The self-resilient society

by | Apr 23, 2009 | Global Dashboard, UK

On Tuesday Demos launched a report I’ve authored called Resilient Nation. The report argues that we live in a brittle society with  over 80 per cent of Britons live in urban areas relying on dense networks of public and private sector organisations to provide them with essential services.  But our everyday lives and the national infrastructure work in a fragile union, vulnerable to even the smallest disturbances in the network. And both are part of a global ecosystem that is damaged and unpredictable.

So how does Britain protect against threats (like terrorism), hazards (such as natural disasters) and major accidents? Much of our infrastructure is outmoded and archaic. And with their narrow focus on emergency services and institutions, so are the policies that underpin it. The pamphlet calls for a radical rethink of resilience.  Instead of structures or centralised services, it argues that citizens and communities are the true source of resilience for our society. Resilience, I suggest,  is an everyday, community activity. It is people’s potential to learn, adapt and work together that powers it. Only by realising this potential will we succeed in building a resilient nation.

The report connects neatly with the Government’s own work on community resilience – which could be a central plank in the next iteration of the national security strategy and may be a public strategy in its own right. The general feeling I got from meetings with officials in central and local government and relevant agencies as well as from people in pubs, sitting rooms, warehouses and meeting rooms was that citizens and communities were the missing piece of the resilience jigsaw.

More often than not in the past no one really bothered to talk about what role citizens and communities could play and this was reflected in official guidance and advice where they were seen as ‘a problem to be dealt with rather than a source of help’.

In short – the shift towards a more citizen focused approach to resilience is happening…and in the summer the Government will unveil its own thinking on the subject (one hopes using the 4Es of community resilience ).

And then I remembered the Government’s response to the Pitt Review and I began to have serious doubts about whether such a strategy will succeed.

(more…)

CIA agents forced to torture

by | Apr 23, 2009 | North America

The FBI’s Ali Soufan has an explosive op-ed in today’s New York Times. 

“For seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding, ” he writes. “I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified. But the release last week of four Justice Department memos on interrogations allows me to shed light on the story, and on some of the lessons to be learned.”

Soufan attacks the claim – propogated strenuously by the Bush administation – that it tortured in order to save American lives. Indeed, he suggests that these claims are based on deliberate and systematic fabrication:

One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.

We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.

Perhaps his most explosive insight is into the contrasting policies within the FBI and CIA. FBI agents were allowed to recuse themselves from torture. CIA agents were ordered to continue torturing even after they protested:

Fortunately for me, after I objected to the enhanced techniques, the message came through from Pat D’Amuro, an F.B.I. assistant director, that “we don’t do that,” and I was pulled out of the interrogations by the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller (this was documented in the report released last year by the Justice Department’s inspector general).

My C.I.A. colleagues who balked at the techniques, on the other hand, were instructed to continue. 

Surely it is only a matter of time before very senior figures from the Bush adminstration face prosecution. A Truth Commission now seems like the very minimum that should be expected…