France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country. France has usually been governed by
prostitutes.

Mark Twain
------------------------------


I would rather have a German division in front of me than a French one behind me.


General George S. Patton
------------------------------

Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion.

Norman Schwartzkopf
------------------------------

We can stand here like the French, or we can do something about it.'

Marge Simpson
------------------------------
As far as I'm concerned, war always means failure.

Jacques Chirac, President of France
------------------------------

The only time France wants us to go to war is when the German Army is
sitting in Paris sipping coffee.'

Regis Philbin
------------------------------

You know, the French remind me a little bit of an aging actress of the 1940s who was still trying to dine out on her looks but doesn't have the face for it.

John McCain , U.S. Senator from Arizona

------------------------------

The last time the French asked for 'more proof' it came marching into Paris under a German flag.

David Letterman
------------------------------

Only thing worse than a Frenchman is a Frenchman who lives in Canada .

Ted Nugent
------------------------------

War without France would be like .. World War II.

Unknown
------------------------------

The favorite bumper sticker in Washington D.C. right now is one that says First Iraq , then France .

Tom Brokaw
------------------------------

What do you expect from a culture and a nation that exerted more of its national will fighting against Disney World and Big Macs than the Nazis?'

Dennis Miller
------------------------------

It is important to remember that the French have always been there when they needed us.

Alan Kent
-----------------------------

They've taken their own precautions against al-Qa'ida. To prepare for an attack, each Frenchman is urged to keep duct tape, a white flag, and a three-day supply of mistresses in the house.

Argus Hamilton
------------------------------

Somebody was telling me about the French Army rifle that was being advertised on eBay the other day --the description was, 'Never shot. Dropped once.''

Rep. Roy Blunt, MO
-----------------------------

The French will only agree to go to war when we've proven we've found truffles in Iraq '

Dennis Miller
------------------------------

Q. What did the mayor of Paris say to the German Army as they entered the
city in WWII?

A. Table for 100,000 m'sieur?
----------------------------

Do you know how many Frenchmen it takes to defend Paris ? It's not known, it's never been tried.

Rep. R. Blount, MO
------------------------------

Do you know it only took Germany three days to conquer France in WWII? And that's because it was raining.

John Xereas, Manager, DC Improv
------------------------------

The AP and UPI reported that the French Government announced after the London bombings that it has raised its terror alert level from Run to Hide. The only two higher levels in France are Surrender and Collaborate.
The rise in the alert level was precipitated by a recent fire which
destroyed France 's white flag factory, effectively disabling their
military.
------------------------------

French Ban Fireworks at Euro Disney
AP), Paris , March 5, 2003

The French Government announced today that it is imposing a ban on the use of fireworks at Euro Disney. The decision comes the day after a nightly fireworks display at the park, located just 30 miles outside of Paris , caused the soldiers at a nearby French Army garrison to surrender to a group of Czech tourists.

Good one Bobby...unnecessarily vulgar but good -- Thanks.

Wouldn't you prefer real facts instead of fiction?

But in France they do have French women, and that makes up for any other failings.

Period.

And in addition to the fine women, they have the best architecture, best cities and best wine.

....A great county that has figured out the key to "quality of life". I've been there several times and cannot wait to go back.

They sure have a hard time taking a joke though.

Even more when we have fought and won more battles than any other country in the world, have been fighting terrorism when you did not even know what the word meant and after 10 soldiers have been killed last night near Kabul, you know the quiet place where French have holidays..

Help From France Key In Covert Operations
Paris's 'Alliance Base' Targets Terrorists
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 3, 2005; Page A01
PARIS -- When Christian Ganczarski, a German convert to Islam, boarded an Air France flight from Riyadh on June 3, 2003, he knew only that the Saudi government had put him under house arrest for an expired pilgrim visa and had given his family one-way tickets back to Germany, with a change of planes in Paris.
He had no idea that he was being secretly escorted by an undercover officer sitting behind him, or that a senior CIA officer was waiting at the end of the jetway as French authorities gently separated him from his family and swept Ganczarski into French custody, where he remains today on suspicion of associating with terrorists.

Ganczarski is among the most important European al Qaeda figures alive, according to U.S. and French law enforcement and intelligence officials. The operation that ensnared him was put together at a top secret center in Paris, code-named Alliance Base, that was set up by the CIA and French intelligence services in 2002, according to U.S. and European intelligence sources. Its existence has not been previously disclosed.
Funded largely by the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, Alliance Base analyzes the transnational movement of terrorist suspects and develops operations to catch or spy on them.
Alliance Base demonstrates how most counterterrorism operations actually take place: through secretive alliances between the CIA and other countries' intelligence services. This is not the work of large army formations, or even small special forces teams, but of handfuls of U.S. intelligence case officers working with handfuls of foreign operatives, often in tentative arrangements.
Such joint intelligence work has been responsible for identifying, tracking and capturing or killing the vast majority of committed jihadists who have been targeted outside Iraq and Afghanistan since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to terrorism experts.
The CIA declined to comment on Alliance Base, as did a spokesman for the French Embassy in Washington.
Most French officials and other intelligence veterans would talk about the partnership only if their names were withheld because the specifics are classified and the politics are sensitive. John E. McLaughlin, the former acting CIA director who retired recently after a 32-year career, described the relationship between the CIA and its French counterparts as "one of the best in the world. What they are willing to contribute is extraordinarily valuable."
The rarely discussed Langley-Paris connection also belies the public portrayal of acrimony between the two countries that erupted over the invasion of Iraq. Within the Bush administration, the discord was amplified by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has claimed the lead role in the administration's "global war on terrorism" and has sought to give the military more of a part in it.
But even as Rumsfeld was criticizing France in early 2003 for not doing its share in fighting terrorism, his U.S. Special Operations Command was finalizing a secret arrangement to put 200 French special forces under U.S. command in Afghanistan. Beginning in July 2003, its commanders have worked side by side there with U.S. commanders and CIA and National Security Agency representatives.
Organizing Alliance Base


Alliance Base, headed by a French general assigned to France's equivalent of the CIA -- the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) -- was described by six U.S. and foreign intelligence specialists with involvement in its activities. The base is unique in the world because it is multinational and actually plans operations instead of sharing information among countries, they said. It has case officers from Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia and the United States.
The Ganczarski operation was one of at least 12 major cases the base worked on during its first years, according to one person familiar with its operations.

Complete article
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...AR2005070201361.html

http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2369780

In Battling Terrorism, the French Excel
Transnational Security Threats, Terrorism, Intelligence, France, Europe
Jeremy Shapiro, Director of Research, Center on the United States and Europe
NPR's The Bryant Park Project
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March 25, 2008 —
Jeremy Shapiro joins NPR's Alison Stewart to discuss how France has become the most effective counter-terrorism practitioner in Europe.
CCTV video camera seen near Paris landmark

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ALISON STEWART, host: The French excel at many things, red wine, perfumes, silk scarves, and fighting terrorism. Because of a unique system where intelligence and the judicial communities work in tandem, France is considered to have one of the best track records on keeping its citizenry safe after a few decades of considerable fear.

Now, considering a recording attributed to Osama bin Laden threatened attacks in Europe, reprisals for running cartoons depicting Allah in some European papers, and just yesterday al-Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, released a new audio tape calling for attacks in American targets, perhaps the U.S. should take a look at the French model, or maybe not. Here to help us consider this is Jeremy Shapiro, director of research at the Center of the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. Jeremy, thank you for being with us.

JEREMY SHAPIRO: Thanks for having me.

STEWART: Now, at two points in the past two decades, mid-'90s, mid-'80s, France was dealing with a series of attacks internally, department stores, trains. Why, at the time, did it seem to be infested with terror cells?

SHAPIRO: Well, it seems as if, particularly in the 1970s, France essentially allowed itself to be a sanctuary for terrorists, as long as they wouldn't attack French interests, and as long as they wouldn't operate within France. And this, over time, proved to be a problem, because when the interest of the groups changes or when the international situation changed, they decided to lash out at France. And of course, they were well-placed to do so.

STEWART: So the French just basically did not poke the hornet's nest internally?

SHAPIRO: Yeah, precisely. This is a common strategy, actually. We saw it in London in the 1990s. We've seen it in the U.S., even, with regard to Irish terrorists in the 1970s.

STEWART: Now, the French moved to a manage-and-minimize strategy, from suppression to prevention. Can you describe the changes French intelligence services made that took care of the past problems and possible thwarted problems in the future?

SHAPIRO: Well, one of the things they noticed, particularly after the '80s and '90s, was that it wasn't enough to simply be able to respond to the attacks. You had to get into the networks. You had to get into the logistical networks and that meant sort of increasing surveillance on the society and their ability to bring into play judicial tools before what they had previously considered crimes even took place. And so they created both a crime of what we would call conspiracy, and also an organization which could act with judicial powers even before violent acts had taken place.
STEWART: Let's break down a couple of the things you talked about, because that's a bunch of different ideas. The French, they've chosen to live with this very different standard of surveillance than we have in the United States. Describe the kind of surveillance that's allowed.
SHAPIRO: The French have really extensive domestic surveillance. They have a domestic intelligence agency which - they have two domestic intelligence agencies, but one of them basically just does surveillance. They are placed in more or less every town. They go into mosques and churches. They take polls - secret polls of the countryside to figure out what people are thinking. And it's generally assumed in France that the government is looking at what you are doing.

Listen to the full interview »

French lessons: What America can learn about dealing with terrorism
04/18/2004

Lee Smith is hearing echoes. In a new article in Slate, he refers readers to an article from the Spring 2003 issue of Survival, the quarterly publication of the International Institute for Strategic Studies ("double-eye double-ess") in London. The authors, Jeremy Shapiro and Benedicte Suzan, chart the ups and downs of France's history of dealing with Middle Eastern terrorism during the last quarter-century.


Shapiro and Suzan sum up France's progress:

...in 1980, French authorities could not even identify a foreign terrorist attack in the middle of Paris after it had happened. In 1999, they possessed a detailed understanding of a terrorist cell in another country plotting attacks against yet a third country. This striking contrast reflects a more general increase in the French capacity to prevent and fight terrorism, both at home and abroad. Throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s, France was considered a haven for international terrorists, both for those operating in France and those using France as a base for operations elsewhere. By the late 1990s, in contrast, France had scored notable successes in preventing planned terrorist attacks on the World Cup in 1998, against the Strasbourg Cathedral in 2000 and against the American Embassy in Paris 2001.
Smith sees U.S. counter-terrorism as starting from the same low base that France did in 1980. But he doesn't seem too optimistic that the U.S. will match the French turnaround:
In July 2002, long after 9/11, an Egyptian national walked into Los Angeles International Airport with a gun and killed two Israeli citizens at the El Al counter. On his application for asylum in the United States, Hesham Mohamed Hedayet had written that in Egypt he'd confessed to being a member of al-Gama'a al-Islameya, but apparently, unless a man has Osama Bin Laden's phone number in his PalmPilot or a big "AQ" tattooed across his chest, it takes the FBI almost a year to decide he is, in fact, a terrorist. And how did they finally determine this? "The investigation," said an FBI spokesman in April 2003, "developed information that (Hedayet) openly supported the killings of civilians in order to advance the Palestinian cause." This is incompetence and there is nothing to indicate our law enforcement agencies are getting better.

When CIA Director George Tenet says it will take five years to build a clandestine service able to serve the country, his over-optimism suggests that either he is lying or too incompetent to know that he is lying. When he says it will take that long for U.S. agents to take root, as the Washington Post reports, "in the rough societies where terrorist sources can be developed," he is telling us he thinks that the main point is to get our boys in those darned caves and mud castles. The Islamist student union at Cairo University is not a rough society, and it does not take five years to get admitted into the school's engineering faculty. When Tenet says that al-Qaida's influence is only recently spreading, he is telling us that no one in his office has briefed him on Sayyid Qutb's writings, the bible for a very widespread and potent ideological trend that declared war on Jews, Crusaders, and infidel Muslim rulers long before Osama Bin Laden first sprouted whiskers.

