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Best defense is good intelligence

Experts looking for lessons from the London attacks will be asking whether more needs to be done, and whether Londoners will accept tighter security in their daily lives.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has vowed the British lifestyle will not change -- but in an atmosphere of increased threat, authorities could very well feel compelled to tighten surveillance and limit some personal freedoms.

Experts say, however, that even if it were possible to screen every passenger for explosives in a London public transit system heavily used by the city's 8 million residents, that still still wouldn't eliminate the terrorist threat.

Even Israel, which has the world's tightest security, "has not been able in every case to prevent suicide bombers," said Alex Standish, editor of Jane's Intelligence Digest.

"It is absolutely impossible to prevent a determined terrorist -- particularly a suicide bomber," he said.

"The best scenario we can hope for is that the intelligence services are able to infiltrate terrorist groups or intercept their communications and foil their plots," Standish said.

"In the event that somebody gets through that, loss of life and the panic factor is minimized," he said.

In March, the British parliament passed a sweeping Prevention of Terrorism Act which allows authorities to place terror suspects under house arrest and impose travel bans without trial. Blair is now pressing for the legislation to authorize national ID cards.

But no capital can shield itself completely from such attacks, said Charles Blackmore, who heads Vance International, a security and intelligence company.

"Any society, no matter how well prepared, is vulnerable to a sophisticated terrorist with good intelligence," he said.

The al-Qaeda terrorist attack on the rail network in Madrid last year prompted Sir John Stevens, the then Metropolitan Police commissioner, to warn that a terrorist attack in the British capital was "inevitable."

Blackmore said that the London attacks seemed to be the work of someone with good intelligence, reconnaissance and planning.

"The series of attacks today demonstrated that we have a sophisticated terrorist," he said. "They clearly had a very specific intent that was to disable the public infrastructure of London, freeze all movement and have maximum commercial impact."

Intelligence and public awareness are the keys to preventing future attacks, Blackmore said, predicting an increase in the number of police on the streets to reassure the public.

But he added: "If we are facing suicide bombers, it is a very different threat and no one has the answer to that. If this is a suicide bombing, then there is a level of threat we have not faced before."

Standish, who is also a senior research fellow at Durham University, said that police and emergency services appeared to have responded efficiently to the attacks and that the wounded were quickly brought to hospitals.

"Compared with how we would have reacted before 9/11, there has been progress in terms of integration and communication between various emergency services, the police and the anti-terrorism branch," Standish said.

Although the loss of life was "appalling," the death toll could have been even higher considering the bombs were timed to coincide with the morning rush hour, he added.
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