The news that Abu Qatada is to be bailed marks another plot turn in the blockbuster that is “Londonistan.” The story, for those who need reminding, begins in the late 1990s, when the French, in particular, were being driven crazy by what they saw as Britain’s naïve neglect of dangerous extremists living in London. These were people, they said, involved in spreading a message of hatred and violence towards non-Muslims; in some cases, too, it was said, helping to recruit volunteers and raise money for terrorist acts.

Slowly but surely, however, the main characters in “Londonistan” disappeared from Britain’s streets. Firebrand preacher Abdullah al-Faisal was convicted of soliciting to murder in 2003; last year he was deported to his native Jamaica. Abu Hamza, who ran the Finsbury Park mosque in north London, is serving time at Her Majesty’s pleasure after he, too, was found guilty of soliciting murder. Once out he faces almost certain extradition to the United States to face trial on separate terrorism offences. And Omar Bakri, the founder of AQ-sympathisers, Al Muhajiroun, fled Britain shortly after 7/7 and was subsequently barred from coming back.

Abu Qatada’s story was always more complicated. Convicted in absentia in his native Jordan for terrorism offences in the 1990s, he was later described by Spain’s chief terrorism prosecutor, Baltasar Garzon, as Osama Bin Laden’s right hand man in Europe. Recordings of his sermons were found in a Hamburg apartment frequented by the 9/11 hijackers.

Facing likely arrest in the face of new terror laws in Britain introduced after those attacks Abu Qatada went on the run. He was caught in October 2002 and then held without charge at Belmarsh high security prison for two and a half years. In March 2005 he won bail and was slapped with a control order instead, placing strict limitations on his movements.

At this point the British government embarked on a new strategy for dealing with foreign nationals it believed posed a threat to national security. It started negotiating agreements, or Memoranda of Understanding, with countries with dodgy human rights records aimed at securing a promise from those governments that they wouldn’t torture or carry out the death penalty on individuals returned there from Britain. After agreement was reached with Jordan in August 2005, Qatada was immediately arrested again pending deportation. It looked like the beginning of the end.

That is until not one but two key legal victories for Abu Qatada in the space of the last four weeks. First the Court of Appeal blocked deportation saying it was unsafe to send him back to Jordan. And now an immigration tribunal has granted him bail, albeit effectively confining him to his house for 22 hours each day. Britain’s Home Secretary pronounced herself extremely disappointed at this latest decision.

It’s all very messy and certainly offers fresh ammunition to those who believe “Londonistan” continues to tie British authorities up in knots. With recent High Court challenges to certain terror offences as well as the sanctions regime targeting terrorist financing, there will be those who believe British judges remain too soft on the terror threat.

Opposition politicians, meanwhile, are saying it underlines the need for Britain to fall into step with many other jurisdictions around the world and allow intercept evidence into court. If that’s what is needed to build a case against Abu Qatada in a British court, they say, then the case for changing the law has never been stronger.

So what are the facts? Do CCTVs make us any safer?

London’s Transport Police say the cameras do work. It claims violent crime on trains and buses is down by half in the past year alone. But officers admit they have to find smarter ways to use the technology.

“The challenge for the police service is to constantly look for smarter ways to look for the product, so the images. “ says Paul Crowther of the British Transport Police. He adds that law enforcement officials are constantly asking themselves how they can use the footage more effectively.

“How do we quickly get those images out, how do we process them, how do we identify the people that were on them and then turn those into arrests so that we can reduce crime further by making it clear to people that CCTV means they are going to get locked up,” says Crowther.

Privacy advocates in Britain claim the country has one fifth of all the world’s CCTVs, at least one for every 14 people in the country. When you’re in Britain, you can be caught on camera hundreds of times per day.

Scotland Yards refuses to comment, but its internal audit suggests all those long lenses are short on results. Government statistics on crime rates have held steady in Britain in the last decade despite billions of dollars of investment in CCTV.

“Most of these problems are social problems and you can’t just get around them by introducing a flashy new technology,” says David Murakami Wood, a surveillance expert who studies its impact on society.

But there is compelling evidence that some crimes would never be solved without CCTV evidence.

In July 2005, CCTV cameras in London candidly caught three armed men viciously stab and beat two friends on a night out. Even though all of it was caught on tape, it seemed to make no difference to the criminals. One of the victims, Daniel Pollen died that night, but Andrew Griffiths, the other victim, survived to see his attackers convicted using CCTV evidence.

“Without it, there wasn’t a case really,” says Griffiths. “Due to the fact that I didn’t remember barely anything, the CCTV showed everything that happened, the way it happened,” he adds.

