Fragmented Europe invites terrorism
(yahoo.com)
Updated: 2004-04-27 09:27

Despite round-the-clock teamwork by European anti-terrorism agencies in the wake of last month's train bombings in Madrid, persistent barriers to cooperation and coordination make Europe vulnerable to attack, senior European and U.S. police officials, prosecutors and other experts say.

Justice systems clash, policing styles diverge, and open borders allow terrorists far more mobility than their pursuers. For years, the Al Qaeda terrorist network has taken full advantage of these factors — and Europe's democratic, tolerant environment — using the continent as a base for recruitment, logistics and plotting attacks elsewhere.

The Madrid attacks, which killed 191 people, showed how Al Qaeda used that infrastructure to carry out its first successful strike in a Western Europe that was caught off guard, investigators say.

"There's a lack of trust among security services and among countries," said Baltasar Garzon, Spain's best-known anti-terrorism magistrate. "There's a lack of solidarity. Self-interest dominates. What we need is a European intelligence community. We are straitjacketed by absurd formalities that distract from what should be essential."

Investigative cooperation depends largely on political dynamics and personal chemistry among Europe's counter-terrorism magistrates, prosecutors, police and spies. Europe wants to build regional justice and policing systems one day, but governments find it hard to relinquish the national security powers that are the core of their sovereignty. Instead, it has been largely up to investigators to develop informal cross-border alliances and friendships.

"Without being alarmist, I think we will have to deal with other grave episodes of terrorism in Europe in the future," said Stefano Dambruoso, one of Italy's top anti-terrorism prosecutors. "The most important thing now is that we have to abolish borders for police and prosecutors so that they can work together and move around Europe without problems."

After the Madrid bombings, cooperation kicked into a higher gear. Police from across Europe hurried to Madrid this month to get a status report from Spanish investigators about the train attacks and leads to pursue in half a dozen countries. Prosecutors in Milan shared a dossier on Algerian extremists with colleagues from Madrid. British police raided homes in London searching for suspects who had received phone calls from a hide-out here just before seven suspected bombers blew themselves up during a shootout with police.

But officials offer a litany of complaints about neighboring countries and sometimes about their own.

Critics say Spanish authorities underestimated Islamic terrorists because they were obsessed with Basque separatist extremists. Neighbors complain that the British have allowed Islamic ideologues to turn London into a jihadi capital. The French have a reputation for being haughty and selective about sharing information. The Germans, Belgians and Dutch often have trouble keeping suspects in jail because of weak terrorism laws, other countries say. And observers see the Italians as being hampered by internecine conflicts.

The complaints tend toward exaggeration. Until Madrid, Europe's security forces used considerable expertise about terrorism to fend off a series of Al Qaeda plots. But the weaknesses have lingered for years despite widespread agreement about increasing dangers.

"Everyone's scrambling," said a U.S. law enforcement official who works with European police. "They might share a little bit more. But everyone holds tight. They don't have a coordinated system. Bilaterally, they probably do all right. But multilaterally, forget it."

Although the European Union has responded to the Madrid bombings by appointing a "czar" to coordinate counter-terrorism efforts, veteran law enforcement officials see the move as essentially symbolic. After the Sept. 11 attacks, European leaders announced with great fanfare that Europol, the EU's fledgling police force, would spearhead the fight against terrorism. But today, Europol remains on the sidelines, officials said.

The little-known Dutch official appointed as the new anti-terrorism coordinator will have trouble cutting through the jungle of the EU's politics and bureaucracy, officials said. They complained that either a noted crime fighter or a high-powered politician from a country with front-line experience should have been appointed.

"The EU coordinator is nothing," a senior French law enforcement official said. "Europe doesn't exist yet when it comes to law enforcement of this kind."

Another concern, however, unites European officials: the secretive aspects of the U.S. strategy against terrorism. U.S. agents are holding top Al Qaeda figures such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, at a secret location without charges. The Europeans acknowledge that Washington has passed on intelligence from interrogations of the captives that has helped authorities to better understand and ward off the enemy.

