It is four years since President Bush declared a global war on terror so it is fair to ask: how is it going? Well, the first point to make is that it is not a war on terror anymore. One of Washington’s sneakier tactics is that if a crucial policy begins to lose public support, you don’t change the policy, you just change its name and carry on. So it is no longer the war on terror. It is the “global struggle against violent extremists”.
There are no tanks at Heathrow – yet. There is no ring of troops around London’s financial district – yet. But Britain is on a “heightened” state of alert as police at Paddington Green station continue to question terrorist suspects arrested at gunpoint in raids across the country earlier in the week.
Across the Atlantic, the Americans are on “orange” (the second highest) alert as the Homeland Security chief, Tom Ridge, said new intelligence suggested that al Qaeda planned car or truck bomb attacks on the Citicorp building, the New York Stock Exchange, and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank buildings in Washington. American banks in London could also be targets.
The furore about Australia’s intelligence community – its failures, tainted reports, politicisation, poor management and damaging disputes with its officers – is not unique. It is typical of what has been occuring in all Western intelligence services since 9/11 blasted them out of their complacent mind set.
Trained to cope with the major Cold War monster, the Soviet Union, they failed not only to identify the new threat but even to imagine what it might be. The collapse of communism (something which, incidentally, came as a complete surprise to every Western intelligence service) left them desperate to find ways of justifying their existence.
Before her death six years ago, was Princess Diana under surveillance by “watchers” from MI5, the British Security Service? Yes. Did MI5 have a file on her? Yes. Were her telephone calls bugged? Yes. Were there, in the Queen’s words, “powers at work in this country of which we have no knowledge”? Yes. Did MI5 or these mysterious powers murder Diana? Emphatically, no.
The secret battle that has been raging in the secret world over the way the British government is trying to politicise our intelligence services is now in the open. The outcome will decide the path that the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) will take for the rest of this century.
At the heart of the fight is a simple question: what are intelligence services for? The traditional view is that since they owe allegiance to the realm and not the government of the day, they are there to report as objectively and as dispassionately as possible what they believe to be the state of the world? The government’s view is that, like any other department, they are there to do whatever is required of them to support government policy.
