Britain works on bringing post 9/11 security up to snuff

The nation has made progress, but holes remain.
LONDON (AP) -- The Sept. 11 attacks on America forced Prime Minister Tony Blair's government to ponder a troubling question: Could terrorists pull off something similar, or even worse, in London or another big British city? The answer, they concluded, was yes.
A string of recent high-profile breaches at Parliament and Buckingham Palace -- one aimed at Blair -- have highlighted serious security flaws. The episodes came as the government works to overhaul its intelligence and security, aiming to boost the army of spies in its domestic intelligence agency to 3,000 and double the pre-Sept. 11 counterterrorism budget by 2008.
Spies are behind
Britain is still struggling to reorient spy services that until the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had not moved beyond a Cold War focus on the Soviet Union. Long experience with Northern Irish terrorism means Britain has strong, well-organized agencies, but their lack of knowledge about Muslim militants such as Al-Qaida will take years, if not decades, to remedy, experts say.
"We are in a period of attempting to catch up with the deficiencies of the system we inherited," said Alex Standish, editor of Jane's Intelligence Digest. "Building an intelligence network with a global reach from scratch is an enormous undertaking."
Britain is still short of interpreters and other Arabic-speakers who might be able to infiltrate terrorist cells, for example, Standish said.
Standish said that's why Britain has failed to infiltrate two Al-Qaida cells it believes are based here, one made up of North Africans and the other of people from the Middle East.
Prosecutors have won few convictions despite hundreds of arrests under strict new anti-terror laws, and Standish said that shows intelligence is not yet as sharp as it needs to be.
The head of Britain's MI5 domestic security service, Eliza Manningham-Buller, has repeatedly warned that Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaida network was resilient and that the threat of attack by Islamic terrorists would remain for "a long time."
"I see no prospect of a significant reduction in the threat posed to the U.K. and its interests from Islamist terrorism over the next five years, and I fear for a considerable number of years afterward," she told a gathering of police and security experts a year ago. "The effort to defeat the Islamist threat is going to be a long haul."
Some progress
Still, though there are big gaps in Britain's defenses, the country has become better-equipped to prevent or respond to a large-scale terror attack than it was before the suicide assaults on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the government and experts say.
Home Secretary David Blunkett recently announced $160 million in new funding for security and readiness in 2005, a boost that came on top of a pledge earlier this year to increase the strength of the MI5 domestic spy agency by 50 percent, adding 1,000 new intelligence experts.
Blunkett said the money he announced earlier this month would go to increase the number of officers in the main police anti-terrorism unit, Special Branch, and buy more suits to protect police in a chemical, biological or radiological attack. Officials said the money would also buy communications equipment for emergency workers, including a new radio system.
Experts say some of the funds are also likely to go toward biometric technologies to identify people with scans of physical features like eyes and faces.
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