Some time ago, Daniel Pipes noted that French counterterrorism efforts were brutally effective:
Paris hosts a top-secret counterterrorism center, code-named Alliance Base, the existence of which was recently reported by the Washington Post. At Alliance Base, six major Western governments have since 2002 shared intelligence and run counterterrorism operations - the latter makes the operation unique.
More broadly, President Chirac instructed French intelligence agencies just days after September 11, 2001, to share terrorism data with their American counterparts “as if they were your own service.” The cooperation is working: A former acting CIA director, John E. McLaughlin, called the bilateral intelligence tie “one of the best in the world.” The British may have a “special relationship” with Washington on Iraq, but the French have one with it in the war on terror.
France accords terrorist suspects fewer rights than any other Western state, permitting interrogation without a lawyer, lengthy pre-trial incarcerations, and evidence acquired under dubious circumstances. Were he a terrorism suspect, the author of Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, Evan Kohlmann, says he “would least like to be held under” the French system.
Today, Bret Stephens elaborates on the efforts of investigative magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere:
Consider the powers granted to Mr. Bruguiere and his colleagues. Warrantless wiretaps? Not a problem under French law, as long as the Interior Ministry approves. Court-issued search warrants based on probable cause? Not needed to conduct a search. Hearsay evidence? Admissible in court. Habeas corpus? Suspects can be held and questioned by authorities for up to 96 hours without judicial supervision or the notification of third parties. Profiling? French officials commonly boast of having a “spy in every mosque.” A wall of separation between intelligence and law enforcement agencies? France’s domestic and foreign intelligence bureaus work hand-in-glove. Bail? Authorities can detain suspects in “investigative” detentions for up to a year. Mr. Bruguiere once held 138 suspects on terrorism-related charges. The courts eventually cleared 51 of the suspects—some of whom had spent four years in preventive detention—at their 1998 trial.
In the U.S., Mr. Bruguiere’s activities would amount to one long and tangled violation of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution. And that’s not counting the immense legal superstructures that successive Supreme Courts have built over and around the Bill of Rights. In France, however, Mr. Bruguiere, though not without his critics, is a folk hero, equally at home with governments of the left and right. The main point in his favor is that whatever it is he’s doing, it works.
“Every single attempt to bomb France since 1995 has been stopped before execution,” notes a former Interior Ministry senior official. “The French policy has been [to] make sure no terrorist hits at home. We know perfectly well that foreign-policy triangulation is not sufficient for that, [even if] it helps us go down a notch or two in the order of priority [jihadist] targets. So we’ve complemented our anti-U.S. foreign policy with ruthless domestic measures.”
Food for thought. Critics of American foreign policy seem to forget that European countries compensate for the lack of military might with extraordinary violations of civil liberties. If we ceased our aggressive foreign policy, would we be forced to adopt French-style domestic counterterrorist measures?
Posted by Hubbard in Those Wacky Foreigners, Global War on Terror