A day of reckoning for the lawfare approach

Westhawk:

The techniques of modern terrorism are placing Western legal traditions under increasing stress. The strange case of the Guantanamo detention facility will very soon demonstrate in a highly embarrassing fashion how contorted and irrelevant the Anglo-American legal system is to face the threat of today’s terrorists.

But before addressing the future of the Guantanamo prisoners, let us first review the past two days in Great Britain. Apparently homegrown Islamists, more enthusiastic than skilled, attempted at least three car bombings. The first was an attempted two-bomb coordinated attack in London’s Piccadilly/Haymarket area. In the second, two highly-motivated Islamists attempted to create a drive-through window at the Glasgow airport, using a flaming sport utility vehicle. As the BBC reports, British authorities have raised Britain’s threat level to “critical,” expecting more such attacks.

Last August, Britain’s security authorities uncovered a plot to simultaneously destroy ten airliners over the Atlantic Ocean. At that time Westhawk speculated that MI-5 probably discovered this conspiracy through the use of electronic eavesdropping. We suggested that Britain's al Qaeda affiliates would take measures to tighten up their own internal security arrangements.

This they apparently did. Although MI-5 and the British police are tracking as many plots and conspirators as they can, there are likely more, many more such Islamist conspirators and plots than there are security officers to uncover them. The latest car bomb plots were a surprise to British authorities. Once the would-be terrorists perfect a reliable fusing mechanism, a relatively straight-forward task, the mayhem will truly begin.

Not long before she left her post, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, then head of MI-5, gave a very rare speech in which she attempted to warn the British public about the looming Islamist insurgency in the British home islands (Westhawk reviewed the speech here). Prime Minister Blair instituted nearly unprecedented government powers in an attempt to respond to this threat. But against a decentralized and adaptive enemy consisting of thousands of members, in hundreds of cells, organizing scores of plots, there seems little chance of avoiding a steady succession of attacks, far more ruthless than what the IRA previously inflicted.

The question that we will see answered in the years ahead will be whether Western legal tradition in Great Britain will be able to survive such an unprecedented internal threat.

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He goes on to point out the inherent danger of the Supreme Courts reconsideration of applying habeas corpus to the detainees at Gitmo. If they do, they are very likely to get a lot of Americans killed if we wind up releasing these terrorist. The lawfare model also destroys the war effort because we must also give the terrorist our sources and methods for collecting intelligence on them as part of the discovery process. Then there is the Miranda warning for detainees picked up on the battlefield.