It's become truistic that we are engaged in a "war of ideas." But this phrase is almost too genteel, and in its connotations sanguine and self-congratulatory: what civilization is better positioned to win a war of ideas than the intellectual powerhouse of the West, what idea is more powerful than democracy, etc. At the same time, we've become fond of assuring ourselves that the enemy is merely a sort of fanatical froth, operating on the fringes of global Muslim society, destined for extinction.

How we conceive of the problem has implications for strategy. Without wishing to deny the appeal of Hollywood movies, the ballot box, or the Enlightenment, it seems to me that we are facing a problem more central, entrenched, and enduring than "the war of ideas" would imply. Yet if it is an enduring problem, it also may be more manageable than we normally assume -- so long as our attempts to quelch it do not have the opposite of the intended effects.

Terrorism has a long history and seems to come and go in waves. As Shapiro and Suzan note,

...because France has lived so long under the spectre of terrorism at home, neither state officials nor the public views the problem as transitory or fixable, but rather sees political terrorism as an inevitable and permanent feature of modern life. The French system therefore seeks to manage and minimise the problem rather than to solve it. In contrast, in the United States, the very notion of a 'war on terrorism' implies that the struggle will someday end.
But we, too, probably had better get used to it. If I were to name a sole "root cause" for the current wave of terrorism, it would be that Western and specifically American culture, political forms, economic models, and military might have conquered the world. This is the backlash. Conquering the world all over again in the name of the same things won't fix the problem.

Analyst

(The article by Shapiro and Suzan, "The French Experience of Counter-terrorism," is available in PDF.)

The French Experience of Counter-terrorism
Defense, Homeland Security, Terrorism, France, Europe

Benedicte Suzan, Research Fellow
Jeremy Shapiro, Director of Research, Center on the United States and Europe

Survival
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Spring 2003 —
On the evening of 3 October 1980, a motorbike was parked outside the synagogue on the Rue Copernic in an upscale section of Paris. Several minutes later a bomb packed into the motorbike's saddlebags exploded, killing four passers-by and wounding 11. It was the sixth and most serious attack on a Jewish target within a week. The bombing sparked a protest rally in Paris against anti-Semitism and intensified debate about the influence of the neo-Nazi movement in France, which the authorities blamed for the wave of attacks. In fact, as the investigation would reveal in the coming weeks, Middle Eastern terrorists had perpetrated the wave of bombings. The attack at Rue Copernic was eventually seen as the opening salvo in a long campaign by foreign terrorists whose purpose was to influence French policy in the Middle East. None of the various French intelligence and police agencies had given any warning that such attacks were imminent or even possible. They were, moreover, unable to immediately identify the attacks as coming from foreign terrorists, despite the perpetrators wanting them to know.

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Nearly 20 years later, on 14 December 1999, an Algerian named Ahmed Ressam was arrested on the U.S.-Canadian border with a trunk full of explosives intended for use in an attack on the Los Angeles International Airport. Ressam grew up in Algeria, resided in Canada and plotted attacks against the United States, but despite having few French connections, French authorities knew who Ressam was and what he intended. French anti-terrorism investigators had been tracking Ressam and his associates in Canada for over three years and had repeatedly warned Canadian authorities of Ressam?s intention to carry out terrorist attacks in North America. After his arrest, French investigators were able to provide the FBI with a complete dossier on Ressam and to aid U.S. authorities in identifying his associates, eventually sending an official to testify at his trial.



In short, in 1980, French authorities could not even identify a foreign terrorist attack in the middle of Paris after it had happened. In 1999, they possessed a detailed understanding of a terrorist cell in another country plotting attacks against yet a third country. This striking contrast reflects a more general increase in the French capacity to prevent and fight terrorism, both at home and abroad. Throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s, France was considered a haven for international terrorists, both for those operating in France and those using France as a base for operations elsewhere. By the late 1990s, in contrast, France had scored notable successes in preventing planned terrorist attacks on the World Cup in 1998, against the Strasbourg Cathedral in 2000 and against the American Embassy in Paris 2001.



View Full Article (PDF—198kb).
http://www.brookings.edu/views/articles/fellows/shapiro20030301.pdf

III. Counterterrorism Laws and Procedures in France
The Judicial Preemptive Approach
Over the past 30 years France has relied primarily on the c riminal justice system to combat terrorism. In 1981 the government of President François Mitterrand abolished the State Security Court, a special tribunal that had tried all national security cases since 1963. The court, composed of three civilian judges and two military officers, had conducted its proceedings in secret with no right of appeal. The year after it was abolished, the French parliament modified the Code of Criminal Procedure to enshrine the principle that in times of peace, crimes against the “fundamental interests of the nation†are to be dealt with in the ordinary criminal justice system.10

Although the French preemptive approach is grounded in the ordinary justice system, terrorism investigations and prosecutions are subject to exceptional procedures, and managed by specialized prosecutors and judges. Since the mid-1980s all terrorism cases have been centralized in Paris among specialized prosecutors and investigating judges who work in close cooperation with national intelligence services.

The basic counterterrorism statute, adopted in 1986, fashioned the centralized judicial system for terrorism-related offenses that today defines the French model. Law 86-1020 of September 9, 1986, created a specialized corps of investigating judges and prosecutors based in Paris—the Central Counterterrorism Department of the Prosecution Service, otherwise known as the “14th sectionâ€â€”to handle all terrorism cases. The 1986 law also instituted trials by panels of professional judges for serious terrorism-related felonies in the Court of Assize in Paris, an exception to the rule of trial by jury in these courts.11 The law extended maximum police custody to 96 hours (four days) in terrorism-related cases.12

The centerpiece of the French judicial counterterrorism approach is the broadly defined charge of “criminal association in relation to a terrorist undertaking†(association de malfaiteurs en relation avec une entreprise terroriste). The charge, introduced by Law 96-647 of July 22, 1996, gives the authorities the ability to take preemptive action well before the commission of a crime.

The vast majority of terrorism suspects are detained and prosecuted on this charge. According to government statistics, 300 of the 358 individuals in prison for terrorism offenses in September 2005—both convicted and those awaiting trial—had been charged with association de malfaiteurs in relation to a terrorist undertaking.13

As Christophe Chaboud, the head of the special anti-terrorism unit of the Ministry of Interior stated in mid-October 2005, “Our strategy is one of preventive judicial neutralization. The anti-terrorism laws … put in place in 1986 and 1996 are our strength. We have created the tools to neutralize operational groups before they pass to action.â€14

The offense is defined as “the participation in any group formed or association established with a view to the preparation, marked by one or more material actions, of any of the acts of terrorism provided for under the previous articles.â€15 In most cases, this charge is a minor felony offense tried in the Correctional Court, and is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. A 2006 law made the offense a serious felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison when the cr iminal association was formed with the purpose of preparing attacks on life and physical integrity, as well as abduction, unlawful detention, and hijacking of planes, vessels, or any other means of transport.16 The punishment for being the leader of such a criminal association was raised from 20 to 30 years.17

The 2006 law, which was enacted in response to the July 7, 2005 bombings in London, also increased the maximum period of police custody in terrorism cases to six days under certain conditions.18

Four other major pieces of legislation adopted since 2001 further reinforced counterterrorism measures. These laws broadened police powers to conduct vehicle and building inspections, imposed data retention and disclosure obligations on internet and telecommunications services, required disclosure of encryption codes where necessary in relation to a terrorism investigation, shored up security measures at airports and seaports, increased surveillance measures generally, and instituted new measures to fight financing of terrorism.19

The Criminal Code also lists a series of offenses that are considered acts of terrorism “where they are committed intentionally in connection with an individual or collective undertaking the purpose of which is seriously to disturb the public order through intimidation or terror.â€20 In addition, any criminal offense is subject to a higher sentence when committed in connection with a terrorist purpose. For example, an attack on life, subject to a maximum prison term of 30 years, may give rise to life in p rison if perpetrated in connection to a terrorist act.21


A “flexible†approach
Counterterrorism officials and government authorities cite the lack of a terrorist attack in France since the mid-1990s as proof of the system’s effectiveness. The key to this success, according to many, has been the willingness and ability to adapt criminal laws and procedures to respond to the particular exigencies of the fight against international terrorism. In this view, it is precisely the flexibility of the French criminal justice system that has eliminated the need to resort to extrajudicial or administrative measures in the fight against terrorism. 22

In an interview with Human Rights Watch, Jean-Louis Bruguière, France’s most famous and controversial counterterrorism judge (now retired), compared the French judicial approach favorably to abuses committed by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, and by the United Kingdom, where foreign terrorism suspects were detained indefinitely without charge from 2001 to 2004 until the highest court ruled the measures illegal.23

According to Bruguière,

Every government has an obligation to react to the threat. But the common law system is too rigid, it can’t adapt because its procedural laws are more important than the criminal laws at the base, and the procedure depends on custom so it doesn’t change easily. The civil law system is more flexible because it functions according to laws voted by parliament and can react faster.24

Flexibility and adaptability may be critical elements in an effective counterterrorism strategy, but they must not stretch the rule of law to breaking point. An appropriate criminal justice approach must be based on fundamental procedural guarantees ensuring the right to a fair trial, which are engaged from the outset of a criminal investigation.

Role of the Investigating Judge in Terrorism Cases
The role and power of the specialized counterterrorism investigating judges—referred to by one analyst as “informed, independent and pitiless adversaries of terrorism in all its formsâ€â€”cannot be underestimated.25

There are currently seven investigating judges specialized in terrorism cases.26 Bruguière was the best known among them. He was head of the pool of specialized counterterrorism judges when he stepped down in 2007 after 20 years.27 During his tenure, Bruguière earned a reputation for uncompromising dedication to his work. Known by nicknames such as “sheriff†and “the admiral,†Bruguière claimed in 2004 he had arrested over 500 people in the previous decade.28

The significant authority of the investigating judge in the French system is magnified with respect to terrorism cases. The logic is that a security-cleared, specialized, and experienced judge will, on the basis of all relevant information, including sensitive intelligence material, be able to connect the dots: discern the existence of a terrorist network, even where the material acts demonstrating this existence are limited to common crimes (for example forgery of identity documents) and determine the identities of the members of the network.29

Defense lawyers complain, however, that the way in which judicial investigations in terrorism cases are conducted seriously undermines the right of each defendant to an effective defense.30 This right is a cornerstone of the right to a fair trial. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) stipulate the minimum guarantees necessary to ensure the right to a fair t rial to all persons accused of a criminal offense. These include timely and confidential access to counsel, and adequate time and facilities to prepare the defense. Another key element is respect for the principle of “equality of arms,†which requires that the prosecution and the defense have equal opportunity to prepare and present their cases, including the obligation on the prosecution to disclose all material information.31

Motions denied
Almost all defense attorneys we spoke with complained that investigating judges routinely deny their requests for investigative steps to be undertaken in the course of the judicial investigation.

The experience of Sébastien Bono during his defense of Christian Ganczarski is only slightly extreme: only one of his 24 requests for investigative steps was accepted (an inquiry commission to Saudi Arabia).32 Ganczarski is a German national alleged to be a significant al Qaeda figure. He was arrested in France in June 2003 after being expelled from Saudi Arabia in what his lawyer called a “disguised extradition.†He faces charges before the Paris Court of Assize for involvement in a 2002 suicide attack on a synagogue in Tunisia that left 21 people dead. Among the 23 motions denied was a request by Ganczarski’s lawyer for an actual copy, and not just a transcript, of the tape of a conversation on the morning of the synagogue bombing between Ganczarski and Nizar Naouar, the suicide bomber who carried out the attack.

The lawyer for a young man accused of association de malfaiteurs, who asked not to be identified because the case is still in the judicial investigation phase, said all three motions he has filed thus far have been denied. These included two motions for a joint deposition between defendants, and the extradition of an individual from Algeria whose alleged confession is pivotal in the case against his client.

