Former MI6 chief warns on 42 day detention
The former head of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, warns that the UK will regret not adopting a selective forty-two day detention period. He says it is certain that some cases, and perhaps very serious ones, will require more than twenty-eight days investigation. Sometimes simply establishing identity is a major investigative challenge
I am instinctively against the erosion of the basic liberties to which we in the UK are so thoroughly attached. However, when I know that a few of my fellow citizens feel that they are justified in the name of some greater purpose to attempt to kill their neighbours, then I want them, where and when necessary, to be effectively constrained. I have no feelings of doubt that it is reasonable for me to expect this of the state.
As someone also thoroughly familiar with the terrorist threat and its various contemporary manifestations, from PIRA to Al Qaeda, I know that Al Qaeda is especially dangerous and unlike any other terrorist movement within our recent experience. It does not fight for a claim to territory, nor for a political agenda. It seeks to destroy our values and our way of life; it has innoculated itself by religious conviction against compromise and it has none of the restraint that pursuit of a comprehensible political agenda would naturally impose. Should it ever obtain the means to blow away a complete city, I fear, with good intelligence that supports my fears, that it would not hesitate to try.
Al Qaeda is already pressing against the limits of our capabilities to contain it using security and intelligence resources proportionate to the reasonable needs of a democratic state. AQ knows well how to exploit the vulnerabilities of the global village – how to pass unnoticed, how to cover its own tracks, how to ride on our technology. In one recent terrorist prosecution, the investigation involved 270 computers, 2000 discs and 8224 exhibits spread across eight different national jurisdictions.
In 2007 thirty-seven people were convicted in fifteen different terrorist cases; in the first four months of this year twenty-eight people have been convicted in just eight cases. Two of the seventeen charged in the plot to blow up seven airliners were not able to be charged until the twenty-eighth day of their detention.
As the intensity and complexity of terrorist investigations continues to increase and more distant and less co-operative jurisdictions come within their scope, it is certain that some cases, and perhaps very serious ones of a type not hitherto experienced (for example employing unconventional weapons technologies), will require more than twenty-eight days investigation. In some states simply establishing identity is a major investigative challenge. When we do need that extension, we will need it badly.
Our judiciary is dogged in their defence of the citizen in the face of an overweaning state; but some of our judges, and a significant number of our politicians, seem uncertain about improving the safety of citizens in the face of an unprecedented and unrestrained terrorist menace. Is selective use of forty-two days really a violation of our basic liberties or rather a sensible practical measure to deal with a serious public danger? If forty-two days is not adopted, regret it we will – and who in our blame culture will the media turn on when the uncharged terrorist, released after a month, turns out to have held the key to preventing the next major attack, and what bad law might we then, in haste, enact during the crisis-driven enquiry that would ensue?
Sir Richard Dearlove