On the other hand, the intelligence has little or no weight in court. And the incarceration without trial of Al Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba is seen in European capitals as undemocratic and counterproductive.

"We have to reconcile the worlds of intelligence and justice," said Garzon, a close ally of U.S. law enforcement. "Guantanamo is a big lie, a big farce in the fight against terrorism…. It denies liberty and the basic guarantees of a judicial system. And it is not preventing terrorism."

Beyond politics, investigators fear that the lack of usable evidence from captured Al Qaeda leaders could end up putting terrorists back on the street in Europe. A court in Hamburg, Germany, recently released the only person convicted in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks pending a new trial. His verdict was overturned, and another accused Hamburg accomplice was acquitted, largely because of a U.S. refusal to provide testimony from the imprisoned Ramzi Binalshibh, the accused coordinator of the hijackers' cell.

Within Europe, the clash between intelligence and justice affects the relationship between mainland countries and Britain, whose spy services dominate the nation's anti-terrorism efforts.

Britain's common-law court system, which resembles U.S. justice, also differs from the continent's mostly Napoleonic-style judiciaries, which are more secretive and dominated by the investigative magistrate, a mix of prosecutor and judge. Spain, France and Italy have tough conspiracy laws, but Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium do not.

Two major terrorism cases in the Netherlands have ended in acquittals after judges threw out evidence because it had been gathered by Dutch spies rather than police. In Germany, with its decentralized policing structure and strict protections of individual rights, suspected Al Qaeda operatives remain free even though they face arrest in other countries.

"One of the biggest difficulties is turning intelligence into evidence," Dambruoso said. "In many countries, the fight against terrorism is done largely in the field of intelligence. In other countries, such as Italy, it's essential to have evidence that can be used in the judicial system."

Preventing bloodshed has taken precedence over building prosecutions in the aftermath of the Madrid bombings, in which at least half a dozen suspects were well known to police. When police recently reviewed documents seized in a raid here in 2001, they found a diagram for assembling a remote control explosive device with a cellular phone that resembled the backpack bombs that exploded on the trains, a Spanish law enforcement official said.

Another episode related to the Madrid case points up the highs and lows of cooperation, according to an account provided by knowledgeable investigators and court documents. In 1998, the CIA informed French intelligence that four extremists had left an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan bound for Europe, where they intended to commit terrorist attacks. French police identified one man as David Courtailler, a French convert to Islam. With the help of British services, they traced his path among Islamic networks. One of Courtailler's closest associates in Spain was Jamal Zougam, a Moroccan shopkeeper.

In 2000, a French anti-terrorism magistrate asked Spanish counterparts to arrest Zougam. A year of high-level disputes over the request ensued. In the summer of 2001, Spanish authorities finally ordered a search of Zougam's apartment and detained him for questioning.

The French judge and a Spanish judge interrogated Zougam together, but neither was able to arrest him. Today, Zougam is behind bars, accused of providing the telephone equipment used in the backpack bombs that he and other suspects allegedly planted aboard the trains in Madrid.

It's not clear whether better cooperation could have helped head off the Madrid plot. But the episode shows the need to speed up the legal machinery. And the intelligence-gathering strategy of letting networks operate under surveillance, experts say, must now be balanced against the harsh lesson of Madrid: Apparent support cells can turn lethal without warning. While Western law enforcement lumbers toward reform, Islamic terrorists adapt with agility.

The imminence of the danger drives the current spirit of cooperation and will, it is hoped, reduce rifts among countries and security forces, officials said. But complacency and inertia remain threats as well.

"I just hope the impetus doesn't fade away after three months," Garzon said. "We need to confront this challenge in a global manner and without hesitating. The concern exists at the level of intelligence services, police and judges. But we need commitment at the political level as well. And let's not forget too soon."