Also denied were requests for the return of a relatively small amount of money confiscated at the time of client’s arrest (his client is out of jail under judicial supervision after spending over a year in pretrial detention), as well as for the authorization to give a copy of the case file to his client, who was still in pretrial detention at the time. Without such authorization, defense attorneys are not allowed to give copies of any elements of the case file to their clients; they can only show, read or summarize the documents. The investigating judge denied the request on the grounds that there was a risk of his client using the information to pressure others involved in the case.33 The inability to share the case file with the accused has a negative impact on the lawyer’s ability to mount an effective defense, according to this attorney, because “the case file is so big, there are details that we [lawyers] can miss but the client could consider important.â€34 The parliamentary commission that conducted an inquiry into the Outreau Affair recommended that all suspects under judicial investigation, including those in pretrial detention, have an unrestricted right to their case files.35 The requests described here are not technically motions for investigative steps.

As noted above, lawyers can appeal against any decisions by an investigative judge to the Investigating Chamber. The president of the Chamber has the authority to reject the appeal in a reasoned judgment or transmit the appeal for examination by the full chamber; this decision cannot be appealed.36 All of the motions discussed above were rejected by the president of the Chamber.


Unmanageable case files
Defense attorneys argue that the length and complexity of judicial investigations in terrorism cases considerably obstruct their ability to mount an effective defense. As discussed in greater detail below, investigations into Islamist terrorism are often protracted, complicated inquiries into alleged networks of like-minded individuals, leading often to voluminous case files tracing the phone calls, travels, meetings, as well as opinions, of a large number of people. According to lawyer Dominique Tricaud, this means case files built on “an idea, a movement, and not on the accused. And then the defense becomes impossible.â€37 Henri de Beauregard, a court-appointed attorney for one of the defendants in a major terrorism trial involving eight defendants, complained at trial that he had been unable to effectively defend his client:

There are 7.5 meters of case file, 78 volumes … 325 kilos of paper. That represents 541 hours of reading time, in other words three and a half months. The lawyer’s fee for Mr. Charouali [his client] is 450 euro. So when you do the math, I have the right to 75 cents per hour to guarantee his defense. And I didn’t have two to three months to prepare my case like the prosecutor did, but one-and-a-half months. The defense lawyer cannot do his job.38

In mid-2007 De Beauregard filed a complaint against France before the European Court of Human Rights for violation of article 6(1)—the right to a fair t rial—and article 6(3)—right to necessary time and facilities to prepare the defense. At this writing the Court has not made a decision on admissibility of the complaint.

While the investigation is ongoing, lawyers may consult the case file at the Palais de Justice (in cramped conditions), or request paper copies at the expense of the state. But lawyers complained that even if they were to obtain these copies, they wouldn’t have enough room in their offices for the entire case file in the major terrorism investigations. Lawyers are entitled to receive a copy of the entire file on CD-rom once the investigative phase is completed; because electronic copies allow for conducting keyword searches and cross-referencing information with relative ease, access to an electronic copy at an earlier stage would facilitate proper and timely preparation of the defense.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

10 Ibid., art. 702 (as amended by Law No. 82-621 of July 21, 1982). The official English-language translation of the Code of Criminal Procedure is available at www.legifrance.gouv.fr.
11 The Constitutional Court ruled that replacing a popular jury by professional judges in terrorism-related cases was a legitimate means of avoiding pressure and threats. Decision No. 86-213 DC, September 3, 1986.

12 The 96-hour period of police custody is also applicable to drug trafficking and organized crime suspects.

13 The term “association de malfaiteurs†can be used with respect to numerous crimes. In this report, we use it to refer exclusively to the offense of belonging to a criminal association in relation to a terrorist undertaking. This statistic is from the Ministry of Justice, as reported in Piotr Smolar, “Les prisons francaises comptent 358 detenus pour activisme,†Le Monde (Paris), September 9, 2005.

14 Jacky Durant and Patricia Tourancheau, “La menace terroriste contre la France est elevee,†Liberation (Paris), October 18, 2006.

15 Criminal Code (CC), art. 421-2-1.

16 The law stipulates the higher penalty for membership in a group whose purpose is to prepare attacks on persons as listed in article 421-1 (willful attacks on life, willful attacks on the physical integrity of persons, abduction and unlawful detention and also the hijacking of planes, vessels or any other means of transport); attacks with explosives or fire in places and at times where such attacks are likely to cause the death of one or more persons; or the introduction into the atmosphere, the ground, waters, foodstuffs or ingredients of any substance liable to cause the death of one or more persons. Law No. 2006-64 of 23 January 2006 concerning the fight against terrorism and adopting different measures for security and border controls. As of February 2008, no one had yet been charged with association de malfaiteurs as a serious felony offense. See National Assembly, Law Commission Information Report on the implementation of Law No. 2006-64 of 23 January 2006, February 5, 2008.

17 Law No. 2006-64 of January 23, 2006.

18 Ibid.

19 Law No. 2001-1062 of 15 November 2001 concerning everyday security; Law No. 2003-239 of 18 March 2003 for internal security; Law No. 2004-204 of 9 March 2004 adapting justice to the evolution of criminality; and Law No. 2006-64 of 23 January 2006 concerning the fight against terrorism and adopting different measures for security and border controls.

20 CC, art. 421-1. These acts include attacks on life, physical integrity, abductions, hijackings, and theft and stockpiling of explosives. The article was incorporated into the CC in 1996 and was modified in 1998 and again in 2001.

21 CC, art. 421-3.

22 Antoine Garapon, “Is There a French Advantage in the Fight Against Terrorism?†ARI.

23 Human Rights Watch, U.K.: Law Lords Rule Indefinite Detention Breaches Human Rights, December 16, 2004, http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/12/16/uk9890.htm.

24 Human Rights Watch interview with Jean-Louis Bruguière, former investigating judge, Paris, February 26, 2008.

25 Jeremy Shapiro and Bénédicte Suzan, “The French Experience of Counter-Terrorism,†Survival, vol. 45, no.1, Spring 2003, p. 78.

26 There are eight positions in the division of specialized counterterrorism investigating judges; at the time of writing, however, there were only seven active judges. Human Rights Watch interview with Philippe Maitre, counterterrorism prosecutor, Paris, February 27, 2008. The judges tend to further specialize in different types of terrorism (for example, international or Islamist, nationalist or separatist).

27 In early March 2008, the European Commission designated Bruguière to undertake a review of implementation of a cooperation agreement between the European Union and the United States in the fight against financing of terrorism. “EU Review of the United States’ ‘Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme,’†European Commission press release, March 7, 2008, http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference...ge=en&guilanguage=en (accessed March 12, 2008).

28 Craig Whitlock, “French Push Limits in Fight on Terrorism,†Washington Post, November 2, 2004.

29 Shapiro and Suzan, “The French experience of counterterrorism.â€

30 Human Rights Watch interviews with Sébastien Bono, Paris, June 21, 2007, and February 28, 2007; Henri De Beauregard, Paris, July 6, 2007; Fatouma Metmati, December 13, 2007; Bernard Dartevelle, Paris, June 21, 2007; Nicolas Salomon, Paris, July 5, 2007; Sophie Sarre, Paris, July 6, 2007; Antoine Comte, Paris, May 10, 2007; Dominique Tricaud, Paris, December 10, 2007.

31 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), adopted December 16, 1966, G.A. Res. 2200A (XXI), 21 U.N. GAOR Supp. (No. 16) at 52, U.N. Doc. A/6316 (1966), 999 U.N.T.S. 171, entered into force March 23, 1976, ratified by France on November 4, 1980, art. 14; European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR), 213 U.N.T.S. 222, entered into force September 3, 1953, as amended by Protocols Nos 3, 5, 8, and 11 which entered into force on September 21, 1970, December 20, 1971, January 1, 1990, and November 1, 1998, respectively, art. 6. See also European Court of Human Rights judgments: Dombo Beheer B.V. v. the Netherlands, judgment of 27 October 1993, Series A no. 274, p. 19, § 33; Ankerl v. Switzerland, judgment of 23 October 1996, Reports 1996-V, pp. 1567-68, § 38; Ruiz Mateos v. Spain, judgment of 24 June 1993, Series A no. 262, p. 25, § 63; Nideröst-Huber v. Switzerland, judgment of 18 February 1997, Reports 1997-I, p. 108, § 24; and Beer v. Austria, no. 30428/96, § 17, 6.2.2001.

32 Human Rights Watch interview with Sébastien Bono, defense attorney, Paris, February 28, 2008.

33 This procedure is laid out in article 114 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

34 Human Rights Watch interview, defense attorney who requested anonymity, Paris, February 28, 2008.

35 National Assembly, Rapport No. 3125, June 6, 2006, p. 397.

36 CCP, art. 186-1.

37 Human Rights Watch interview with Dominique Tricaud, defense attorney, Paris, December 10, 2007.

38 “Extraits d’un proces antiterroriste des presumes membres de la ‘cellule francaise’ du ‘GICM’ (‘Groupe islamique combattant marocain’) et presumes soutiens financier et logistique aux attentats de Casablanca,†http://paris.indymedia.org/IMG/pdf/doc-46372.pdf (accessed January 28, 2008). Translation by Human Rights Watch.



July 2008
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France: Europe's Counterterrorist Powerhouse Print Mail



By Gary J. Schmitt, Reuel Marc Gerecht
Posted: Thursday, November 1, 2007

EUROPEAN OUTLOOK
AEI Online
Publication Date: November 1, 2007


Click here to view this Outlook as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.

No. 3, November 2007

Counterterrorism, like espionage and covert action, is not a spectator sport. The more a country practices, the better it gets. France has become the most accomplished counterterrorism practitioner in Europe. None of the western European counterterrorism officials we have met with over the last eighteen months would dissent from this view. And while there may be a debate about which European state has had the most experience dealing with terrorism--be it Germany with its Baader-Meinhof Group, Italy with its Red Brigades, Spain with the Basque separatist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or even Great Britain with the Irish Republican Army--there is no question that France has had as much experience with the most virulent, police-resistant forms of modern terrorism as any of them. Whereas September 11, 2001, was a heart-stopping shock to the American counterterrorism establishment--and only slightly less revolutionary for many in Europe--it was not a révolution des mentalités in Paris.

Two waves of terrorist attacks, the first in the mid-1980s and the second in the mid-1990s, have made France acutely aware of both state-supported Middle Eastern terrorism and freelance but organized Islamic extremists. The attacks in 1985 and 1986 were probably Iranian-inspired, carried out as payback for France's military and financial support of Saddam Hussein. The attacks in the 1990s, however, in part an outgrowth of the Algerian civil war, clearly revealed to French security officials that "proper" Frenchmen, les français de souche, could convert to Islam, and that Muslims raised in France could spearhead mass-casualty terrorism.[1]

By comparison, the security services in Great Britain and Germany were slow to awaken to the threat from homegrown radical Muslims.[2] Britain gambled that its multicultural approach to immigrants was superior to France's forced assimilationist model. But with the discovery of one terrorist plot after another being planned by British Muslims, as well as the deadly transportation bombings that took place in London on July 7, 2005, British public and security officials have begun to question the wisdom of their "Londonistan" approach to Muslim integration.[3] Similarly, until recently, officials in Berlin believed that Germany was safe from homegrown Muslim terrorism, but two major bomb plots over the past year and a half--one aimed at German trains, the other at American military personnel, installations, and interests in Germany--have raised serious doubts in the minds of many German security officials about that previous assumption.[4]

French scholars and journalists have also been way ahead of their European and American counterparts in dissecting Islamic extremism and jihadism, and in analyzing the "Zacarias Moussaoui" phenomenon of European-raised Muslim militants and terrorists.[5] And French officials, who work in counterterrorism domestically and overseas, appear to be well aware of this intellectual spade work, often maintaining friendly relationships with scholars and journalists working in the field. The French interior ministry and prison system, for example, were remarkably open and helpful to the renowned Franco-Iranian sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar in his interviews of jailed al Qaeda members. Khosrokhavar's research, which produced the untranslated Quand Al-Qaida parle: Témoignages derrière les barreaux (When al Qaeda Speaks: Testimonies from Behind Bars) is the most insightful look into the mind and manners of highly westernized, Europeanized members of al Qaeda. Nothing in the American literature comes close to dissecting the nature of al Qaeda's westernized elite.[6] Given the distance and stiffness between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and American scholars and journalists, it is unlikely that Khosrokhavar will soon have any American competition.[7]

What sets France apart are its juges d’instruction and their ability to harness the country’s enormous police resources.

