A War on Terror?: The European Stance on a New Threat, Changing Laws and Human Rights Implications
European journal on criminal policy and research 14 , , European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 14 , European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 13 , , European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 14 , , Newsletter of the European Society of Criminology 2 , Articles 1—20 Show more. Coping with overloaded criminal justice systems: M Gras Nomos , The power to decide—prosecutorial control, diversion and punishment in European criminal justice systems today M Wade Coping with overloaded criminal justice systems, , A European public prosecutor: A War on Terror?: Prosecution and diversion within criminal justice systems in Europe.
The Januses of Justice: Whatever the target of terrorists, there are multiple ways of hardening the targets to prevent the terrorists from hitting their mark, or reducing the damage of attacks. One method is to place Hostile vehicle mitigation to enforce protective standoff distance outside tall or politically sensitive buildings to prevent car and truck bombing.
Counter-terrorism
Another way to reduce the impact of attacks is to design buildings for rapid evacuation. Aircraft cockpits are kept locked during flights, and have reinforced doors, which only the pilots in the cabin are capable of opening. UK railway stations removed their rubbish bins in response to the Provisional IRA threat, as convenient locations for depositing bombs. Scottish stations removed theirs after the 7 July London Bombings as a precautionary measure.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority purchased bomb-resistant barriers after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
As Israel is suffering from constant shelling of its cities, towns and settlements by artillery rockets from the Gaza Strip mainly by Hamas , but also by other Palestinian factions and Lebanon mainly by Hezbollah , Israel developed several defensive measures against artillery, rockets and missiles. These include building a bomb shelter in every building and school , but also deploying active protection systems like the Arrow ABM , Iron Dome and David's Sling batteries which intercept the incoming threat in the air.
Iron Dome has successfully intercepted hundreds of Qassam rockets and Grad rockets fired by Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. A more sophisticated target-hardening approach must consider industrial and other critical industrial infrastructure that could be attacked. Terrorists need not import chemical weapons if they can cause a major industrial accident such as the Bhopal disaster or the Halifax Explosion. Industrial chemicals in manufacturing, shipping, and storage need greater protection, and some efforts are in progress.
Industrial shipments of chlorine, widely used in water purification and the chemical industry, travel in 90 or 55 ton tank cars. To give one more example, the North American electrical grid has already demonstrated, in the Northeast Blackout of , its vulnerability to natural disasters coupled with inadequate, possibly insecure, SCADA supervisory control and data acquisition networks. Part of the vulnerability is due to deregulation leading to much more interconnection in a grid designed for only occasional power-selling between utilities.
A small number of terrorists, attacking key power facilities when one or more engineers have infiltrated the power control centers, could wreak havoc. Equipping likely targets with containers i. The technique was apparently used on a limited scale by British authorities in the s. The idea has been suggested more recently as a deterrent to suicide bombings in Israel. In North America and other continents, for a threatened or completed terrorist attack, the Incident Command System ICS is apt to be invoked to control the various services that may need to be involved in the response.
ICS has varied levels of escalation, such as might be needed for multiple incidents in a given area e. National response, for example, might be needed for a nuclear, biological, radiological, or large chemical attack. Fire departments , perhaps supplemented by public works agencies, utility providers e. Again under an incident command model, local police can isolate the incident area, reducing confusion, and specialized police units can conduct tactical operations against terrorists, often using specialized counter-terrorist tactical units.
Bringing in such units will normally involve civil or military authority beyond the local level. Emergency medical services will triage, treat, and transport the more seriously affected victims to hospitals, which will also need to have mass casualty and triage plans in place. Public health agencies , from local to national level, may be designated to deal with identification, and sometimes mitigation, of possible biological attacks, and sometimes chemical or radiologic contamination. Today, many countries have special units designated to handle terrorist threats.
Besides various security agencies , there are elite tactical units , also known as special mission units , whose role is to directly engage terrorists and prevent terrorist attacks. Such units perform both in preventive actions, hostage rescue and responding to on-going attacks. Countries of all sizes can have highly trained counter-terrorist teams. Tactics, techniques and procedures for manhunting are under constant development.
Most of these measures deal with terrorist attacks that affect an area, or threaten to do so.
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It is far harder to deal with assassination, or even reprisals on individuals, due to the short if any warning time and the quick exfiltration of the assassins. These units are specially trained in tactics and are very well equipped for CQB with emphasis on stealth and performing the mission with minimal casualties. The units include take-over force assault teams , snipers , EOD experts, dog handlers and intelligence officers. See Counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism organizations for national command, intelligence, and incident mitigation. The majority of counter-terrorism operations at the tactical level, are conducted by state, federal and national law enforcement agencies or intelligence agencies.
