Germans in terrorist rights row

NY Times:

While the British public reacted to the latest terrorist strike there with stoicism and a practiced determination to get on with their lives, Germany has erupted in a rancorous dispute over how to deal with a terrorist threat that has yet to materialize here.

The debate, which has simmered for months, flared up again in the wake of the botched car bombings in London, after Germany’s top security official, Wolfgang Schäuble, said Germany should consider detaining potential terrorists and sanctioning the killing of terrorist leaders abroad.

Mr. Schäuble, a conservative politician who is the country’s interior minister, also said that the police should be allowed to conduct clandestine searches of private computers by way of the Internet, a practice now forbidden.

“The old categories no longer apply,” Mr. Schäuble said in an interview with the magazine Der Spiegel. “We have to clarify whether our constitutional state is sufficient for confronting the new threats.”

Mr. Schäuble’s remarks, which were confirmed by his spokesman, have set off a storm of protest from opposition leaders, and even from Social Democratic members of his own “grand coalition” government.

They say his proposals would erode personal rights and jeopardize the rule of law in Germany. Some critics accuse him of playing up the threat of an attack on German soil to push through draconian measures.

“He would lead the country down a very dangerous path,” said the co-chairman of the opposition Green Party, Reinhard Bütikofer. “He is advising the exact opposite of what Prime Minister Gordon Brown has demonstrated so admirably: a combination of determination and equanimity.”

No other major European country has publicly debated its anti-terrorism laws in the wake of the failed British attacks. Among the few notable responses of any kind came from France’s new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who restated his support for installing 1,000 video surveillance cameras in Paris — a longstanding proposal that has languished for lack of financing.

Both the timing, and the nature, of the debate in Germany trouble some counter-terrorism experts in Europe.

“One of the time-honored tactics of terrorists is to draw governments into over-reacting,” said Gijs de Vries, a Dutchman and a former counter-terrorism coordinator for the European Union. “Governments should resist public pressure to pile on new measures after each incident.”

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The problem is that one side sees the terrorist as a law enforcement problem and one as a adversary in a war. The lawfare model gives significant advantages to the terrorist because the government must reveal its sources and methods of intelligence gathering to an enemy dedicated to its destruction. Those who want to be "fair" with terrorist seem to either be oblivious to the problem or they just don;t care that their procedures will lead to more innocents being killed by the enemy. Many Democrats in this country are similarly disposed toward terrorist right acting if the President is a bigger threat than the enemy. Sen. Leahy is an obvious example of this bad thinking.