The Marsaud Report, issued on November 22, 2005, by a special parliamentary commission charged with examining France's counterterrorism capacities, articulates the general French view of the threat posed by radical Islamic terrorism. It is perhaps the most cogent statement yet by an official European governing organization on why its citizens are inextricably involved in the fight against radical Islamic terrorism and unavoidably tied to the United States.

The absence of Islamist attacks on French soil since 9/11 should not be misinterpreted: it does not signify at all that France has been immunized from such actions, notably because of its position on the Iraq conflict. Elsewhere, we have already indicated that terrorist cells have been taken apart [since 9/11]--cells which were planning attacks on our soil. Further, outside of our national territory, French targets were struck, like the May 8, 2002, attack in Karachi, which killed fourteen, of whom eleven were employees of the DCN [Direction des Constructions Navales, France's major shipbuilder], or the attack against the oil tanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen on October 6, 2002. France is an integral part of Western civilization, a target of radical Islamic terrorists. In this regard, she figures among the potential targets of these terrorists to the same extent as any other Western nation. A member of the international coalition in Afghanistan, where our special forces participate in the hunt of al Qaeda's leaders, France is thus considered an enemy, no matter her position on Iraq. Furthermore, France has been since 1986 on the cutting edge of countering [Middle Eastern] terrorism: her contribution in dismantling networks and her central role in the international counterterrorist effort have made her undeniably an enemy of international terrorist groups. Additionally, France must take into consideration her geographic position and her history. It has been clearly shown that France is the target of choice for the Algerian GSPC [the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat].[8]

After 9/11, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the FBI decided to headquarter America's premier European counterterrorism liaison shop in Paris because they recognized--despite the acrimony arising from the run-up to the Iraq war and the historical coolness between the CIA and French intelligence--that France is the European country most serious about counterterrorism.

French Lessons

It is unclear what practical lessons Americans can draw from the French encounter with Islamic terrorism, given the two countries' different histories of interaction with the Muslim world and the significant differences between the two when it comes to legal systems and the domestic purview of the state. Nonetheless, it is always worth knowing how others do things--especially other democracies--when what they do seems to work.

And one of the things the French do well--and perhaps the hardest thing for Americans to appreciate, let alone adopt--is granting highly intrusive powers to their internal security service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), and to their counterterrorist investigative magistrates (juges d'instruction). The latter institution is the linchpin of France's counterterrorism prowess, allowing the French to combine the powers of prevention, deterrence, and punishment in one individual. This office, created after 1986, has no American parallel and in its powers seems to be unique within Europe. They oversee and often direct the investigative reach of France's myriad police services, especially the intelligence unit of the French national police, the Renseignments Généraux and the DST.[9]

This direction is exercised through a distinctly French combination of administrative statutes and--just as important--informal institutional and personal relations. The juges d'instruction do not have the authority to command the DST, which belongs formally under the authority of the interior minister. But because of the success of such magistrates as Jean-Louis Bruguière and Jean-François Ricard, who proved that they could handle sensitive information collected by a domestic intelligence agency, the DST has essentially formalized its relationship with these magistrates. The juges d'instruction can now direct DST operations and intelligence collection.[10] The political class in Paris, often at odds with the judicial class, has grown comfortable with the independence exercised by these investigative magistrates. A cynic might say that this reflects the political sensitivity of the terrorism portfolio--better that magistrates handle the potential blowback from these cases than elected officials. But it is also an acknowledgement of how effectively and professionally the juges d'instruction have conducted themselves since 1986.

French scholars and journalists have been way ahead of their European and American counterparts in dissecting Islamic extremism and jihadism.

These magistrates and their offices have become the repositories of counterterrorism information in the French government. The advantage over the American system here is significant: counterterrorism personnel at the FBI, Justice Department, CIA, and National Security Council usually rotate out of the terrorism portfolio after a few years. Few could be said to have monitored specific cases and particular Islamist organizations for years on end. Bruguière, France's most famous juge, stayed on the counterterrorism beat for over twenty-five years and could overwhelm his interlocutors with details and insights that come only from long-standing first-hand experience. These magistrates have become, as Jeremy Shapiro and Bénédicte Suzan have pointed out in their incisive evaluation of the juges d'instruction, their own counterterrorism intelligence services.[11]

Observers are struck by the ability of the French to concentrate the combined resources of the state quickly. From the substantial use of wiretaps and other forms of electronic interception to day-and-night physical surveillance and "preventive detention" that can be directed against targets about whom authorities do not have sufficient evidence to seek criminal prosecution, magistrates and their allied police and intelligence services can rapidly monitor, harass, and paralyze those they suspect of terrorist activity. As the French 2006 white paper on domestic security and terrorism states:

To be effective, a judicial system for counterterrorism must combine a preventive element, whose objective is to prevent terrorists from acting, and a repressive element, to punish those who commit attacks as well as their organizers and accomplices. The French system follows this logic. But its originality and strength lie in the fact that the barrier between prevention and punishment is not airtight.[12]

The juges d'instruction have largely demolished this wall.

The French have other important counterterrorism agencies. Foremost among them are the Conseil de Sécurité Intérieure (Internal Security Council), chaired by the French president or his representative, which "defines the orientation for domestic security policy and establishes priorities." The prime minister chairs the Comité Interministériel du Renseignement (Interministerial Intelligence Committee), which brings together all of the ministers involved in counterterrorism. The interior ministry leads the Comité Interministériel de Lutte Antiterroriste (Interministerial Counterterrorist Committee), which coordinates actions at the ministerial level.[13] Most important is the Unité de Coordination de la Lutte Antiterroriste (Counterterrorist Coordination Unit), which was created in 1984 inside the interior ministry. This office collects information supplied by all the other agencies, including the interior ministry, the defense ministry, and the ministry of economy, finance, and industry.[14] As noted by Shapiro and Suzan:

Previously, no single service had specialized in terrorism and thus no one was responsible for assembling a complete picture from the various different institutional sources, for assuring information flows between the various agencies, or for providing coordinated direction to the intelligence and police services for the prevention of terrorism.[15]

None of these organizations and offices is of course uniquely French. We certainly could not conclude that they operate more efficiently than their American counterparts--excepting the greater efficiency one would expect to find in a smaller, highly centralized state. What sets France apart are its juges d'instruction and their ability to harness the country's enormous police resources. These magistrates are also able, because of their singular focus, to keep the counterterrorism apparatus in France operating with an esprit and at a tempo other countries find hard to match, especially as 9/11 recedes into distant memory. The French themselves are not deluded about their capacities: the counterterrorism white paper notes that "the threat now develops almost invisibly and is much more difficult for the intelligence and security agencies to detect."[16] French officials are confident, however, in what the French state, properly focused on an internal enemy, can do.

Looking at the French and American approaches to counterterrorism provides an odd symmetry.

We underscore the power of the French state since so much post-Patriot Act commentary in the United States suggests that enhanced police powers--for example, the sequestration of terrorist suspects without immediate access to attorneys, or the use of wiretapping and physical surveillance that falls far short of "probable cause" of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) standards--are counterproductive to counterterrorism efforts since they corrode our collective trust in the law and are ineffective in any case.[17]

We are uncomfortable with some French counterterrorism practices--such as the government's ability to jail French citizens without sufficient grounds for actually taking them to court--and would not want to see them imported to the United States. Some in France worry that police power, when focused on the Muslim community, can become overbearing and counterproductive.[18] The French national police and the DST are conscious of this concern. We suspect that the presence of Muslim Frenchmen in the police and domestic intelligence services--larger, it appears, than in any other European country--allows French officials to track this concern, as well as deploy a more effective counterterrorism cadre, better able to penetrate police-resistant radical Muslim circles. In any case, anxiety about police intrusiveness still appears to be a minority opinion in France, both among officials and in the wider population.[19]

Transatlantic Parallels

It is worthwhile to mention a critical study of Franco-American counterterrorism relations commissioned by the policy planning staff of the French foreign ministry. Entitled The Counterterrorist Effort in France and the United States: Beyond the Celebration of Our Cooperation, Are There Long-Term Structural Problems?, its critique is pessimistic.[20] France's highly codified legal system, in which the French state enjoys enormous powers of intrusion and coercion, does not resemble the messier U.S. system of separated powers, judicial independence, and presumptive rights held by individuals against the government. The censure in the piece, which likely represents the views of much of the French elite, is more procedural than moral. America's legal and political system, at least under George W. Bush, could not handle such "extralegal" challenges as Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, or warrantless surveillance. According to the authors of the report, the United States got hoisted by its own petard by making the struggle against radical Islamic extremism into a highly politicized, militarily front-loaded "war on terror" that its legal and ethical system could not handle.

We can agree with some of this critique--for example, we do not think the Bush administration effectively thought through the judicial and legal challenges it would encounter as it interrogated and imprisoned members and suspected members of al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other extremist Islamic groups. But the stabilizing genius of American government is its extremely open political system, in which convulsive questions can be asked and debated, and bipartisan consensus can usually be found on serious matters of national security. The Bush administration, reflecting the desire of all presidents to protect executive prerogatives they deem necessary to wage war successfully, got itself into a difficult spot with aspects of the "war on terror" precisely because it did not allow politics to intervene early enough on the thorny--at times gut-wrenching--questions of how to interrogate, imprison, and eliminate "enemy combatants." The French political and legal system does not do debate easily; if allowed, the American system does it sublimely well.

These "procedural" challenges, which torment some of our allies, are unlikely to seriously affect our counterterrorism cooperation with Paris. Throughout the run-up to the Iraq war, which was perhaps the nadir of post-World War II Franco-American relations, counterterrorism cooperation blossomed. In 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy, who openly admires much about the United States and rarely engages in the anti-American cynicism so common among the French intellectual elite, was elected president. Unless he has been hiding his true feelings--something he is not known for doing--Sarkozy does not seem to believe the United States has been ethically deficient since 9/11. We suspect that many in France, especially those in its intelligence and security services, understand the unique challenges the United States confronted after 9/11--the challenges that only a global military power could confront.

In the end, looking at the French and American approaches to counterterrorism provides an odd symmetry. In the case of France, the threat is largely--but not simply--within the confines of its own borders. To meet the threat, the French are willing to give their officials what we would consider extraordinary powers and discretion. In the case of the United States, the terrorist threat comes largely--but not solely--from abroad. To meet that threat, President Bush has used his power as commander in chief to its fullest. And while his political opponents and a few judges criticize the use of that power, for the most part, Americans have not reacted in a manner that suggests that they see a darkening, dangerous shadow over their personal liberties. Similarly, since 1986, when French domestic counterterrorism became much more intrusive--when Judge Bruguière's distinctly un-Anglo-Saxon mission began--France has not gone down the slippery slope into tyranny. France's society, its politics, and many of its laws have actually become much more liberal and open.

As a practical matter, there will always be a trade-off of sorts between citizen liberties and the powers a state needs to fight certain threats. Yet it is the paramount duty of any liberal democracy not only to protect the rights associated with a decent political order, but also to protect the lives of its citizens. Exercising power in the name of security is not necessarily illiberal. And as our examination of the French approach to counterterrorism suggests, the exercise of such power can be considerable indeed. It is a point that some liberal and civil libertarian critics of the Bush administration, who too rarely study what is going on abroad, might do well to remember.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at AEI. Gary J. Schmitt is a resident scholar and director of the Program on Advanced Strategic Studies at AEI.

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Notes

1. Reuel Marc Gerecht, personal conversations with French officials and scholars focusing on Islamic radicalism in France, 1980-2000. For a good discussion of Middle Eastern and Islamic terrorism in France and the official French reaction to it, see Ali Laidi and Ahmed Salam, Le Jihad en Europe, les filières du terrorisme en Europe (Paris: Seuil, 2002). It was the effort by the Algerian-born but thoroughly Gallicized Khaled Kalkal, in particular, to blow a high-speed Paris-Lyon train off its rails in August 1995 that caught Paris's attention.