Experience authorities here in Britain point out that there is no way of knowing how or when CCTVs actually prevent crime.

“This is a wonderful tool for crime reduction and crime prevention but it’s not being used in the right way” says John O’Connor, a former Scotland Yard commander.

“Who knows how bad crime would be if it wasn’t for the CCTV?” he asks.

Watch my report here.





By International Security Correspondent, Paula Newton.

A few of you have commented that regardless of the morality of torture, an interesting question is: Does it work? Back in the Fall, when CIA and U.S. justice department secret memos on aggressive interrogation were leaked, we interviewed a man who says he was tortured by American authorities. He claims torture is useless.


Watch my report here.


Update by Paula Newton.

So, picture yourself in a movie theatre, some frenetic music starts up, then the water starts to pour. It could be an ad for spring water or even vodka, it’s slick. But within seconds the slick commercial pans down and delivers a big dose of shock.

Amnesty International actually staged a waterboarding session in order to sharpen its campaign against it and beginning in May the commercial will air as a preview in theatres throughout Britain. http://www.unsubscribe-me.org/


“It’s not a stunt, ” insists Sara McNeice of Amnesty. “This constitutes torture. We don’t need to gloss it up, we don’t need to call it an enhanced interrogation technique. It’s torture, it should be illegal it should never be used,” she adds.

Malcolm Nance, a former American military officer, trained personnel to resist water boarding and claims it feels like slow motion murder. He acted as a consultant for Amnesty during the production of the commercial.

“These videos that Amnesty International has put out are pretty realistic, ” says Nance. “These people are being tortured and this is just not how the American public, I’m certain, wanted their government to dishonour themselves,” he says.

Water boarding is now an iconic symbol in what has become known as the 'War on Terror". It is emblematic of the controversy and confusion now surrounding the war itself. The Bush Administration bans the practice of waterboarding for the military, but not intelligence officers which is why Amnesty International says it wants the American public to demand it be banned outright.

“This isn’t about being anti-American or taking an anti-American stance on the issue this is about an anti-torture stance people and the public don’t want to see people being tortured in their name” insists McNeice.

But some scholars warn that a shock ad will only add to all the confusion surrounding the debate. Professor Michael Levin of City College in New York is a noted scholar on the philosophical question of when and if torture is justified.

Levin insists he is not advocating waterboarding or any other kind of aggressive interrogation technique but he points out that there is a realistic question to asked : How tough should governments get when lives are on the line?

“There have to be firm rules, it has to be to protect the innocent, it has to be non-punitive,” he says before insisting that the blanket ban that Amnesty is advocating is not realistic.

“I don't see how you can honestly say that there are techniques you just can't use to save thousands of innocent lives, it just seems absurd." Says Levin.

Amnesty claims its commercial is the "video the CIA doesn’t want you to see”. It says almost four hundred thousand people have already viewed it online, even before it’s been released in theatres. And so the debate continues with another battleplan, on a different battlefield with Amnesty’s latest salvo coming soon to a theatre near you.

Watch report on the video.


By Paula Newton, International Security Correspondent.

Their first salvo is hardly revolutionary, but those launching the Quilliam Foundation say it will be much more than just a talk shop. Quilliam is the first of its kind, a think-tank run by former extremists, ‘defectors’ from Islamist thinking who insist they will stand up to terrorists by blowing apart their ideology. Watch Paula Newton's report.

“We really are rocking the boat, this is the first time you’ve had Muslim voices coming up and saying ‘we’ve got problems,’ says Ed Husain, one of the directors of this new think-tank. He adds, “Within the Muslim community thus far there’s been a denial, there’s no problem guys.”

For those caught up in modern day terror, denial is not an option. Rachel North survived the train blast on the Piccadilly line in London in July 2005. She says that almost three years later she is still in search of answers that may only come from those once so inspired by terror.

“You start to see that what you’re dealing with has solutions it’s not a black and white situation where fear and panic and hysteria about terror rules,” says North. “You’re actually dealing with people at the end of the day, people you can communicate with,” she adds.

One of those people is now Maajid Nawaz, another Quilliam director who used to recruit extremists all over Europe. He says he will now methodically, patiently debunk what he calls the ‘Islamist lie’.

“We’ve done this because for the first time a counter-extremism think tank has been established by former Islamists to critique the ideology, to critique Islamism and that voice can only come from Muslims because we’ve developed a theological and political critique of this ideology and in a nutshell what I’d say is we’re deciding to fight back with ideas,” he says as he strolls through the London university where he used to conduct much of his extremist recruiting.

