by From a story in Daily Mail: Terror suspects including jihadis returning from fighting in Syria are to be offered taxpayer-funded homes, counselling and help finding jobs to stop them carrying out attacks in Britain. The top-secret Government strategy, codenamed Operation Constrain, could even allow fanatics to jump to the top of council house waiting lists. Official documents seen by The Mail on Sunday reveal that up to 20,000 extremists previously investigated by MI5 will be targeted with what critics last night described as ‘bribes’ aimed at turning them away from extremism. The highly contentious nationwide programme is due to start next year, with police and cash-strapped councils hoping the Home Office will pay for it out of its £900 million
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Mike Kimel considers the following as important: incentives, rewarding bad behavior, terrorism, Uncategorized
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From a story in Daily Mail:
Terror suspects including jihadis returning from fighting in Syria are to be offered taxpayer-funded homes, counselling and help finding jobs to stop them carrying out attacks in Britain.
The top-secret Government strategy, codenamed Operation Constrain, could even allow fanatics to jump to the top of council house waiting lists.
Official documents seen by The Mail on Sunday reveal that up to 20,000 extremists previously investigated by MI5 will be targeted with what critics last night described as ‘bribes’ aimed at turning them away from extremism.
The highly contentious nationwide programme is due to start next year, with police and cash-strapped councils hoping the Home Office will pay for it out of its £900 million counter-terrorism budget.
The article goes on:
The move comes amid growing concern at the huge number of radical Islamists living in Britain who the security services are unable to track effectively.
Fanatics who had been under surveillance by MI5 in the past were among the perpetrators of the two terror attacks in London and one in Manchester this year that left 35 people dead.
The intelligence agencies fear as many as 20,000 former ‘subjects of interest’ – people who had been monitored but later dropped off the radar – could be plotting fresh atrocities. It is this group that will be targeted by the new scheme.
A bit more:
A fierce debate has also raged about how to deal with the estimated 360 battle-hardened jihadis who have returned to Britain after fighting with Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and the ones who may come back now after the fall of the so-called caliphate.
Bear in mind an awful lot of these battle-hardened jihadis ended up that way because they were attracted by the propaganda about how they were going to get to treat the, well, call them infidels. If the Daily Mail story is anything close to true, I imagine “bang for the buck” is going to be an element in a very bad pun for the British taxpayer.
Now here is an article about France in Deutsche Welle (Deutsche Welle is Germany’s equivalent to the BBC International Service or Voice of America) from a few weeks ago:
France is about to pass a new anti-terror law as it eases its way out of the state of emergency. But civil rights campaigners say it will put citizens under general suspicion. Lisa Louis reports from Paris.
The state of emergency was declared in the immediate aftermath of the November 2015 terror attacks, in which 130 people were killed. France has since been hit by various other attacks and martial law has been renewed several times. It will now expire in early November, just like President Emmanuel Macron had promised during his election campaign.
But first, parts of it will be enshrined in general law.
“The terror threat level is still very high and we can’t just lift emergency rule without adapting our law accordingly,” said MP Yaël Braun-Pivet from the government party La Republique en Marche (LREM). She heads the National Assembly’s Law Commission that has drawn up the new anti-terror legislation.
To summarize… measures that in the past were so extraordinary they were meant to deal with insurrection and other threats to the nation are going to become everyday law under a President who just half a year ago campaigned as the Great Left Hope. I am not an attorney, but effectively, it seems to me to be the equivalent of the US having and lifting martial law, though not before taking some of the provisions of martial law and moving them into our civil and criminal codes.
French authorities also make a case that sometimes there is an overlap between those who commit petty crimes and those who commit terrorist acts.
I think most people would prefer to live in a world with less terrorism (and less petty crime) on the one hand, and fewer police powers on the other hand. But scaling back the cops isn’t going to prevent the next terrorist attack, much less the one after that. So there is a trade-off.
Obviously, working backward, none of this would have happened without an assortment of terrorist attacks, some spectacular and some mundane. If you had the ability to tweak one thing in the past, what is the smallest change in French history that would have prevented France from having all these terrorist attacks? Are there any lessons in this for Britain? What about for the US?
Update, 5:11 AM PST, 10/31/2017… a couple of minor grammatical corrections were made.