2. Reuel Marc Gerecht and Gary J. Schmitt, personal conversations with British and German counterterrorism officials, September 26-28, 2007, in London, and March 26-27, 2007, in Berlin.

3. For an excellent account of the British perspective on its homegrown Muslim terrorist threat, see Peter Clarke, "Learning from Experience: Counterterrorism in the UK since 9/11" (Colin Crampton Memorial Lecture, Policy Exchange, London, 2007), available at www.policyexchange.org.uk/images/libimages/260.pdf (accessed October 29, 2007).

4. See Mark Landler, "Bomb Plot Shocks Germans into Antiterrorism Debate," New York Times, August 22, 2006; Craig Whitlock, "Germany Says It Foiled Bomb Plot," Washington Post, September 6, 2007; and Mark Landler, "Germans Weigh Civil Rights and Public Safety," New York Times, July 12, 2007.

5. For an excellent early discussion of Islamist networks in Europe, and France especially, see Antoine Sfeir, Les réseaux d'Allah: Les filières islamistes en France et en Europe (Paris: Plon, 1997). Sfeir's concerns proved prescient. See also Jocelyn Césari, Être musulman en France (Paris: Karthala, 1994); Bruno Étienne, La France et l'islam (Paris: Hachette, 1989); Gilles Kepel, Les Banlieues de l'islam (Paris: Seuil, 1994); and Rémy Leveau and Gilles Kepel, eds., Les Musulmans dans la société française (Paris: Êditions du CNRS, 1988). Zacarias Moussaoui's mother was fourteen when she was married in Morocco. Five years later, Moussaoui's parents moved to France, where he was born. In time, his mother left his father, raising the children herself. According to his family members, no religious education was provided to young Zacarias.

6. Farhad Khosrokhavar, Quand Al-Qaida parle: Témoignages derrière les barreaux (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2006).

7. The position of American detainees is different from those in France, making it more difficult for U.S. officials to grant access to these prisoners. It is not very hard, however, to find European security and intelligence officials who have debriefed Guantanamo detainees in Guantanamo and are willing to discuss their findings privately. U.S. officials are much more sensitive, and official classification on this issue is much greater. Western Europeans--and the French in particular--are more open about discussing terrorism operationally and intellectually than their American counterparts are.

8. Assemblée Nationale, Rapport Marsaud, document number 2681, November 22, 2005, 18-19. Translation by author. GSPC has now associated itself as part of al Qaeda. If one adds up the detainees who have passed through Guantanamo, those that come from Francophone North Africa represent a significant proportion, comparable in number to those who have come from Pakistan, a country four times more populous than Francophone North Africa. In addition, seven French nationals are also known to have been detained in Guantanamo. See John Rosenthal, "The French Path to Jihad," Policy Review, October/November 2006.

9. See Jeremy Shapiro and Bénédicte Suzan, "The French Experience of Counter-terrorism," Survival 45, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 78-85, available at www.brookings.edu/views/articles/fellows/shapiro20030301.pdf (accessed October 29, 2007).

10. Ibid., 78-85.

11. Ibid., 79-84.

12. Dominique De Villepin, Prevailing Against Terrorism: The White Paper on Domestic Security Against Terrorism (Paris: La Documentation Française, 2006), 53. Emphasis added.

13. Ibid., 49.

14. Ibid., 50.

15. Jeremy Shapiro and Bénédicte Suzan, "The French Experience of Counter-terrorism," 77.

16. Dominique De Villepin, Prevailing Against Terrorism: The White Paper on Domestic Security Against Terrorism, 36.

17. For an eloquent defense of this position, see Philip H. Gordon, Winning the Right War: The Path to Security for America and the World (New York: Times Books, 2007).

18. For a thoughtful discussion of backlash among Muslims in France, see International Crisis Group, "La France face à ses musulmans: émeutes, jihadisme, et dépolitisation" [France Facing Its Muslims: Riots, Jihadism, and Depoliticization], Rapport Europe 172, March 9, 2006.

19. For example, in Le Monde, a center-left publication generally considered the French newspaper of record, news reports and editorials infrequently express concern about the intrusiveness of French counterterrorism methods among the country's Muslims. A comparison of Le Monde with the New York Times--in which criticism of the Patriot Act is constant--is striking.

20. Victoire Boccara and Bénédicte Suzan, Lutte antiterroriste en France et aux Etats-Unis: au delà de la celebration de notre coopération, des problèmes structurels de long-terme? (Paris: Centre d'Analyse et de Prévision, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, N/06-079, July 12, 2006).



Related Links

AEI's European Outlook series

Related European Outlook on U.S.-French relations by Reuel Gerecht and Gary Schmitt

Related study on political strategies to counterterrorism by Michael Rubin and Suzanne Gershowitz




AEI Print Index No. 22370

Volume 5, Issue 5 (March 15, 2007) | Download PDF Version


INSIDE THIS ISSUE:

The Danger of Terrorist Black Holes in Southern Africa
Internal Divisions Threaten Kurdish Unity
Malaysia's Role in Thailand's Southern Insurgency
Europe's Emerging Counter-Terrorism Elite: The ATLAS Network


Europe's Emerging Counter-Terrorism Elite: The ATLAS Network

By Ludo Block

Special operation forces, or in police terminology special intervention teams, are an essential asset in any counter-terrorism operation. Their deployment can be needed during a terrorist incident or as a logical follow-up on gathered intelligence with the aim to arrest terrorists and prevent an attack. The need for well-trained intervention units in Europe was first demonstrated during the 1972 Olympics in Munich when Palestinian terrorists kidnapped members of the Israeli Olympic team and the subsequent action to rescue the hostages failed tragically. Following this incident, most European countries created their own counter-terrorism special intervention units that were embedded in either police or military structures. Examples of present-day special intervention units in Europe are the renowned British SAS, French GIGN and German GSG-9 and the lesser-known units like the Austrian COBRA, Danish AKS, Dutch DSI, Estonian K-Commando and Finnish Karhuryhmä. Although the character of global terrorism has changed—broadly speaking from bombings and hijackings to suicide attacks—the need for special interventions has not decreased. On the contrary, contemporary terrorists tend to have little risk-aversion, meaning that specialized intervention is needed more than ever. This can be illustrated by the incident in April 2004 when a Spanish police officer was killed and 11 wounded as the alleged ringleader of the Madrid bombings, Sarhane ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, blew himself up together with three accomplices when the police raided their apartment. There is also the instance in November 2004 when a terrorist suspect threw a hand grenade, wounding three Dutch police officers part of an intervention unit, illustrating the dangers that police face when engaging terrorists.

To reach a high level of professionalism, special intervention units place much emphasis on training and, when possible, the sharing of each other's experiences. Practical experience with counter-terrorism, however, often comes with high prices paid in terms of trial and error. Out of fear that they may lose their "competitive advantage," they are understandably cautious in sharing their special knowledge, expertise or skills. Cooperation between special intervention units is therefore largely based on informal contacts and, above all, on mutual trust. In 1996, the European Union first politically pushed an initiative for cooperation in this field when the EU Council decided to create a directory of specialized counter-terrorist competences, skills and expertise to facilitate cooperation on special interventions between member states. Although it was envisaged that member states would take turns maintaining the director, little was actually done until September 2001. After 9/11, the Council—in an extraordinary meeting following the terrorist attacks—ordered Europol to take responsibility for the directory. At the same Council meeting, the European Police Chiefs were instructed to organize and coordinate cooperation of the special intervention units. This led to the establishment of the "ATLAS network," an informal cooperation structure between special intervention units in the European Union. Its initial goal was to bring each special intervention unit to the highest possible level of professionalism through intense structural mutual cooperation [1].

The first meeting of the heads of the intervention units took place in October 2001, and the ATLAS network currently regroups more than 30 counter-terrorist special intervention units based in the police, gendarmerie and armed forces of the EU member states and the non-EU member Norway [2]. The little known network is, however, not formally institutionalized in any EU framework. Only in November 2005, based on a short European Commission press briefing, was there any public media coverage of the ATLAS network, revealing its name and existence [3]. In January 2006, the EU counter-terrorism coordinator in a public speech briefly mentioned the ATLAS network and its possible usage in case of hostage situations and other emergencies requiring cross-border assistance [4].

Meanwhile, cooperation between the units in the network has been enhanced on various terrains. European funds were freed for setting up an operative database to act as a library on completed operations and as support for acquisitions of common special equipment, as well as for setting up an expert group on equipment and technologies [5]. Europol was tasked with providing the units secure means of communication and in 2005 personnel from each unit in the ATLAS network was instructed in the use of Europol's secure communication platform, "EurOPs" [6].

Joint counter-terrorism exercises as well as seminars, studies and the exchange of materials between the special intervention units in various formations have in the past six years been organized on a regular basis. Examples include a four-day international exercise in 2003 in Germany to increase competencies to handle assault and hostage taking from boats and a large-scale exercise in 2004 in the harbor of Rotterdam. Joint studies on improvement of operational procedures and techniques that have been conducted include a joint study in Spain of the effect of explosives on different types of doors to improve accessing techniques and a study and exercises in Italy of forced entry into high-speed trains [6].

According to a study of the Swedish National Defense College, the advantages of ATLAS cooperation for small countries like the Nordic states are many, ranging from joint exercises that offer possibilities to test special equipment to the possibility of exchanging experiences from demanding incidents face-to-face [7]. Meanwhile, access to alternate training situations is an asset of interest to all units in the network. The need for training cannot be emphasized enough as was sadly demonstrated recently when a French GIGN member was killed and two others seriously wounded during a seemingly routine arrest of a mentally ill person who was shooting at the police with a shotgun (Le Monde, January 20).

Although the current primary aim of the ATLAS network is mutual training to a common standard, it is foreseen that the cooperation could expand to an operational level. Plans for organizing assistance possibilities from neighboring countries have been considered from the inception of the network. Operational cooperation, however, is still somewhat of a sensitive issue. Governments are reluctant to give permission for deployment of "foreign" police or military on their sovereign territory especially when this by definition entails the possible use of deadly force. Nevertheless, in the elaboration of the 2004 EU multi-annual strategic plan on police and judicial cooperation—the so-called Hague Program—development of a legal framework for operational cooperation in special interventions was explicitly included [8].

In October 2004, the European Police Chiefs attended the ATLAS exercise at the harbor of Rotterdam and discussed the question of the appropriate legislative framework if such an operation should ever take place in reality. The idea of a formal legal framework to regulate cooperation between special intervention units, however, did not receive a warm welcome from the units themselves. They preferred a less formal approach that allows the network to draw up its internal rules, procedures and organizational arrangements [9]. From a professional perspective, the preference of the units for informal cooperation with little public exposure is understandable. Nonetheless, in the current European political landscape it would be naïve to assume that operational assistance could be rendered on the same informal basis as combined training and exchange of experience. Furthermore, since no member state can pretend that it has the capacity to deal with all kinds of large-scale situations that require a special intervention, the possibility of a request for actual operational assistance from one of the EU member states is far from hypothetical.

A further discussion on a possible legal framework for special interventions in the European Union started in 2005 and issues discussed included the scope of cooperation (the definition of crisis, type of assistance to be rendered), civil and penal responsibility, the decision-making process (chain of command during operations), working procedures and financial issues [10]. As such discussions in the EU policy-making process usually take some time, the six largest European states agreed in March 2006 as an interim solution on developing joint support teams to offer operational assistance in case of serious terrorist attacks. These expert teams or liaison officers could provide on-site support to an attacked country upon its request [11].

In December 2006, Austria presented a concrete draft of a legal framework for cooperation between the special intervention units in crisis situations [12]. The envisaged framework lays down general rules and conditions to allow for special intervention units of one member state to provide assistance and/or actual operational deployment on the territory of another member state. The most essential issues covered by the proposed framework are those regarding the chain of command and civil and penal liability, while further organizational and operational details are left to the professionals involved.

