ThatDamnedPanda
Posts: 6060
Joined: 1/26/2009 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Starbuck09 Then surely the constitution can just be ammended in this case? I don't dispute that for America the constitution is a very important and effective grounding for society but I am sure even the founders understood that in the future that they might not cover every eventuality. The reason this particular case is exceptional is that the people with the most expertise are in the army. Understandably you do not want the military being responsible for carrying out the duties of law enforcement but equally you want to ensure that the general public [and police officers involved] are as protected as possible. The scope for this sort of situation occuring is thankfully small so presumably that would make it easy to ammend the constitution to allow certain elements of the military to safeguard a location alongside bona fide police officers. But that's not what we train our military for, generally speaking. We have a much different environment, and much different relationship with terrorism than you folks. In Britain, you've been dealing with a dire threat of domestic terrorism for decades, and the weapon of choice for your terrorists has been bombs directed at the civilian population. With very, very rare exceptions, that's not a problem we've ever had to deal with, and it's only the last few years that we've even felt compelled to take domestic terrorism seriously at all. Your command and control structure for dealing with terrorists reflects your experiences with the IRA and their cohorts, and the procedures you have for dealing with them have evolved to meet that specific threat. Having a few small, highly trained teams of bomb specialists makes sense in Britain, because you've got a small country - smaller than many American states - and a demonstrated need for very skilled bomb disposal specialists. For you people, it makes a lot of sense to have such teams, because you can fly them anywhere in the country in less than an hour. Here, because of our different history with terrorism and the command control structure dictated by our Constitution, the FBI has been assigned to play many of the same roles your military anti-terrorism units play over there, and they do a much better job of it than our military would do. Not because our military is incompetent, but because domestic crime is just not what they're trained to do, whereas that's the only thing the FBI is trained to do. If we were talking about assigning your military to work with our local law enforcement agencies, that would be one thing. But with our military, it would represent no advantage at all. They would actually be a hindrance. The FBI is as good as we have in the US.
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Panda, panda, burning bright In the forest of the night What immortal hand or eye Made you all black and white and roly-poly like that?
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