explosives plot. Britain became aware of the plot early on and mounted a massive and professional operation to monitor the plotters and to capture them before anyone was hurt. The operation was entirely run by the British on British soil. The documentary shows British security as very professional and successful. The Americans on the other hand behaved very poorly and appeared to be rank amateurs. I am certainly not a security person, but I know a professional when I see one-these guys weren’t.
OK, money can cure lots of ills, so the Americans do accomplish a lot. But most of the Americans in that documentary came across as behaving like teenagers.
The part that really appalled me was the actions of the then new CIA director General Hayden. The terrorists in Britain had almost completed their bombs and were proceeding with a dry run to test whether they could carry out their attack. After the British refused to be hurried in their investigation, G. Hayden traveled to Pakistan without telling the British and told the Pakistanis about a key terrorist in their country. Naturally the Pakistanis promptly arrested him-which inevitably would tip off the terrorists in Britain. This forced Britain to rush out ahead of their schedule and arrest the known terrorists to prevent them from using their bombs inside Britain. In order to slightly reduce the danger to American airplanes, General Hayden double-crossed our British allies and greatly increased the danger to the public in Britain. And the smirk on his face as he bragged about what he did on camera was awful to see.
Here is one link to a write-up about the story:
there are lots of links through google.
Did anyone else see the documentary and what are your opinions about what Hayden did? Note that no one is claiming he went off on his own, this was a deliberate move by the US Government.
America has double crossed us in all kinds of ways (most currently our unequal extradition treaty) but over all I think we came out on top as you took our most fanatical religious types off us. Britain is still far too religious but there’s no comparison when it comes to somewhere like the US.
Oh by the way more British military personal were killed in the Gulf War by American friendly fire than Iraqi fire.
I haven’t seen the documentary but I sort of have to feel Hayden had a valid point here. If the terrorists have reached the point where they had “almost completed their bombs and were proceeding with a dry run to test whether they could carry out their attack” then the time for conducting an investigation was over and the time for preventing the crime had arrived.
You might belittle concerns about the “danger to American airplanes” but, to me, people being killed is a lot more legitimate concern than worrying about whether the British investigators had their feelings hurt.
The point was that they had the whole cell under surveillance, no planes were going to be blown up, but further contacts and intelligence could have been developed from following the cell and seeing if they could further penetrate the terrorist network. The British Security Services have had a fair number of decades practice breaking terrorist networks (although ironically those operations were often not helped by the US either)
No one was worried about hurting feelings. It was the killing of innocent people that is at issue. The actions of the CIA director increased the risk of innocent people being killed, while marginally if at all reducing the threat to the aircraft. All of the terrorists were under surveillance and none would have been allowed on any planes under any circumstances. Everyone had agreed on that. The British police had observed them planning to get on planes on a saturday. They monitored their internet searches of aircraft schedules. Their plan was to arrest everyone all at once on Friday. Because of the actions of the CIA director, the police had to make the arrests Wednesday before their forces were in position. The problem, besides the loss of trust, was that the police weren’t quite ready and it was possible some of the terrorists might have gotten away. If their bombs were in fact ready, they likely would have used them in Britain once they realized their plan for attacking the aircraft had failed. So the director’s actions did nothing to reduce the threat (almost zero at that point) to the aircraft while significantly increasing the danger to the British public.
I assume you mean that this might have hypothetically happened and nobody actually got killed. I’ll just point out that it’s equally possible that the terrorists might have hypothetically moved their plans forward two days and blown up several flights on Thursday instead of Saturday when the British had been expecting it. The British investigators say they were watching the flights and none of them would have gotten on board. But according to you, the British were got by surprise by a sudden change of plans caused by the Americans and Pakistanis - what might have happened if the terrorist change of plans also caught them by surprise? And it seems to me that if you want to minimize the risk to innocent people it makes more sense to arrest the terrorists before they have their bombs ready rather than wait a couple more days. The earlier you catch them, the less likely they are to have any bombs ready.
I’m not saying the Americans were necessarily right. But I’m also not saying the Americans must have been automatically wrong. Both groups were taking a risk. The Americans apparently felt the risk of having the terrorists out free was a bigger risk than moving in and arresting them. Which I think is a reasonable argument. Is there any evidence that the British investigators were going to learn anything significant by waiting two more days? The argument that they could safely wait is based on the premise that they already had a pretty complete idea of what the terrorists were doing.
The British weren’t watching the Americans because they thought they were on the same side. They were watching the terrorists, so none could have got on board a plane.
As I said, there seems to be two possible scenarios.
1 - The British had complete information. They had identified every member of the group, they knew where all their equipment was located, and they had all the information about what their plans were. If that’s the case then they had completed the investigation. Why wait forty-eight hours before performing the arrests?
2 - The British didn’t have complete information. They had identified most members of the group, they knew where some of their equipment was located, and they were pretty sure they knew the group’s plans. But there were gaps in their information. There might be unknown terrorists who had bombs they didn’t know about - and who they wouldn’t be able to stop from boarding a flight. Or maybe the terrorists were all planning on splitting up two days before the flights and going into hiding. Or maybe there was some other important fact hidden inside one of the gaps in their information. Arresting them now prevented any last minute surprises and gave you three days to question them for additional information, rather than waiting until only a few hours before the attack was scheduled to begin. In this case, leaving the terrorists out on the street seems like a bigger risk than arresting them now while you know where they are.