Already, the ATLAS network fulfills an important role in European counter-terrorism capabilities by enhancing mutual trust and reaching common standards between the intervention units and by further professionalizing counter-terrorist intervention techniques. With the proposed legal framework, actual deployment of special intervention units from each European country across Europe becomes possible. This would further enhance the role of the ATLAS network, which is a much needed step in the development of a common European special intervention capacity.

Notes

1. Conclusions adopted by the JHA Council (12156/01), Brussels, September 20, 2001.
2. Combating Terrorism in Nordic Countries: A Comparative Study of the Military's Role, Swedish National Defense College, 2003.
3. European Broadcasting Service, November 29, 2005, item reference: I-049865en.
4. Presentation by Gijs de Vries, EU counter-terrorism coordinator, at a seminar of the Center for European Reform in Brussels, January 19, 2006.
5. Amendments submitted to the meeting of the European Parliament Committee on Budgets of 4, 5 and 6, October 2005.
6. AGIS project descriptions and evaluations 2003, 2004, 2005.
7. Combating Terrorism in Nordic Countries: A Comparative Study of the Military's Role.
8. Council and Commission Action Plan Implementing The Hague Program Strengthening Freedom, Security and Justice in the European Union, Brussels, June 10, 2005.
9. Conclusions on the 10th meeting of the Police Chiefs Task Force, October 11-12, 2004.
10. Discussion document on a normative framework for "ATLAS" (8434/05), Brussels, April 25, 2005.
11. Conclusions of the meeting of the interior ministers of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom, Heiligendamm, March 22-23, 2006.
12. Official Journal of the European Union, C321, December 29, 2006

Getting it Right: Understanding Effective Counter-Terrorism Strategies

Abstract:


The scale of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, encourages scholars and policy-makers to narrowly focus their attention on these events and ignore the long and even more devastating history of terrorism. Terrorism is not a new problem; over the past three decades, democratic governments accumulated significant experience dealing with terrorism, and scholars can assess the effectiveness of these policies and their impact on the fabric of democracy. I test whether specific counter-terrorism strategies are more effective against particular types of terrorism (the five most commonly identified are religious, ethno-nationalist, left-wing, right-wing and single issue). I address the question of whether or not we can draw some general conclusions about effective counter-terrorism policies by examining these other governments? experiences, in particular those of the United Kingdom, Spain, France, and Italy. Creating an effective counter-terrorism strategy need not be akin to re-inventing the wheel; I highlight some successes and failures and find that democracies can succeed in reducing terrorism to manageable proportions without betraying the values that set them apart from other political systems. The cases demonstrate several important lessons, including: the value of treating terrorists as ordinary criminals; the importance of a coordinated response incorporating local, state, and national assets; the benefits of international and regional cooperation; and the necessity of a precise legal definition of terrorism. The cases also highlight the dangers of over-reacting to successful terrorist attacks and the problems associated with sweeping reorganizations of security and intelligence agencies responsible for counter-terrorism.

The French Were Right
By Paul Starobin, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Nov. 7, 2003

Let's just say this at the start, since this is the beginning, not the end, of the discussion about how to grapple with the post-9/11 world (and because it's the grown-up, big-man thing to do): The French were right. Let's say it again: The French -- yes, those "cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys," as their detractors in the United States so pungently called them -- were right.

Jacques Chirac and his camp, shaped by the Algerian war and their own recent lessons in fighting terrorism, correctly predicted the consequences of invading Iraq.

"Be careful!" That was the exclamation-point warning French President Jacques Rene Chirac sent to "my American friends" in a March 16 interview on CNN, just before the Pentagon began its invasion of Iraq. "Think twice before you do something which is not necessary and may be very dangerous," Chirac advised. And this was not some last-minute heads-up, but the culmination of a full-brief argument that the French advanced against the perils of a U.S.-led intervention, pressed over months at the United Nations in New York and at meetings in Paris, Prague, and Washington. There were, of course, other war critics in Europe and elsewhere, but nobody presented the arguments more insistently or comprehensively than did the French, God bless 'em.


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Polling On Iraq
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Insider Interview: John Zogby On Iraqi Public Opinion
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National Journal Social Studies Column: Bush Is No Cowboy. But If He Were, It Wouldn't Matter
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U.S. Military Deaths In "Operation Iraqi Freedom"
Additional Information
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Chirac's CNN Interview
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Rumsfeld's Oct. 16 Leaked Memo On Iraqi Progress
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Address To U.S. Institute Of Peace By French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte
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American Enterprise Institute's Study On Public Opinion Of America And The War On Terrorism
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Zogby Poll On Iraqi Public Opinion
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Brookings Institution's Article: "The French's Experience of Counter-terrorism"
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Ambassador Djerejian's Report On America's Image In The Arab World
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History Of French-American Relations




But the Americans, or at least the Bush administration, paid no heed to the French warnings, which were not simply that war was a bad idea, but that an invasion's consequences could be harmful to Western interests and to the larger war on terror. And now the administration is finding itself in an increasingly unhappy situation in Iraq, with its 130,000-strong contingent there the target of a sophisticated and lethal guerrilla campaign waged by foreign Islamic fighters and Saddam Hussein loyalists. Back home, a majority of the American public is opposed to Congress's backing of the president's request for $87 billion for military and reconstruction needs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the White House strains to explain the failure, so far, to find weapons of mass destruction, whose supposed presence in the country, after all, was a prime rationale for the war. Even avid war proponents concede that the United States is in for "a long, hard slog" in Iraq, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a recently leaked memo. America, in short, is at risk of getting trapped in a hell of its own making. Leave it to a philosopher on the Seine to anticipate this sort of predicament. The Left Bank existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre called his 1944 play, on the suffering that human beings tend to visit on themselves, No Exit.

In blame-game Washington, critics are asking how the administration got into this mess, and why its forecasts of the war's aftermath were so mistaken. But perhaps the most helpful question is not "Why the Administration Was Wrong," but rather, "How the French Managed to Get It Right." To ask how the Bush camp got offtrack is to pose a car-wreck type of question, and all such inquiries tend to be disfigured by partisan, factional enmity. But to ask why the French were right is to put the matter in a more positive, constructive vein. And the question has a ripe urgency, worth pursuing not as a matter of assigning historical bragging rights but as an aid to a necessary rethinking of the Iraq campaign that the administration, albeit in a fitful, truculent mood, has in any event already begun, with its recent plea for help from the United Nations and other countries, France included, and its stepped-up efforts to put more Iraqis in charge of security.

Hold on. Were the French really right? After all, Iraq is not a finished matter. What looks like a mess today may yet get sorted out. Most supporters of the war continue to believe it was justified, despite the problems it has caused. Nevertheless, at this juncture, it is plain that the French, and in particular Chirac and his advisers, had a certain analytical purchase on the situation that the Bush administration lacked.

The French made three basic claims -- all countered, in varying degrees of intensity, by the administration. The first was that the threat posed by Saddam was not imminent, and that's borne out by all available evidence, not least the latest report by Bush-appointed arms inspector David Kay, in which he stated that no weapons of mass destruction had been found. The second claim was that democracy-building in Iraq was going to be a lengthy, difficult, bloody process -- with the Iraqi population very likely to view the Americans as occupiers, not liberators. Quite apart from the spate of attacks on U.S. soldiers by various fanatics, this claim is borne out by polls showing that a majority of Iraqis would like the United States to leave. And third, the French correctly predicted that the Muslim world would perceive a U.S.-led intervention lacking the explicit blessing of the United Nations as illegitimate -- and thus would incite even greater anger toward America.

"A war in Iraq could trigger more frustration, bitterness, in the Arab world and beyond, in the Muslim world," Jean-David Levitte, French ambassador to the U.S., warned in remarks on February 7 at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington. Touche. "Hostility toward America has reached shocking levels," an administration-appointed panel, headed by a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, Edward Djerejian, recently reported on post-invasion attitudes in the Muslim world.

Still seething over the French prewar position on Iraq, administration officials are hardly of a mind to bestow awards on the French for prescience. The Democrats, many of whom supported the war, would have no political gain in citing the unpopular French as role models for their thinking, even if the statements now made by the party's leaders in Congress and its presidential candidates so closely resemble prewar French comments. ("The war was an unnecessary war," retired Gen. Wesley Clark pronounced, a la Chirac, on October 9.)

As for the administration, even Secretary of State Colin Powell, a relative moderate, still gets huffy at the mention of the French. "We were right, they were wrong, and I am here," a Powell aide, in an interview with The New York Times, quoted his boss as saying at a September meeting with Iraqi officials in Baghdad.

U.S. media presentations of the French arguments have been on a similar plane. The "cheese-eatin'" tag (would that be Brie or Roquefort?) derives from an eight-year-old episode of the animated television show The Simpsons, in which a reluctant teacher of French greets his elementary-school charges with the rousing salutation "Bonjour, ye cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys!" It fell to a pop-culturally informed conservative polemicist, National Review scribe Jonah Goldberg, to revive and popularize the insult in the prewar name-calling. The New York Post is still calling the French "weasels."

From the tenor of the discussion, in Washington and the hinterlands, you might think that the Elysee Palace opposes by reflex whatever the White House says. But the French are only selectively stubborn. France was the only country, other than the United States, to conduct air strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan, with their Mirage jets and Super Etenard fighters hitting more than 30 targets during Operation Anaconda in March 2002. The French enthusiastically backed the Afghanistan war, breaking with Washington only on the Iraq question.

No more persuasive is the widely voiced (in the U.S.) argument that the French were defending wide-reaching and profitable commercial relationships with Saddam's regime. The truth is that France enjoyed minor economic ties with Saddam. Under the United Nations' now-defunct Oil for Food program with Saddam's Iraq, the French were only the 13th-largest participant. The U.S. under that program bought more than 50 percent of Iraq's total oil exports, the French 8 percent.

So the answer to the question of why the French were right has to begin with an admission that their intransigence cannot be dismissed as a knee-jerk impulse or narrowly self-interested plank. Au contraire. What divided the two longtime allies -- each of which has been a beacon for liberal Western values over the past two centuries -- was a deep analytical chasm. An understanding of how the French got to the place they got to and stubbornly clung to, even as relations with Washington badly deteriorated, requires a probe of the substance and roots of the French position.

That may not sound like much fun. Even though they deny it, the French are already gloating that their much-maligned prewar forecast has proved to be on target. But here's the good news -- and it really is very good news. One big reason the French were right is that they were thinking along the lines that Americans are generally apt to think -- that is, in a cautious, pragmatic way, informed by their own particular trial-and-error experience, in this case as an occupier forced out of Algeria and as a front-line battler, long before 9/11, against global Islamic terrorist groups.

The Bush administration, by contrast, approached Iraq the way the French are often thought to approach large world problems -- with a grandiose sweep of the theoretical hand, a tack exemplified by the big-ideas neoconservative crowd, whose own thinking, ironically, draws on European political philosophy. So as the administration rethinks Iraq, the way back to a sound position may lie at home, in the great but neglected tradition of American Pragmatism. And then everyone can forget about the French.

The Prism: Algeria
A pragmatic approach starts with memory -- with the ability to distill lessons from analogous past experiences. That can be a tricky business. American critics of the war, particularly those on the left, cited Vietnam as a cautionary parallel. Perhaps that is apt, since the Vietnam conflict did involve a clash of civilizations, and the U.S. never fully understood the alien social and political milieu in which its forces were operating.

But Vietnam is not a Muslim or Middle Eastern country, and it was a Cold War theater, in which both the Soviet Union and China assisted anti-U.S. guerrilla bands. There is only one Western country with an intimate, bloody, and recent experience of what it is like to be an occupying power in an Arab land, facing an Islamic insurgency. That country is France, which granted independence to Algeria in 1963 after failing to subdue an eight-year-long rebellion by cold-blooded assassins who didn't blanch at bombing Algiers nightclubs frequented by French teenagers.

