Experts: Time to Empower the West's 'Jack Bauers'
Cheshvan 2, 5770, 20 October 09 12:44
by Gil Ronen
Jack Bauer from '24'
(Israelnationalnews.com) A two-day international conference entitled "Intelligence & Democracies in Conflict and Peace" opened Sunday afternoon at Bar-Ilan University. It discussed a problem that has been of great interest in the West in recent years: how far may secret agents go in using extreme methods to save innocent citizens?
The conference hosted a range of visiting and local experts presenting past and current topics, from Intelligence in a Democracy: Ancient Greece to controversial issues such as Media and Intelligence, Parliamentary Oversight and Accountability, and more. BESA Center Director Prof. Efraim Inbar said that the West had a problem with what he called "the religion of human rights" whose adherents hamstring the intelligence agenies.
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Dr. Lars Hänsel, Representative of the Konrad Adenauer Fund in Israel, declared in the opening session that the most prominent challenge of democracies today is to sustain themselves using non-democratic methods (such as secret services, wiretapping, etc.) and maintaining a balance between these non-democratic methods and the control of the government institutes on them. Intelligence services should serve democracies and not vice versa, he said.
Among the conference participants were CIA Chief Historian Dr. David Robarge, Adm. Sigurd Hess, of the German Navy and NATO, Col. (res.) Miri Eisen, Former Media Adviser to the Israeli Prime Minister, Maj. Gen. (res.) Emanuel Sakal and additional research associates of the BESA Center, and intelligence experts from around the world. The conference was as a joint initiative of the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies and the Konrad Adenauer Fund, in association with The International Intelligence History Association (IIHA).
Among the conference participants were CIA Chief Historian Dr. David Robarge, Adm. Sigurd Hess, of the German Navy and NATO, Col. (res.) Miri Eisen, Former Media Adviser to the Israeli Prime Minister, Maj. Gen. (res.) Emanuel Sakal and additional research associates of the BESA Center, and intelligence experts from around the world. The conference was as a joint initiative of the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies and the Konrad Adenauer Fund, in association with The International Intelligence History Association (IIHA).
The dilemma regarding extreme methods against terror suspects is a recurrent theme in the popular Fox television show '24' (which features a secret agent named Jack Bauer who uses torture against suspects, and gets in trouble for it) and a focus of intense public debate, especially since the 9/11 terror attacks.
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