Fighting Terrorism: Lessons from France ..... (long)
Mary Sunshine
Fighting Terrorism: Lessons from France
France has been remarkably successful in thwarting Islamist terrorism.
The French experience holds some challenging lessons for the U.S.
BY BRUCE CRUMLEY
The French have a long and intimate acquaintance with terror, earned in
years of attacks by Algerian independence fighters. Although currently
plagued by an Islamist terror threat, French authorities have made their
country so inhospitable to terrorist networks that many have relocated
to Germany. How did they do it? What lessons can the U.S. learn? And,
perhaps most important, how many civil liberties are we willing to give
up in the process?
The French connections
The French approach terrorism much like doctors approach the common
cold: Rather than wiping it out completely, they look for ways to manage
it. This is done through a combination of years of patient
intelligence-gathering and police work to ascertain the terrorists'
modus operandi, and a set of laws that would (and in France at times
did) make civil libertarians' hair stand on end. These were necessary in
part because the terrorists were not a single band of extremists, but
rather a multi-layered series of cells and networks each contributing in
a small way to sophisticated terror operations whose scope and magnitude
is known only to one or two men.
In the early 1990s, Islamist radicals found a pool of willing recruits
in the cauldrons of youthful rage found in the impoverished suburban
ghettoes that house many of France's 5 million people of Arab origin.
The point of connection between the suburbs of Paris and Marseilles and
Osama Bin Laden's Afghanistan-based networks came via Algeria. There,
the military-backed government overturned elections won by the
Islamists, banned their party and drove its most extreme elements
underground — where they've led a merciless war of terror against
politicians and citizens alike. The most notorious Algerian terror
faction, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), had been founded by men who'd
fought as volunteers alongside Bin Laden in Afghanistan's anti-Soviet
'jihad.' When that war ended with the Soviet withdrawal, the men moved
into France and began recruiting young thugs and exploiting their
larcenous talents to raise money and build an infrastructure to attack
France for its support of the Algerian government.
A far-reaching law
Operatives recruited in France helped staged a series of bombing attacks
during 1995 that left eight dead and around 150 wounded. French
anti-terrorist police ultimately tracked down the bombers, and developed
an extensive "human intelligence" capability to monitor the wider
networks of which they'd been a part. French law-enforcement was also
aided by a catch-all crime law: Simply by citing "association with
wrong-doers involved in a terrorist enterprise," French police are able
to arrest and detain any suspect in any crime whose goal, however
remotely, can ultimately assist terrorist activity. That law shocks
civil libertarians in the U.S. and Britain, but French officials retort
that those countries' commitment to strict civil libertarian principles
has made them havens where Islamist militants can plot terror with less
risk of detection because of the legal restraints on techniques such as
spot ID checks and information monitoring.
The combination of these laws and human-level intelligence gathering
(infiltration and interrogation of suspects) helped France successfully
uproot terrorist networks in the mid-1990s and to thwart outrages
planned during the 1998 soccer World Cup. Casting the net wide revealed
that many people police had previously assumed were simply petty crooks
had actually been thugging for the Islamists.
Inside the terror networks
The French sweeps also revealed the informal and dispersed nature of the
terror networks: They were mostly cut off from one another to contain
the damage of detection or infiltration, and were guided by a limited
number of people who'd move around assembling the fruits of each cell's
particular talents — false documents from one, funds from another and
weapons from a third, for example. The organizers who linked these
discrete cells could then synchronize complex multiple attacks.
One case in point: The February trial of Fateh Kamel, a 40-year-old
Algerian with Canadian citizenship, provided further evidence of the
discrete patterns of the terror networks. Kamel had been arrested on a
charge of "association with wrong-doers in relation with a terrorist
enterprise," for his involvement in the "gang of Roubaix" — a group of
young men whose criminal behavior had been considered anti-social rather
than political.
Not your average gangsters
In 1996, following a failed car bomb attempt in Lille on the eve of a G7
summit there, French cops picked up two ethnic-Arab suspects, one of
whom cracked under questioning and revealed the true nature of "gang of
Roubaix." The group was in fact a collection of Muslim militants (most
of them white French converts) who had been radicalized during visits to
Bosnia. Robbery was used to finance arms purchases, and to create false
ID documents to facilitate the movement of Islamist terrorists
transiting France. The group had recruited men for their "holy war," and
had staged attacks when instructed to do so.
Patient intelligence work revealed that Kamel was both an expert
document forger, head of the network of which the Roubaix gang was a
part and had also spent time in Afghanistan, where he'd been in contact
with Bin Laden. French authorities say there's no way of proving whether
Kamel "worked for bin Laden." But, they say, it is clear that in the
decentralized, compartmentalized and intersecting root system of Islamic
networks, Kamel had been given the responsibility for creating and
transporting false ID documents used by militants being assembled in
Turkey, Bulgaria, Belgium, France, Bosnia and North America.
The value of surveillance
The French simply followed Kamel around the globe for six months prior
to his arrest, taking note of those with whom he met. That turned up
names who'd cropped up elsewhere, and revealed some of the point men for
the various regional networks with which Kamel had been put in contact.
Based on Kamel's visits to Montreal, France's top anti-terrorist cop
Jean-Louis Brugiere wanted to pay a call on Ahmed Ressam — but he was
discouraged by incredulous Canadian authorities who considered the
Algerian expatriate no more than a petty crook. This was the same Ahmed
Ressam who in 1999 was arrested en route to Seattle with a car full of
explosives.
Kamel and 23 associates were convicted for activities related to
association with terrorist enterprises. There was no demonstrative proof
of their service or allegiance to Bin Laden, although such links would
be impossible to verify given the dispersed, cellular nature of these
operations (thus organized precisely to prevent police from following a
linear trail back to the top) and their vague hierarchy and direction.
In other words, prosecutors may never find sufficient evidence to
legally prove Bin Laden issued orders to various operatives, although it
is clear their commitment to his cause functions as a kind of remote
control.
The French experience also shows that the commitment level of terror
recruits is far from uniform, and that opens a gap exploited by the
authorities. "The ones that truly believe are the ones who become
suicide pilots," says French terrorism expert Roland Jacquard. "The ones
who don't — the ones responding to promises of money, and support for
their families, or the ones simply acting out of hate — they end up with
the grunt work of logistics, criminal activity, gun-running. Eventually,
they'll burn out. When they do, they'll be valuable to intelligence
people — if they're picked up." Identifying those people will be the
prime test for U.S. intelligence forces in the years to come.
Speaker to Animals
>
>TIME magazine, Monday, Sep. 24, 2001
>
>Fighting Terrorism: Lessons from France
>
>France has been remarkably successful in thwarting Islamist terrorism.
>The French experience holds some challenging lessons for the U.S.
>
>Roubaix." The group was in fact a collection of Muslim militants (most
>of them white French converts) who had been radicalized during visits to
>Bosnia. Robbery was used to finance arms purchases, and to create false
This is the frightening part.
Local converts.
But I wonder if the "white French" converts are
willing to die in a blaze of glory for their cause.
The other thing I worry about is a further erossion
of our shrinking civil liberties. The French are not
troubled by such consideration of FREEDOM as we in the
USA expect.
Lonnie Courtney Clay
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Have any of you ever tried to send an email to him ? I have. The
connection fails with a very revealing connection path. Speaker to
Animals, I am looking at you and what you are doing. I dislike what I
see...............
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Lonnie Courtney Clay - run THAT through your Anagram Generator.
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