Why does any of this matter? I put that question to Nawaz and asked him will any of his efforts really make us any safer?

“Definitely it makes us safer because terrorism grows out of Islamism, Islamist inspired terrorism is a phrase I use because it grows out of those who share the same ideology. The Al-Qaeda world view came from somewhere.”

By Paula Newton, CNN’s International Security Correspondent.

The camera works like a telescope to screen you from as far as 80 feet away, even when you’re moving. Its best application would be in crowded spaces where security authorities want to increase surveillance without slowing people down. Authorities can search for concealed weapons and explosives without you ever knowing it.

“We are genuinely looking through clothing,” says Clive Beattie of Thru Vision, a British company now piloting the camera. “It’s almost a glowing light bulb, you don’t see the detail that people might be concerned about.”

That ‘detail’ he’s referring to is body parts, but the camera actually makes people look like glowing blobs because of how it works. The camera picks up on electromagnetic rays that all of us, and all objects, give off naturally. These rays are called Tera-hertz or t-rays.

Thru Vision claims the camera is completely safe. “We’re not having to eradiate people with x-rays or any other type of radiation,” says Beattie.

We showed what the camera could do to people taking a stroll in Piccadilly Circus, central London, already one of the most spied on corners in the world. Some were still uneasy about a camera that can get under your skin.

“Yeah, maybe, a bit over the top I think” said one woman who couldn’t help but giggle when she saw the glowing images on the screen.

The crucial question is; will it actually make us any safer? Even this camera would likely not have detected the London bombers as they carried their explosive laden knapsacks. So many people are carrying so many packages it would take more than one camera to catch them, but very vigilant security personnel.

Privacy advocates worry security officials are relying too much on technology, extending the reach of ‘big brother’ without really making us any safer.

“What we should consider is how much we want to lose aspects of our privacy in order to attain a sort of notional security, in most cases this isn’t real security, it’s a sense of safety, that has very little real effect.” says a David Murakami Wood a researcher who studies the effects of new technology on society.

It seems authorities though are convinced a ‘sneak peak’ is worth it. Thru Vision says it has already sold its camera to a few companies in the London, including the Canary Wharf financial complex and they say the US military has also expressed its interest.

And remember, if the camera is in use as you’re walking around a crowded event in the next few years, you’ll never know it.


By Paula Newton, CNN’s International Security Correspondent.

Question: When Osama Bin Laden speaks, who’s listening? That’s what we want to know as bin Laden releases not one, but two audio messages this week.

This image taken from a militant Web site shows an undated photo of Osama bin Laden as part of an audiotaped speech posted late Wednesday.

In the first, released on an al Qaeda Web site, he talks of a new crusade against Islam as evidenced by the publication of Danish cartoons that ridicule the Prophet Mohammed. He says, “Although our tragedy in your killing of our women and children is a very great one, it paled when you went overboard in your unbelief and freed yourselves of the etiquettes of dispute and fighting and went to the extent of publishing these insulting drawings. This is the greater and more serious tragedy, and reckoning for it will be more severe.”

In the second, an audiotape broadcast by Al Jazeera, bin Laden called on Muslims to keep up the fight against U.S. forces in Iraq as a path to "liberating Palestine." He says: "My speech is about the Gaza siege and the way to retrieve it and the rest of Palestine from the hands of the Zionist enemy," Bin Laden adds. "Our enemies did not take it by negotiations and dialogue but with fire and iron. And this is the way to get it back."

Neither message could be independently authenticated although security services around the world are now trying to assess if the messages are the recorded words of Osama bin Laden and when he might have issued his warnings.

Just a few months ago, a message from bin Laden would have rated among the top stories in any newspaper or on any newscast. Now, that’s just not the case. Most news organisations reported the messages but there didn’t seem a need for in-depth analysis or pundit panels about the imminent threat. Even security services seem less alarmed by bin Laden’s messages with one Italian security source telling Reuters.com: “Obviously we can't ignore it but at this moment that doesn't mean the threat is being taken seriously," the source said.

It gets you thinking. We debate this here at CNN but we’ve come up with no real definitive answers as of yet. When we cover bin Laden’s messages, do we give him too much credibility? Or given his iconic position as the head of al Qaeda, are we not taking his messages seriously enough?

But most importantly, to those who still see bin Laden as a guiding force for jihad, how do they interpret his messages? We’re still looking for those answers, and as always looking for your comments.


By Paula Newton, CNN’s International Security Correspondent.