"Today, France has 'a pool of specialized judges and investigators adept at dismantling and prosecuting terrorist networks.'" (Perelman, 2006)
"France has a system, Vigipirate, used at moments of danger to the country. Instituted in 1978, Vigipirate has two levels, which can be activated by the president without legislative consent. The first level, 'simple,' is activated when a threat appears imminent. The government may call up reserve police and rescue personnel, and will deploy police to sensitive sites such as embassies, the subway, train stations and airports, and fuel infrastructure, including nuclear plants (approximately 50% of France's electricity is derived from nuclear power). The government activated this first level at the outset of the first Gulf War in 1991. It remained in effect until the day after the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, when France activated the second level, 'reinforced.' At this level, President Chirac exercised his authority to direct the armed forces to deploy internally to ensure security. He put an additional 5400 police, gendarmes, and soldiers on the streets of Paris at strategic points; four thousand police were initially assigned to the Paris subway system alone." (Carl et al., 2006)
The diagram below is something that both the U.S. And France use to evaluate and categorize all threats and attacks that occur within their region (Boyer, 2006). The diagram itself is pretty self-explanatory with the severity of a potential terrorist threat being the highest and top priority and the lack of severity of a potential terrorist threat being the lowest priority. It is important to note here that both countries rate the overall nature of the threat differently in different circumstances hence there is no clear pattern as to which particular aspects are necessary to checklist to make the potential of a threat or attack a severe or low one (Council of Europe, 2004).
In the U.S.A., the overall structure and organization has been re-evaluated and redesigned in order to tackle the new and emerging threats like the ones that they encountered in the September 11 attacks. Even though this seems like a daunting and risky task to implement in the economic condition that exist today, the U.S. government and official strongly believe that this is the way to proceed further with a more efficient and stronger homeland security and birder security structure. Hence, the structure for the homeland security that exist within the U.S. today looks like the flow chart below, that displays the departments involved as well as their designated responsibilities (Transatlantic Homeland Security, 2006):
The process that the United States uses for an efficient setup of homeland security is based around the single-minded 'domestic incident management'. As the name suggests it is a measure to ensure that all internal threats and attacks, natural and man-made, are prevented and managed in a timely and efficient manner. The main aim of using such an approach is to make sure that all the sections of the government administrative bodies throughout the 51 states work cohesively and effectively towards a common goal. Furthermore, the areas of crisis management and consequence management will be dealt with as a single entity and both will be solved using thorough and efficient solution designs pertinent to the situation circumstances. The diagram below shows a very general design of how the U.S. government aims to keep all the governments sections connected and in association with each other towards a common goal (U.S. Department of State, 2002):
The diagram shows the general overview of the departments involved in the homeland security responsibilities within the U.S. And what particular responsibilities and tasks they each handle from a micro to a macro level. It is important to note here that all the departments are either connected directly to the president or the governor while in the French setup. The governor was never in the picture and the tasks of the governors were mainly fulfilled by perfect who was either a government or a public official.
The Secretary of Homeland Security controls the domestic incident management structure and he can use the government assets for responding to crises in one or more of the following conditions
(1) A Federal department has requested the intervention of the Secretary;
(2) The State and local authorities have requested the intervention of the Secretary due to the exhaustion of their assets;
(3) The responsive unit to the incident incorporates more then one Federal department; or (4) The Secretary personally assumes accountability for the incident from the President (U.S. Department of State, 2002).
US and France: Suspected Terrorist threats to Homeland Security
1. Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) also known as the Arab Revolutionary...
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