Rights chief: we need more spies

Sunday Times
Aug. 21, 2005

THE head of Britain’s most prominent civil rights group has called for the recruitment of many new police officers and British-Asian spies to infiltrate their own community in an attempt to crack Muslim terrorist cells, writes Jasper Gerard.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, says she rejects some assumptions made by her predecessors.

Past leaders of Liberty include Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman, now senior government figures. “I want more money put into the police and more Asian people in the security services,” she says in an interview in today’s News Review. “I have never said that before. I bet my predecessors [Hewitt and Harman] probably called for the disbanding of the security services.”

She suggests the “billions” that the government proposes to spend on its ID cards — up to £19.2 billion, according to the London School of Economics — could be diverted to finance a huge “beat” policing and intelligence push.

Chakrabarti knows she infuriated Liberty supporters by calling for calm after police hunting the London bombers shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian. However, seeming to revel in her new muscular style she said: “I am not Mary Poppins.”

She goes on to show her new robust line in her comments about police policy on the terrorist search. “I am morally comfortable with the idea of shooting to kill,” she says. “In extremis you take life to defend life.”