July 19, 2005
They're everywhere
If you can’t find the enemy, everyone becomes the enemy:
Security services have barred more than 200 foreign scientists from studying at British universities over the past four years, amid fears they could present a terrorist threat, the Guardian has learned.
The scientists were among more than 2,000 vetted after applying to universities to do postgraduate or post-doctoral research in fields such as chemistry, microbiology and biotechnology. The figures were released to the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act as police continue to search for those linked to the London bombings.
… The documents, obtained before this month’s bombings, reveal that 2,282 scientists were referred for vetting from 2001 until May this year. Of those, security officials recommended that 238 be rejected admission to their chosen university.
… The Guardian has also been passed details of a study of extremist groups at British universities which ties 14 cases of people either convicted or accused of involvement in Islamist terrorist actions over the past 12 years to activities on campuses.
The nine-month study, How Safe Are British Universities?, was carried out by Anthony Glees, director of Brunel University’s centre for intelligence and security studies, and is due to be published shortly. It documents 14 cases since 1993 where there is evidence that a person either charged or convicted of terrorism offences experienced a “tipping point” after coming into contact with extremist groups on campuses.
The research indicated “you need a variety of things to bring people to a tip-over point where they will consider engaging in terrorism”, he said. One of those things was “access to extreme terror-justifying ideas such as those we’ve seen on campuses”.
Glees’ “solution” isn’t exactly new:
His report concludes that universities should monitor their students, including in student unions, by keeping records of societies’ memberships. In the most extreme cases, he argues, universities should sanction covert action on campuses. He suggests that monitoring should be of all students, not just Muslims, to ensure that potential [British National Party] or animal rights extremists are watched, too. He freely acknowledges that his ideas hark back to the surveillance that has existed through history of universities: from the 1930s, the Bolsheviks, to the communists and the cold war.
What Glees fails to acknowledge is that such surveillance routinely violated just about every kind of human right and civil liberty—but still proved spectacularly ineffective at preventing Soviet recruitment activities. Focusing on universities (or any other kind of institution) isn’t the answer; what we need are security forces that are more adept at profiling and identifying individual suspects. MI5, in particular, has proved hopeless at that—which is why it prefers the kind of shotgun technique proposed by Glees.
Posted by Stephen at 1:18 PM in Terrorism | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
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