The memory remains etched into the French political consciousness. No event since the Second World War is a heavier or more painful burden for France than is the Algerian uprising. Algeria, on the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, had a much closer connection to France than Vietnam ever did to the United States. During the 132 years of French rule, starting in the 1830s, Algeria was, in legal, constitutional terms, an annexed section of France, not a colony. The Algerian uprising, with its demand for independence, destroyed the fourth French Republic by precipitating a coup attempt by the French military against civilian political leaders viewed as feckless. It also established itself as the central prism through which the French political elite came to view the Muslim world in general and the forces of Arab nationalism and Islamic militancy in particular.

And even more than that, Algeria forced France to re-examine its political, economic, and cultural relations with the entire non-Western portion of humanity. Algeria contained the lesson of a classic "failure," the British historian Alistair Horne wrote in A Savage War of Peace, his definitive 1977 account of the conflict; he called it "the failure either to meet, or even comprehend, the aspirations of the Third World."

The Islamic world, as the most immediately problematic for the French, received France's priority attention. In the United States, it was only with 9/11 that beginning a dialogue with the Muslim community came to seem urgent, but the French, because of Algeria, had embarked on this road decades before. "The U.S. is still a bit virginal in its relationship with the Islamic part of the world," notes Simon Serfaty, a Frenchman born 60 years ago in colonial Morocco, who is an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "The French know this part of the world better."

The Algerian uprising certainly made a powerful impression on a young man destined for France's highest political office: Jacques Chirac. Conscripted in 1956, at the age of 23, to serve as an officer in the French army, Chirac commanded a platoon in an isolated mountainous region of Algeria. The mission was to keep order. But order proved impossible to keep, with the local population protective of the fellaghas, the armed resistance fighters from the Fronte de Liberation Nationale (FLN). Chirac himself was not wounded in engagements with the guerrillas, but some of his men were, and some were killed. In a speech to the French Military Academy in 1996, he called his time there the most important formative experience of his life.

According to an old friend and adviser, Algeria principally taught Chirac that occupation, even under the best of intentions, is impossible when popular sentiments have turned against the occupier: "His experience is that despite all the goodwill, when you are an occupier, when you are seen [by the local people] as an occupier, the people will want you to get out." And if Chirac was convinced of anything, according to this source, it was that the Americans would ultimately be viewed not as liberators in Iraq but as occupiers. He foresaw a kind of re-enactment of the Algerian tragedy, the source adds, a "vicious circle" in which increasingly violent acts against the occupier are met with an increasingly harsh response -- a cycle that inevitably sours local people against the occupation.

As the French side tells it, this perspective was at the heart of a disagreement between Chirac and Bush at a private talk late last November in Prague, where U.S. and European leaders were gathered to discuss enlarging NATO. (Although the pair talked on the telephone, this was their main exchange before the war started six months later.) According to a senior French official who reviewed a French handwritten transcript of the meeting, Chirac talked not about the risks of the major combat phase of a military campaign, which the French expected to go quickly, but about the perils of the postwar phase, in particular the dangers of underestimating the force of Arab nationalism and the prevalence of violence in a country that had never known democracy. According to the French source, Bush replied that he expected postwar armed resistance from elements connected to Saddam's Baathist regime -- but thought it unlikely that the population as a whole would come to see the U.S. as occupiers. And Chirac, according to the source, told Bush that history would decide who was right. The White House recently declined to comment on the meeting.

Seven months after Saddam's toppling, the struggle for the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqi people goes on. But a survey of Iraqi public opinion, done in August for the American Enterprise Institute by pollster John Zogby, tends to confirm Chirac's instinct. Yes, the poll found that on the whole, Iraqis were very glad to be rid of Saddam; 70 percent said they expected Iraq to be "much better" or "somewhat better" in five years. That was the finding the administration and AEI highlighted. But asked whether America and Britain should help make sure a representative government is set up in Iraq or just let Iraqis work this out themselves, 60 percent responded "Iraqis alone." Asked whether the U.S. over the next five years would help or hurt Iraq, 36 percent said "help" and 50 percent said "hurt." In an interview on the poll's results, Zogby said: "The results are not good, from the perspective of the Bush administration. Something is not working, and there is plenty of polling evidence to show that something is not working." He continued: "The Americans misread the situation. They honestly thought the Iraqis were going to be welcoming them."

Traumatic experiences can be distorting, but the French fixation on Algeria, if that's what it is, seems appropriate. The uprising was not just a defeat for an aging, corrupt imperial power. It was also an awakening experience for such coming-of-age insurgents as Yasir Arafat and a forerunner of Islamic militants' decision to use terror to achieve broad political objectives. The conflict introduced the French to the same kind of deadly enemy that U.S. forces now find themselves battling in the streets of Baghdad. Better late than never, the Pentagon in September arranged for senior Special Forces officers a screening of The Battle of Algiers, the 1966 film showing how crack French paratroopers rolled up terrorist cells in the Algerian capital, in one of France's few clear-cut victories in that war. The message is twofold. On the one hand, the paratroopers forced the FLN to abandon the campaign in the capital. But the insurgency itself was not extinguished -- and eventually, it was the unremitting toll of French casualties and a public backlash in France against the army's harsh tactics against the Algerian population that caused the French to cut and run.

If an Iraqi version of the Algerian drama were to continue playing out, then the final act would be an abrupt, poorly planned pullout by a politically pressured Washington. Noting the growing domestic outcry over U.S. casualties in Iraq -- which, at 379 killed as of November 4, are quite small according to the historical standards of armed conflict -- the French believe this may well happen, despite Bush's vow to stay the course until Iraq is stable and democratic. And the result, Paris worries, would be a giant mess on Europe's doorstep. At this stage, "the worst-case scenario for us would be for [the U.S.] to leave," Levitte said in a recent interview at his Georgetown quarters. "If you want to build democracy in Iraq, you must be prepared to pay a price."

From Appeasement To Afghanistan
So the French are not virgins when it comes to occupations. Nor are they virgins when it comes to countering international terrorism. They left Algeria feeling humiliated and somewhat cowed. In their first stab at constructing a policy to deal with the strange new threat of Islamic terrorism, the French adopted a policy of appeasement -- an approach that included tacit permission for globally oriented terrorist groups to use French soil as a base, so long as the groups did not make France itself a target. Not surprisingly, France became a haven for international terrorists. But several decades later, Paris possessed counter-terrorism capabilities, oriented toward preventing attacks, second to none in the Western world in effectiveness. And French Mirages were dropping bombs on Afghanistan.

Behind this turnaround is a story of how the French learned what works in the struggle against Islamic terrorism. Along with Algeria, this learning experience powerfully shaped the French perspective on the post-9/11 world, and it helps explain why the French felt so strongly that Iraq was a secondary priority in the struggle against terrorism.

One of the few in Washington who has done a careful parsing of the French experience in counter-terrorism is an unassuming former Rand analyst, Jeremy Shapiro, who these days hangs his hat at the Brookings Institution as a research associate in the think tank's center on the United States and France. A 1989 Harvard graduate who's fluent in French, Shapiro has cultivated contacts among counter-terrorist experts at law enforcement agencies in both Paris and Washington. For obscure policy journals, he's been writing such pieces as "The U.S. Can Learn From the French in the War Against Terrorism."

In an interview at his cramped Brookings quarters, Shapiro right away warmed to the topic. "The French were among the first to note that terrorism was a global movement," he said. But before they came to this realization, they floundered. In the 1980s, a wave of bombings struck Paris targets, including department stores and subways. Not only were the French unable to prevent these attacks, they were also clueless about the perpetrators and motives. At first they thought that domestic neo-Nazi militants were behind an assault on a synagogue in a wealthy section of Paris. Only belatedly did they realize that responsibility lay with terrorists from the Middle East.

The French had descended to this low point through their adoption of what Shapiro calls the "sanctuary doctrine" -- a morally repugnant effort to isolate France from international terrorism by taking a neutral stance toward global terrorist groups. The idea was to give the terrorists no reason to attack France. (Better they hit someone else.)

It didn't work. Other countries actively battling terrorism, such as Spain and Israel, were understandably outraged that France was sheltering their enemies. Some splinter terrorist bands failed to recognize France as a "sanctuary" and targeted French interests anyway. And amid the Paris attacks, the French public demanded a get-tough approach.

As a result, French counter-terrorism policy evolved to its current emphasis on suppression and prevention. The key to this policy is what Shapiro calls the "Alan Greenspan" choice. In effect, France decided to de-politicize the anti-terrorism battle. "The French treat terrorism like we treat central banking -- as too serious to be left to the politicians," Shapiro says. At the heart of the French system is a group of Paris-based magistrates with sweeping investigative powers of the sort that a John Ashcroft would die for. Through the expertise accumulated over numerous investigations, the magistrates managed to burrow deeply into the roots of global Islamic terrorist networks and thus gain information on attacks even as they were being plotted.

The results are impressive -- and have helped protect not just the French but Americans, too. Shapiro's textbook example is the apprehension of terrorist Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested at the U.S.-Canadian border in December 1999 with a trunk full of explosives he planned to use to attack Los Angeles International Airport. Even though he had few connections to France, French anti-terrorism officials had been tracking Ressam for more than three years and had repeatedly warned Canadian authorities of his plans to attack North American targets. The French provided the FBI with a full dossier on Ressam, helped U.S. officials identify his associates, and sent an expert to testify at Ressam's trial, at which he was convicted.

In this context, the French response to 9/11 represented a final repudiation of the sanctuary doctrine. The notion that France could somehow hide from terrorism was replaced by a newfound sense of solidarity, all the more startling given the anti-Americanism that had long been a staple of French politics. "We Are All Americans" -- "Nous Sommes Tous Americains" -- the front page of Le Monde declared on September 13, 2001. And with Levitte at the helm of the U.N. Security Council (his assignment before he took up residence in Washington as the French ambassador), that body, for the first time in its history, declared that an act of terrorism was equivalent to an act of war. It was with that legal predicate that France joined the U.S. in the campaign to topple the Taliban.

Iraq: A Question Of Legitimacy
Unity, of course, proved short-lived, as the real possibility of a war in Iraq came into focus in the fall of 2002. France's clear priority was a continued focus on Al Qaeda and related networks -- and the pursuit of what they viewed as unfinished business in the campaign against Taliban and other Islamic fighters regrouping in Afghanistan and Pakistan. French citizens were themselves directly under attack -- a Qaeda bomb had killed 11 French engineers at the Sheraton Hotel in Karachi. "This is the main threat," Levitte said in a briefing at the European Institute, a Washington think tank, on January 29. Based on its own knowledge of Al Qaeda and related Islamic networks, the French saw nothing to connect Saddam's regime with Osama bin Laden and company. In December 2002, French authorities arrested a dozen North African Arabs who had links to Al Qaeda and were plotting to attack targets in Paris. French authorities suspected links between Al Qaeda and Chechen rebels, but not between Al Qaeda and Baghdad, French officials stated publicly at that time.

Still, the French did not rule out the use of force in Iraq. Rather, French opposition to a U.S.-initiated strike on Iraq centered on the question of legitimacy. On whose authority, they asked, could military force justifiably be used? This is an old tug-of-war between the two countries, going back to the early days of the Cold War, but Iraq elevated this disagreement to a new level of antagonism. The French reject the idea of American Exceptionalism -- a venerable fixture of the U.S. political psyche and staple of presidential speeches. American Exceptionalism is the notion that the United States has a unique crusader role to play in advancing freedom in the world, and can accomplish this mission not only because of its immense military power but also because of the compelling example it has set in creating a dynamic, democratic society at home.

The French, who after their anti-monarchical revolution in the 18th century staked a similar claim to a liberal, torch-bearing Exceptionalism, don't accept any of this. They insist that legitimacy, particularly with respect to the use of force, resides exclusively in the institutions of the "international community," namely the U.N. Security Council. "I am totally against unilateralism in the modern world," Chirac told The New York Times in a September 8, 2002, interview.

