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The New York Times/ - Politics, Sáb, 31 de Março de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Civil Rights)
Fighting Terrorism, French-Style
FRANCE and the United States have different notions
of liberty, equality and fraternity, though the words look
roughly the same in both languages. Methods of
combating homegrown terrorism — another French
word dating from 1789 — are also quite different,
stemming from different histories, legal systems and
conceptions of the state.
The horrors in Toulouse — the murders of seven
people in a bit more than a week by Mohammed
Merah, a 23-year-old French citizen of Algerian-born
parents who claimed membership in Al Qaeda —
created a fierce debate in France about whether the
police and security services failed to identify him in
time. The police also failed to take him alive, making it
harder to discover the true breadth of his contacts and
of his path to terrorism.
Mr. Merah clearly slipped through the French net,
which relies heavily on human intelligence and
judgment. The French are asking why, and whether he
might have been more easily identified by the more
automated — and expensive — American-style
reliance on computerized monitoring of phone calls
and the Internet. That question is unanswerable, of
course. But the differences between the two countries
and their methods are considerable.
“In the United States, it is the system that counts; in
France, it is the men,” says Marc Trévidic, a senior
investigating magistrate for terrorism in France.
After 9/11, the Americans threw enormous resources
of manpower, money and computer time into the
“global war on terrorism,” which was also about
tracking the potential terrorist at home, in a country
with a tiny and mostly well-integrated Muslim
population. The French, with a colonial history, have
been dealing with terrorism (and Islam) for much
longer. With the largest number of Muslims in Europe
— nearly 10 percent of the population, often
concentrated in poorer neighborhoods — and closer
proximity to the Middle East and North Africa, France
has focused more on preventing the recruitment of
potential terrorists through a regular infiltration of
mosques and radical Islamic networks.
Partly because of their history and partly because of
more limited budgets, the French rely more on human
contacts, local intelligence and human resources and
less on automated phone tapping and surveillance
than the Americans do. That can make the French well
informed but less systematic, less able to “connect the
dots” than the Americans, who have tried to learn from
their own failure to uncover the 9/11 plot before it
happened. In general, Judge Trévidic said, the French
have one-tenth of the resources of the Americans for
any given case.
The French state is highly centralized, not federal. Fed
up with a series of bombings in the 1980s, France tried
to better coordinate domestic and foreign intelligence
with the establishment in 1984 of the Unité de
coordination de la lutte anti-terroriste (the coordination
unit of the anti-terrorist struggle), or Uclat, and tried
something similar within the Justice Ministry.
French law governing intelligence was reformed in
1986 and refined again after 1995 and 2001, with
another reform in 2006 by Nicolas Sarkozy, then
interior minister, to give even more margin of
maneuver to the investigating judges and the police.
The Central Directorate of Domestic Intelligence was
founded in 2008 as a merger of the intelligence
services of the Interior Ministry, which were
responsible for counterterrorism and
counterespionage, and of the state police.
THE fight against terrorism is more decentralized in the
United States. That is not without complications. The
tensions among the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
the Central Intelligence Agency and local or state
agencies are legendary, especially between the F.B.I.
and the New York Police Department, which has its
own counterterrorism intelligence unit. That tension
forms a sometimes entertaining, sometimes
disconcerting spine for Christopher Dickey’s 2009
book, “Securing the City.”
“France is a country with only two police forces,” Mr.
Dickey notes, “both national, so there is less rivalry
among agencies.”
Legally, too, the French have centralized terrorism
cases in one court and tried to reintegrate procedures
for fighting terrorism into regular law, but with more
flexibility for terrorism investigations to act on
suspicion, order wiretaps or surveillance and hold
suspects for a longer period of time. The United States
is still trying to reconcile due process of law with
fighting terrorism — look at the difficulty in finally
shutting the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, or
whether to hold criminal trials or military tribunals for
detainees like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
While easy to oversimplify, the French state also has a
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