Editorial

“We got him,” said President Barack Obama, leaning back in the White House Situation Room, after watching the killing of Osama bin Laden on video link. Sure, the retort might be—but while intelligence services were hunting the al-Qaeda leader, they failed to foresee the Arab Spring. British and US services were wrong about Iraq’s weapons, and worse, its propensity for civil war; years before that, they failed to anticipate the fall of the Soviet Union.

What should we expect of the intelligence services? A decade after the September 11th attacks, the answer matters. It affects whether we feel safe in daily life, and whether we accept recent intrusions into civil liberties. It determines whether we accept ministers’ arguments about foreign policy which depend on claims about intelligence, as in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Any assessment faces the obvious problem that the full scorecard is not publicly known. The details of attacks averted often stay hidden. John Sawers, head of MI6, makes the point that the services cannot operate without secrecy, and that their aim is to preserve our society, not to infuse it with fear. (Adam Kirsch describes the lasting impact of 9/11 on American fiction and imagination.)

All the same, the record has been patchy. As Gregory Treverton argues, western agencies are often better at operations than geopolitical analysis. That reflects their choice of recruits, he suggests, and lack of resources. Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA bin Laden unit, asserts that the Arab Spring “will be crushing for the CIA” by depriving it of help from former allies. He argues that a recurrent mistake is to assume that goals are shared by others—such as Pakistan’s ISI agency. It is hard to believe that, behind the ISI’s 15-foot-high red brick walls, incongruously draped with purple bougainvillea, there are not some who knew where bin Laden was. But while Moni Mohsin is scathing about Pakistan’s military, Scheuer makes the central point that it has “lost 9,000 fighting our wars.”

The first answer, then, is to have realistic expectations of the services, in the light of new threats and strain on resources. But that is no reason to grant them more powers. The protection of freedoms bill, now in the House of Commons, has been a welcome exercise in reviewing recent curbs on civil liberties. Yet it still allows wide use of CCTV and DNA samples. The cabinet office may also soon publish a green paper setting out how people might challenge their treatment by the intelligence services in court, while allowing intelligence to be kept secret—a useful step, if it gets the balance right.

No one could think that threats have vanished, not least, the risk from dissident Irish republicans. But public pressure, rightly, is now for openness, in all kinds of institutions (see James Grant on the UK’s new Supreme Court). A decade after 9/11, it is time for the justification for secrecy to be set out clearly and for emergency curbs on civil liberties to be rolled back.