Damned if they do - and damned if they don't

After the Forest Gate raid, those who urge Muslims not to co-operate with the Met are playing a dangerous game

Published in the Evening Standard June 8 2006

This must be Sir Ian Blair's second worst nightmare. The biggest fear of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner is of another 7/7. But he surely has long dreaded a repeat of the other London tragedy of July 2005: the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the suspected suicide bomber who turned out to be an innocent man riding the Tube to work.

Now, nearly one year on, it seems as if Sir Ian's men have made the same mistake again. In Forest Gate, 250 officers mounted a dawn raid on a house where intelligence told them terrorist brothers were making a lethal chemical device. One of the men inside was shot - and yet, so far, not so much as a chemical trace has been found.

The episode evokes a horrible sense of deja vu, as once again - just as they did after the de Menezes shooting - the Independent Police Complaints Commission pore over every step taken by the Met; lawyers for the affected family denounce the authorities; and, seamlessly, anti-war campaigners take up the case as their own.

In that last category, step forward Yvonne Ridley, the former Express journalist turned candidate for George Galloway's Respect party. Ridley, you'll remember, was briefly held captive by the Taliban in the lead up to the invasion of Afghanistan in September 2001 - only to emerge as a convert to Islam less than two years later. Students of Stockholm Syndrome - whereby hostages develop a strong attachment and even sympathy for their captors - might see here an interesting case study.

Ridley addressed a meeting in east London on Tuesday night, making headlines by calling on her fellow Muslims to withdraw all co-operation with the police, following the Forest Gate raid. No offering directions, no "passing the time of day" with a bobby on the beat - until the police "start showing some respect to the community."

Ridley softened that hard line in later interviews, but that scarcely rescued her from her mistake. She may well be right that the young Muslims she speaks to feel harassed, even terrorised by the police. But the remedy for that is surely dialogue and argument, not sullen silence.

More importantly, Ridley's attack on the police - denouncing them as if they were brutish thugs, bent on beating up Muslims - fails to appreciate the terrible predicament they are in. They, along with the security services, are damned if they do act - and damned if they don't.

The latter point is the most obvious. Imagine if the house at Forest Gate had indeed harboured a home-made chemical weapon. And imagine if, uncertain of their evidence, the authorities had held off - only for the weapon to have been detonated, killing hundreds, maybe thousands. None of those responsible would ever have been forgiven. The terrible truth for the police is that, even if there's only a one in twenty chance that a tip-off is right, they cannot ignore it. The risks are just too great.

Yet if they get it wrong, as they did with Jean Charles de Menezes and may have done again in Forest Gate, they come under fierce legal and political attack. Nor is this criticism wholly unjustified, for it is quite true that the alienation and anger caused by misfired police action ends up making terrorism more, not less, likely. As Britain learned with the ill-fated internment policy in northern Ireland, when a community feels singled out for harassment and worse by the authorities, even those previously unsympathetic to the terrorists' cause can be recruited. The current risk is that young Muslims in east London hostile to the jihadist message last week will be more open to it now.

So the police are in a no-win situation. Do nothing, or even wait too long, and they risk letting a terror attack happen. Act too fast and too heavy and they could alienate the very community whose support they need most. The predicament is sharpened by the inherent weakness of the one commodity on which all counter-terrorism relies: intelligence.

It used to sound so reassuring. "According to the intelligence..." police officers or politicians might say, explaining their actions. Yet in recent years we've come to realise just how flawed intelligence can be, especially when it comes - as, it seems, the Forest Gate tip did - from a single source. This means a single informant passes on a nugget of information which cannot be corroborated elsewhere. If he's paid for his work, he may want to prove he is worth the money. Or he may simply want to ingratiate himself with his bosses. He may exaggerate, knowing there is no way his claim can be independently checked.

We have learned this lesson over and over again, whether it be the intelligence failures in Northern Ireland which saw the wrong people arrested for IRA bombings or, most spectacularly, the intelligence which persuaded governments around the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We've seen the same weakness demonstrated again in recent months, as police arrest suspected terrorists by the hundreds - only to release all but a handful of them.

What are the police to do in this impossible situation? There's not much they can do, except tread more carefully. Did they really need to go in so hard at Forest Gate, sending in 250 officers? When American troops raided the hideout of Uday and Qusay Hussein for a gunfight in Iraq, there were only 200 of them. Nor can it be really necessary for the police to turn such operations into a media circus, with a regular stream of gung-ho tales fed to the papers.

When there's even a remote threat of terrorist danger, of course the police have to act: we would forgive nothing less. But they have to act in a way that keeps everybody on side, and that takes great care. It is an extraordinarily difficult balancing act we are asking our police to perform - and the likes of Yvonne Ridley would do well to appreciate it.

Posted on June 8, 2006 05:08 PM

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