As I’ve said, this is an argument based on hypotheticals. But it seems to me that the Americans were arguing for the minimum-risk controlled plan while the British were trying to hot dog it with a dramatic last-minute arrest.
interesting. Thanks for posting this. This is exactly why I raised the issue. I needed to hear another point of view.
we interpret the same situation and arrive at basically opposite conclusions.
First, a few disagreements with your summary.
I don’t consider any decisions made in this investigation to be based on hypotheticals. Everything described actually happened. No one believed any of the outcomes to be hypothetical and to use the word, to me, denigrates the decisions made by both the US and Britain.
I disagree with who was hot dogging here. The British were moving methodically and carefully. It was the US who wanted fast action-and deliberately forced that to occur. Based on the outcome, the only ones who hot dogged this process was the US.
As soon as the first person was arrested the collection of information from the terrorists ceased, at least for weeks. None of the terrorists were likely to suddenly and spontaneously divulge any information on current activities. Certainly the British would collect more physical evidence. But it wasn’t like that wasn’t already being collected. Trash from the buildings were collected and analyzed for instance. As soon as one was arrested, the British had to assume that everyone involved would be alerted and try to take action-either to escape or to carry out an attack. Arresting the known terrorists would not give more time to collect information-it gave the British less time.
Might the terrorists have split up two days before the flights? On what basis should one have considered that possibility? There was no evidence that it might be part of the plan. The main bomb making facility where terrorists worked every day was wired with both video and audio bugs. Security didn’t hear or see everything in the building, but they gathered a lot of intelligence on the daily activities and plans of the terrorists. To me proposing that possibility, there are many such possibilities, without any evidence is a perfect example of a hypothetical. One should never make decisions based on hypotheticals.
We all agree, you, me, the British, the Americans, that scenario 1 wasn’t the case.
Considering scenario 2, first we all recognize the issue is how long does one wait to collect more information. The US position is that the Brits had waited long enough. The Brits concluded they needed to wait longer. Judgement call. If it had been up to the Americans, the terrorists would have been arrested sooner. The British choose another course and had good reasons to do so. And certainly there was a risk that the close surveillance would be discovered by the terrorists and trigger a run. That was a risk the British were taking. As it turned out, no other terrorists were involved, both Britain and the US would have been right. But it was a judgement call at the time. My disappointment in the American action is that this was a British case, and the British were handling it. They were in charge should have been allowed do things according to their best judgement.
The Americans traded 2 days for what I contend is a significantly greater risk to the British public-hunted terrorists may have decided to attack a bus instead of an aircraft. And the Americans lost trust with a close ally. At least I certainly won’t trust the US government to behave professionally in the future. If a similar case occurs in the future, Britain will share a LOT less information with the Americans. At least if I were British I would expect that. The US demonstrated they can’t be trusted. So they won’t be. Was it worth the cost to the US and to Britain?
Again, thanks for engaging in this discussion. I need an intelligent different viewpoint to examine my understanding of the situation. Clearly we disagree. That is how we learn.
I’m surprised by this. You describe the hypotheticals that existed in your post.
I disagree. If you’ve identified a criminal who you know is planning on committing a crime, the minimum-risk plan is to arrest the criminal and place him in custody. The riskier “hot-dog” plan is to let the criminal stay free and watch him for awhile to see what he does. You leave a criminal free and there’s a chance he’ll slip away from you. It wasn’t just the Americans who were taking chances with innocent lives - the British we’re doing the same by delaying the arrests.
I guess I need to figure out what the term hypothetical means. To me it means a possible event that, while possible, isn’t supported by any evidence. Or that requires a series of low-probability events to precede it. Whether there are hypotheticals in the above case-I have to think about that.
I agree with you that the minimum-risk plan is to arrest the criminal as soon as possible. There are two things to consider here though. First, there is more than one criminal involved and everyone is concerned that security doesn’t know about all of them. That changes the risk calculation. Second, the British point out that for a long time they weren’t sure they had enough evidence to secure a conviction of all the of criminals. They feared that they would arrest but not be able to hold all of them. Again, that changes the risk calculation.
Again, thanks for participating in this discussion.
It’s worth considering that stuff from e.g. phone taps can’t be used in evidence in UK courts*. It may have been that the to have a conviction stick they needed to catch them in the act, even if they knew everything from the intercepts.
*As I understand it this is by choice from the police and security services - i.e. it is currently barred from being used, but the government keeps offering to change the rule but the security services don’t want it changed as it would “reveal their methods”
Also consider, we British do not have the instant resources to go and arrest a terrorist cell at the drop of a hat. (Normally)
Although we’re bloody good at killing them.
A plan had been put in place, a date set and resources scheduled to go and arrest those involved. By rushing, forcing our hand this i feel caused the greater risk.
We don’t have an armed police force, we have armed units which are a reduced number of officers.
We don’t have a FBI or CIA, our intelligence services are unarmed and don’t go around arresting people.
However don’t mistake this for poor organization, we’ve been dealing with terrorism for many many years, we’re applying well tested methods.
Everything is intelligence lead, a case has to be water tight, everything by the book else it gets thrown out.
One point of pride the British spokesman made: none of the police making the arrests were armed. Every one of the terrorists were taken into custody without any guns involved.
