No Dirty Wars on Terror: The Imperative of 'Ethical Intelligence'

By Valentina Soria for RUSI.org

Long depicted and perceived as an incredible intelligence failure, 9/11 has come to epitomise the kind of strategic shocks which compel organisations and bureaucratic institutions to reassess their own frame of reference and to adjust the 'lenses' through which they see the world.

In particular, those events exposed the inadequacies of a strategic and cultural framework which prevented the US intelligence community really appreciating the unconventional nature of the threat posed by Al-Qaida. Indeed, the Cold-War mindset still dominant at the time was mostly to blame for the intelligence agencies' inability to properly 'connect the dots' and avert the tragedy.

Similarly, the attacks of 7/7 represented the UK's 9/11 in many ways: both those incidents stood as a watershed in the way the threat would subsequently be countered.

In the UK, there was certainly greater awareness and understanding of the threat posed by jihadist terrorism at the time; yet, the security services failed to prevent the atrocities. It was not so much an outdated strategic mindset as rather certain operational flaws which hampered the security services' ability to spot and connect significant clues.

Arguably, the timing, method and origin of the attacks surprised the security services tactically at a moment when the focus of their attention was on other significant plots. Yet from an intelligence perspective, an additional conceptual leap was still required in order to fully appreciate emerging patterns which would once again point to a significant evolution of the threat, manifesting itself in the phenomenon of home-grown suicide terrorism, directed indiscriminately at UK targets.

With an enemy as rapid as to morph and evolve as Al-Qaida would prove to be, it became even more crucial for intelligence agencies to be able to quickly to learn valuable lessons from their mistakes and to adapt their approaches accordingly. Undoubtedly, this presented distinct challenges; bureaucracies are by definition slower in undertaking major changes and in incorporating them into their institutionalised organisational culture.

 

However, the need to do this swiftly and efficiently was made more compelling by the fact that the fight against Al-Qaida was meant to be intelligence-led. In other words, the 'war on terror' was to be waged, and eventually won, by securing information superiority over the enemy. The fact that no other successful terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 and 7/7 have taken place since then is a remarkable testimony of the UK and US intelligence community's relentless effort to improve their tools and refine their craft.

In practical terms, this was pursued through a huge boost of technical, manpower and financial resources, as well as by broadening the security agencies' remit. For the US intelligence community, this translated into the power of doing whatever was deemed necessary to conduct their job effectively.

A failure to modernise the legislative framework, though, has left the system open to misuse and, in some cases, abuse. The controversial and divisive issues of rendition, enhanced interrogation techniques and torture seem therefore to represent the dark side of the post 9/11 intelligence-led fight against jihadist terrorism.

The legal structure for sustaining the 'war on terror' in the US has been inadequate mainly because it was built on the basis of a Twentieth century cultural mindset which implied a clear distinction between homeland and overseas politics, between international laws (or judicial frameworks which would apply overseas) and the domestic criminal system. This could help explain why the decision to resort to, and abet, brutal practices was not judged at first to be particularly problematic. As long as this contributed to protect national security and took place outside the remit of domestic jurisdiction, that was assumed to be acceptable and, most importantly, harder to contest legally.

But in an era when domestic public perceptions tend to be much more affected, and shaped, by events overseas, underestimating the implications that such hard-nosed methods could have for the long term legitimacy of the intelligence agencies' approach to countering terrorism could come at a high price.

In particular, public opinion might deem as self-defeating the incoherence between the official stance of Western governments with reference to the protection and promotion of human rights on the one hand and the 'illiberal' (and, in some instances, illegal) conduct of their security services on the other.. In trying to strike the right balance between security and the safeguarding of human rights, it has therefore become necessary for governments to determine much more precisely what it is publically acceptable to do in order to protect national security.

At the same time, though, it is equally important for the public to appreciate that, in weighing the possibility of preventing a terrorist attack against the need to respect someone's human rights, intelligence agencies tend to assume, correctly, that the public 'risk threshold' is indeed low. It is certainly true that risk appetites differ substantially in the US, the UK and other western societies. Nonetheless, where the public demand for a 'total security' society is greater, this dilemma is somehow harder to address satisfactorily.

The implications of this go beyond the issue of human rights per se: indeed, the support of domestic publics is paramount for the way Western intelligence agencies conduct their operations. The public has been increasingly encouraged to become the 'eyes and ears' of the security services, indicating the extent to which the latter rely nowadays on public help and vigilance to detect and disrupt terrorist attacks.

One of the most striking differences with the pre-9/11 period is therefore the deliberate tendency towards more openness and transparency displayed by intelligence organisations which traditionally have regarded secrecy as the quintessential element of their craft. It is a shift which, almost certainly, would not have taken place, had it not been for the changes in the strategic paradigm brought about by 9/11.

But greater transparency implies, and indeed demands, greater accountability: this, in turn, requires pursuing an ethical code of conduct which is coherent and unambiguous.

Ten years after 9/11, Western intelligence agencies need to prove their willingness to stick to this course of action. This will contribute greatly to the preservation, and indeed the strengthening, of public support which remains an essential tool in the fight against terrorism.

The views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of RUSI.