Introduction: policy options and loci of opposition

Three standard governmental policy responses to terrorism have been identified: a military one, treating the fight against terrorism as a form of warfare; a police-based one, treating it simply as a form of criminal activity, to be detected and then defeated using (perhaps some modified version of) the criminal justice system; and a political one, viewing it as a form of armed rebellion to be resolved through negotiation and the political process. The UK Government's response to political violence in Northern Ireland, for example, was to use a mixture of police-based and political strategies. In this light, the UK Government's response to the al Qaeda threat (leaving aside its military aspect, such as the war in Afghanistan) is police-based: it has involved a very significant ratcheting up of the state's coercive powers in terms of surveillance, data-sharing and detention. The main change in UK anti-terrorist policy in recent years has been described as being ‘the shift to intell-ige-nce-based and proactive methods [with] the primary aim of preventing terrorist attacks, rather than responding to events and attempting to solve crimes after they occur’. The use of preventive detention, rather than charging suspects with offences actually committed, is the logical conclusion of this approach: persons may be imprisoned, not because of what they have actually done, but for fear of what they might do, based upon suspicion of their involvement with al Qaeda generally.