To a grated-on U.S. ear, this may sound like nothing more than the usual French rant against the United States as the world's hyperpuissance, or hyperpower. And, of course, the French, in arguing for a decisive role for the U.N. Security Council, are seeking to preserve an important role for themselves as one of the five permanent, veto-wielding members of that body. Nonetheless, it is also possible to believe that the French have a better practical fix on how the world sees America -- and multilateral institutions such as the U.N. -- than the Americans themselves have. American Exceptionalism works only when foreigners buy into it. If they don't, then the U.S. insistence on having its way truly does amount to bullying. And in this regard, world public opinion, loudly and clearly, seems to be saying, "I'll take the U.N." For example, in Iraq itself, while a majority of Iraqis in Zogby's recent poll said they thought the U.S. would "hurt," not "help," Iraq over the next five years, the same question about the U.N. drew an opposite response, with 50 percent saying it would "help" Iraq and just 19 percent saying "hurt."

Polling in the broader Muslim world underscores what, to advocates of American Exceptionalism, can only seem contradictory. On the one hand, the U.S. intervention in Iraq significantly inflamed Muslim opinion. A June survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that anti-American attitudes had spread from the Middle East to Islamic countries such as Indonesia, where favorable ratings for the U.S. had plunged from 61 percent to 15 percent over the course of 12 months. The survey also found that majorities in leading Muslim countries were worried about the U.S. as a potential military threat. Yet the Pew team also found that large majorities in most Islamic countries aspired to Western-style democracy. The Muslim world seems to like the product the U.S. is selling -- but not the salesman. They'd prefer to get the product from another store, and they seem to think the U.N. is that store.

All of which, of course, is what the French have been arguing -- at a higher decibel level than anyone else. "The French sometimes say out loud what others are thinking," says Charles William Maynes, president of the Eurasia Foundation in Washington. And this has long driven Washington nuts. Maynes remembers from his days as a Foreign Service officer for the State Department in the 1960s that it was "very difficult to get a rational discussion" within the department about France or India. "I decided that that was because they were democratic countries that had an independent policy and their own view of the world."

Pragmatism, Anyone?
Let's review. The French got it right in Iraq for three basic reasons. First, the French, by virtue of their own experience, had the best of all prisms with which to view the Iraq showdown: Algeria. Second, the French, because of the improvements they had made in their counter-terrorism efforts, were in a position to make their own independent determination of the threat posed by Al Qaeda and related groups versus the threat posed by Saddam's regime. And third, the French possessed good antennae; they had a clear reading of world, and in particular Muslim, public opinion on whether a U.S.-led intervention would be viewed as legitimate. They were better listeners than the Americans were.

In its exasperation with the French, Washington says it is Paris that has become lost in languid abstractions. "It's easy to toss out nice theories about sovereignty, and occupation, and liberation, and all that," Colin Powell complained to reporters on his plane last month after a round of inconclusive talks with the French on an expanded U.N. role in Iraq.

But he's picking on the French for the wrong reason. The Bush camp had run up against Jacques Chirac -- a stubborn 70-year-old man. Not even his friends regard him as a conceptual thinker or grand strategist. He's prone not to airy theorizing but to condescension. On the Iraq matter, he revealed his sense of superiority over Bush, a man 14 years his junior who entered the White House without a track record in foreign affairs. (Chirac has a higher estimation of Bush's father, a multilateralist who fought in World War II and headed the CIA before becoming president.) That final "Be careful!" warning was preceded by a vintage -- which is to say, patronizing -- Chirac pronouncement: "Personally, I have some experience of international political life."

It's very hard to know what to do about something if you haven't been there before. That's when the temptation to adopt a guiding theoretical framework to make sense of an unfamiliar and threatening landscape can become seductive. It may be too early for a conclusive verdict on the biggest of the big ideas that the neocons around Bush have offered -- the idea that a regime change in Iraq can spur a democratic transformation of the authoritarian political culture of the entire Arab Middle East. But that idea most certainly belongs in the category of untested hypothesis.

The neocons are not experts on the Middle East. One of their prime intellectual influences is an abstruse political philosopher, Leo Strauss, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany whose students at the University of Chicago included Paul Wolfowitz, now serving as Bush's deputy secretary of Defense and the administration's leading proponent of using Iraq as a laboratory for democratic nation building in the region. Straussians tend to believe in the ability of intellectual elites -- modern-day philosopher-kings -- to discern truths unavailable to lesser minds. "It's a European style of getting the peasants to do what 'we' say," said James Pinkerton, a critic of the Iraq intervention who worked in the Bush I White House.

Even if America can't tap a particular memory to deal with the post-9/11 world, it does have available to it that old and poignant tradition of American pragmatism. And it is a poignant tradition. Modern American Pragmatism, as the American critic Louis Menand tells the story in his Pulitzer-Prize winning book, The Metaphysical Club, was hatched after the Civil War as a kind of antidote to overly ideological and moralistic views of the world. The pragmatists came to their new lights as a result of their own hard, tragic experiences. Of Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the movement's charter thinkers, Menand writes: "He had gone off to fight because of his moral beliefs, which he held with singular fervor. The war did more than make him lose those beliefs. It made him lose his belief in beliefs. It impressed on his mind, in the most graphic and indelible way, a certain idea about the limits of ideas."

There is a danger in this line of thinking -- the risk that an excess of pragmatism will spill over into cynicism and a paralyzing pessimism. But there's danger, too, in an excess of theory, spilling over into recklessness. "The limits of ideas" -- now there's an intriguing concept. How un-what-we-think-of-as-French. How ripe for America to re-explore.

WHAT THE.............?

2 platoons, 60 men, belonging to the 8eme Regiment Parachutiste d'Infanterie de Marine (Airborne,Marine Infantry) 2eme Regiment Etranger de Parachutistes (Airborne, Foreign Legion) and Regiment de Marche du Tchad (Motorised Infantry, Marine Infantry) patrolling with an unit of the Afghan National Army, 30 miles of Kabul, near Surobi have been caught in an important ambush at the end of the afternoon.

Many IED and RPGs hit the patrol. The fight went late into the night until mid morning.

10 french soldiers have been killed in action and 21 wounded.

Circumstances of the ambush:

A group of 100 French, ANA and US SF were ending a patrol at high altitude and making a RECO on foot, no UAV available, when a group of 100 Talibans opened fire.
8 french paratroopers of the 8th RPIMA and one medic of the 2nd REP were killed, a dozen of soldiers including the CO were wounded.

Firefight last for hours during the night until morning, fire support came from two Apache and two A10 and partly from two Caracal used for MEDEVAC.

30 Talibans killed (their leader presumably among them), 30 talibans wounded according to available informations.

Looks like the Talebans have really taken an agressive stance for weeks. An american unit had to go through a fierce fight near the border with Pakistan during the night.

There is a national celebration in the Church of Invalides, Paris, today, 10 30 AM

Killed in Action

Sergent-chef DEVEZ Sébastien,8eme RPIMa
Caporal-chef BUIL Damien,8eme RPIMa
Caporal-chef GREGOIRE Nicolas,8eme RPIMa
1ère classe CHASSAING Kevin,8eme RPIMa
1ère classe GAILLET Damien,8eme RPIMa
1ère classe LEPAHUN Julien.8eme RPIMa
1ère classe RIVIERE Anthony,8eme RPIMa
1ère classe TAANI Alexis,8eme RPIMa
Caporal-chef Rodolphe PENON, 2eme REP

One had his 31 st birthday the day of the ambush, was expecting a kid and getting married when back from Afghanistan.
Another one had his 20th birthday today.

There will be a mass in the cathedral of Castres, hometown of the 8eme RPIMa coming Sunday.

It's called HUMOR

They get (well, got) to watch this reporter and they get to listen to French (real French, not that Quebec crap) accents all day. I'd put up with alot for that opportunity,

Now I understand Edmond's post count!

Sir - you should try being an Englishman when Australians start discussions!



Rgds Ian

quote:

Originally posted by IanF:
Now I understand Edmond's post count!

Sir - you should try being an Englishman when Australians start discussions!



Rgds Ian

And your point is........?

quote:

Originally posted by pichon1:

quote:

Originally posted by IanF:
Now I understand Edmond's post count!

Sir - you should try being an Englishman when Australians start discussions!



Rgds Ian

And your point is........?

What can you say? ..... Poms and Frogs!

During WWI, 1.3 million French soldiers were killed, and over 4 million wounded – of which 1.5 million permanently maimed. This means that in 1918, 66% of the men between 18 and 28 were either dead or invalid. Twenty years later, due to the incredible shortage of young and valid men to occupy relevant positions and to marry, France was ruled by people who should have long been retired - and was almost a full generation short of valid men.

Americans are always happy to take easy potshots at others, but are sadly afflicted by a total lack of understanding of the magnitude of the tragedies of WWI and WWII and their consequences for Europe.

During WWII, about 300,000 Americans died. Of these, 150,000 in Europe.

During WWII, 50 million Europeans died. Give or take 5 millions, nobody will ever be able to know.



Think.



Hollywood may not be the best reference if one wants to understand history.

wow! i'm impressed, 60 troops in afghanistan.

Dumbass.

quote:

Originally posted by IanF:
Now I understand Edmond's post count!

Sir - you should try being an Englishman when Australians start discussions!



Rgds Ian

A little defensive Ed??

Na, I just don't like some village idiot unable to check the facts first to run their big mouth.

quote:

Originally posted by swampshooter:
wow! i'm impressed, 60 troops in afghanistan.

i will refrain from replying to an insulting Frenchman who feels free to criticize the united states even though without u.s. military assistance would be speaking German today. the french also stood idly by while Hitler developed a massive military in violation of the treaty of Versailles because they didn't feel threatened. according to the french Saddam was not a threat and neither were Hitler or Stalin.

Wich letter don't you understand in dumbass?

btw

Boys, boys, boys.........
Behave yourselves.

I have always found Americans who slander France to never have the balls to do it in France.

Edmond, from one proud Frenchmen to another;

We know what we are and what we are not, you will notice that they insult us 5000 miles away, I wager that should they be in our beautiful country they would not be so flippant regarding the sacrifices we have made.

I travel around the world constantly and of all the countries that I have visited I can say without reservation that France is far and away my favourite destination. This is not just because of its obvious beauty, charm and history but also because of the warm and friendly people that I constantly meet. They are courteous and always willing to lend a hand to a foreigner like myself, whereas in a lot of countries the opposite is often the case. Oh, I nearly forgot, their wine and culinary delights are second to none!! Merci beaucoup, "Viva la France"

I admit, I have had problems with the French people and the political views that are REPORTED in the U.S., but I think it's more like a sibling rivalry thing; like two brothers that just disagree on a whole lot of things. We have a complicated history, our two counties. But one thing is sure: neither one of us would exist as we know it without the other one helping.

quote:

This is not just because of its obvious beauty, charm and history but also because of the warm and friendly people that I constantly meet.

Well, you've clearly only ever been to rural France - la France profonde - and never Paris!

quote:

Originally posted by enfieldspares:

quote:

This is not just because of its obvious beauty, charm and history but also because of the warm and friendly people that I constantly meet.

Well, you've clearly only ever been to rural France - la France profonde - and never Paris!

Quite the contrary, PARIS is always my main destination and where I spend the most time!!!

I feel some historical correction is needed here..

You americans think the french are cowards...?

Where were America in 1940 when Hitler rolled through western Europe...?

Norway was invaded 9. April 1940, we fougth the German Wehrmacht for 3 months.....did we get any military support..?

Yes we did, but not by the US, but by an Anglo-FRENCH expeditionary force at Narvik....and the french soldiers reportedly fought hard as well as the british..

Do not mock other nations before you do your history lessons folks..

....forgot to mention, there were also a large Polish force at Narvik also..

quote:

Originally posted by enfieldspares:

quote:

This is not just because of its obvious beauty, charm and history but also because of the warm and friendly people that I constantly meet.

Well, you've clearly only ever been to rural France - la France profonde - and never Paris!

Oh,I forgot to add the most unfriendly city I have visited....London. Must be the weather.

as usual,after the action is over,the french come out of hiding to give their opinion of how they would have handled it,if they had been there.

quote:

Originally posted by jb:
as usual,after the action is over,the french come out of hiding to give their opinion of how they would have handled it,if they had been there.

Yes, because the French are so reserved when giving advice on the international stage, you could even argue that we are meek.