In some countries, the military may be called in as a last resort. Obviously, for countries whose military are legally permitted to conduct police operations, this is a non-issue, and such counter-terrorism operations are conducted by their military. See counter-intelligence for command, intelligence and warning, and incident mitigation aspects of counter-terror.
Some counterterrorist actions of the 20th and 21st century are listed below. See list of hostage crises for a more extended list, including hostage-taking that did not end violently. March 30, the Manawan Police Academy in Lahore attack — 8 gunmen, 8 police personnel and 2 civilians killed, 95 people injured, 4 gunmen captured. Plaza Cinema Chowk attack — 16 policemen, an army officer and unknown number of civilians killed.
As many as people injured. The scope for Anti-terrorism systems is very large in physical terms long borders, vast areas, high traffic volumes in busy cities, etc. In this environment, the development of a persistent Anti-terrorism protection system is a daunting task. Such a system should bring together diverse state-of-the-art technologies to enable persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, and enable potential actions. Designing such a system-of-systems comprises a major technological project. A particular design problem for this system is that it will face many uncertainties in the future.
The threat of terrorism may increase, decrease or remain the same, the type of terrorism and location are difficult to predict, and there are technological uncertainties. Yet we want to design a terrorism system conceived and designed today in order to prevent acts of terrorism for a decade or more.
A potential solution is to incorporate flexibility into system design for the reason that the flexibility embedded can be exercised in future as uncertainty unfolds and updated information arrives. And the design and valuation of a protection system should not be based on a single scenario, but an array of scenarios. Flexibility can be incorporated in the design of the terrorism system in the form of options that can be exercised in the future when new information is available.
Using these ' real options ' will create a flexible Anti-terrorism system that is able to cope with new requirements that may arise. While some countries with longstanding terrorism problems, such as Israel, have law enforcement agencies primarily designed to prevent and respond to terror attacks, [30] in other nations, counter-terrorism is a relatively more recent objective of civilian police and law enforcement agencies. Pursuant to passage of the Homeland Security Act of , federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies began to systemically reorganize.
Some scholars have doubted the ability of local police to help in the war on terror and suggest their limited manpower is still best utilized by engaging community and targeting street crimes. In intelligence-led policing ILP efforts, the most quantitatively amenable starting point for measuring the effectiveness of any policing strategy i. Since terrorism is such a rare event phenomena, [42] measuring arrests or clearance rates would be a non-generalizable and ineffective way to test enforcement policy effectiveness.
Another methodological problem in assessing counter-terrorism efforts in law enforcement hinges on finding operational measures for key concepts in the study of homeland security. Both terrorism and homeland security are relatively new concepts for criminologists, and academicians have yet to agree on the matter of how to properly define these ideas in a way that is accessible. Given the nature of operational counter-terrorism tasks national military organizations do not generally have dedicated units whose sole responsibility is the prosecution of these tasks. Instead the counter-terrorism function is an element of the role, allowing flexibility in their employment, with operations being undertaken in the domestic or international context.
In some cases the legal framework within which they operate prohibits military units conducting operations in the domestic arena; United States Department of Defense policy, based on the Posse Comitatus Act , forbids domestic counter-terrorism operations by the U. Units allocated some operational counter-terrorism task are frequently Special Forces or similar assets. In cases where military organisations do operate in the domestic context some form of formal handover from the law enforcement community is regularly required, to ensure adherence to the legislative framework and limitations.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Ethnic violence Militia movement Resistance movement. Designated terrorist groups Charities accused of ties to terrorism. Counter-terrorism International conventions Anti-terrorism legislation Terrorism insurance.
Counter-terrorism - Wikipedia
List of special forces units. Lemay Center for Doctrine Development and Education. Crossing Legal Boundaries in Defence of the State. Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory. With the collapse of Parnell's political career in and the general, if temporary, demoralization of the Irish cause, the Special Branch's interests shifted to other revolutionary and anarchist groups, and the word Irish dropped out of the name.
Terrorism and Political Violence. Volume 27, Issue 2, Retrieved April 14, The Need for Systematic Evaluation". Retrieved 6 September Mideast Security and Policy Studies No. Retrieved November 14, Retrieved June 16, Can Human Rights Fight Back? The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
A French View of Counterinsurgency". Archived from the original on January 12, US Department of the Army. Retrieved February 3, While military manuals rarely show individual authors, David Petraeus is widely described as establishing many of this volume's concepts. Design buildings for rapid evacuation". Wants Rail Hazmats Banned: Wreck Renews Fears for Capital".
Retrieved January 2, Secret Weapon Against Islamic Terror? Archived from the original PDF on October 11,