Australia's response to terrorism
 

http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol48no1/article03.html

Nicholas Grono


In the difficult fight against the new menace of international terrorism, there is nothing more crucial than timely and accurate intelligence.

-- John Howard1

The attacks of September 11, 2001, fundamentally changed the understanding of the United States and its allies of the threat posed by terrorism. With this new comprehension has come the realization that significantly improved collection and use of intelligence will be required to prevent catastrophic terrorist attacks in the future.

Accordingly, in the United States, the role of the intelligence community has been scrutinized like never before. US intelligence agencies have received increased resources and powers, and important modifications have been made to the rules governing intelligence collection and dissemination.

In Australia, equally significant changes have taken place. Canberra's process of adjusting its intelligence to meet the challenges of global terrorism, however, started more than two years before the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, in preparation for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. After September 11, the Australian government further strengthened its intelligence capabilities through legislative and funding adjustments. If many Australians thought that their relative isolation distanced them from the immediate threat of large-scale terrorism, any such complacency was shattered by the Bali bombings on 12 October 2002, which claimed the lives of 89 Australian citizens.

This article examines how the Australian government and intelligence community have responded to the challenges posed by the Olympic Games, the September 11 attacks, and the Bali bombings, and analyzes some of the key differences between Australia's intelligence response to terrorism and that of the United States.
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http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol48no1/article02.html

Larry L. Watts

Intelligence reform is a critical element of democratization, but it is frequently relegated to the back burner in the early days of post-authoritarian regime transitions. This is due, in part, to a reflexive aversion to what was commonly the most brutal legacy of the former regimes. Transition populations tend to favor the destruction of intelligence apparatuses, not their reform.

In the post-communist transitions in central and eastern Europe, competing priorities also distracted attention from intelligence reform as political, economic, and other security institutions simultaneously underwent changes. Western biases shaping the packaging of reform assistance added to the relative neglect of intelligence. The West's early focus on market economy formation instead of the establishment of rule of law, as well as its pronounced unwillingness to assist what were still considered the "instruments of repression," kept intelligence near the bottom of the reformist agenda during the first few years of transition.

The mechanics of intelligence liaison relationships between the West and the former communist states perpetuated this "hands off" attitude. Liaison officers sent into the region were chiefly responsible for obtaining information of use to their countries. They were not sent to advocate or undertake the reform of local intelligence structures and practices. If information was flowing in a satisfactory manner, the unintended consequence was a distinctly anti-reform ethos driven by the logic: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Given recurrent intelligence and "political policing" problems in the transition states, it was inevitable that reform in those domains would eventually become a western priority, particularly after NATO opened its doors to new members in 1993. Unbridled political competition within the post-communist states, where the rules of the game were still in contention and abuses of executive power common, heightened concerns regarding the impact of partly reformed or unreformed intelligence services on an enlarged western alliance.

Unfortunately, the West's attempts to evaluate the intelligence reform process in the various states of the region were handicapped by the differences among the new democracies, which limited comparative analysis;1 by the inappropriateness of western models developed under different political, social, and economic circumstances; and by the failure of western analysts to recognize that the post-Cold War revolution in intelligence affairs conflicts in many respects with the classic model of intelligence reform. This article examines these challenges.
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