Role of Law Enforcement Administrators Term Paper

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Therefore, one must be both committed to the law, as well as to individual freedom, and this would be in keeping with the trends as dictated by a democratic country such as the United States of America.

It must be stated that in the Post Cold War world, crimes such as terrorism, narcotics drugs trafficking, money laundering, and so on, are all considered to be serious threats to the very security of the entire nation. These threats are in fact termed as 'transnational threats', and they are today, in the face of the changing nature of crime and related security, the primary concerns of law enforcement agencies as well as that of the U.S. Intelligence Community. For example, two serious foreign banking scandals that occurred during the late years of the 1980's, made sure of the fact that any information that would be in the hands of Intelligence Agencies in the United States of America must be made available to law enforcement officials as well. This led in turn to the development wherein, during the middle of the 1990's, the Federal Bureau of Investigation started to assign several more additional agents to newly created offices, all over the world. The great tragedy that occurred on September 11, 2001, is a perfect example of how big and frightening the issue of international terrorism has become to the issue of upholding and protecting national security.

In fact, the Bush Administration and the Congress have both moved in a rapid and efficient manner in order to establish more Intelligence and Enforcement cooperation among several different agencies of the United States of America, to face better threats like the Al-quaeda to the national security. It is the opinion of some people that after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact by the year 1991 was innately responsible for altering, in an extremely significant manner, the international environment, and this was the time, therefore, when transnational issues such as terrorism, drug trafficking, shipments of WMD, or in other words, weapons for mass destruction, money laundering, and so on and so forth happened to become very important, and in some cases, these issues gained even more importance than the hitherto traditionally political and all related issues.

As a matter of fact, the Director of central Intelligence, or the DCI, George Tenet, has stated that the threat that has risen from issues like that of terrorism is very real, and it is also an evolving issue. Although the state sponsored method of terrorism appears to have declined today, the method of terrorism being demonstrated by transnational groups, with a unique method of decentralized leadership, which in turn happens to make such groups not only more difficult to identify, but also infinitely more difficult to disrupt and disband, has started to increase everywhere. This means that more concern must be shown towards issues related to international crimes, and as a matter of fact, much before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon in September 2001, were executed, there was a greater amount of interest as well as concern about international crime being carried out all over the world.

It must be noted at this point that although the responsibilities of the Courts of the United States of America and the several law enforcement agencies in America have traditionally always included those activities like for example, smuggling, piracy, and so on, that occur outside the territorial borders of the U.S.A., these activities have never been considered as being threats to the national security of America, or even as being on the same level as the several types of military threats that are being today, posed by foreign countries. These are the responsibilities of the state and the Defense Departments, and the Intelligence Departments of America. What this means is that the changed and the altered international realities have inevitably led to a larger and an infinitely more expansive role to be played by the law enforcement agencies of America, and this must be combined with the employment of intelligence agencies, as well as with the operational departments of the State and the Defense wings.

Therefore, it can be said that while on the one hand there is today the rising phenomenon of agencies being charged with domestic law enforcement, with these officials playing rather extensive roles in overseas missions, on the other hand, there is the occurrence of intelligence agencies laying emphasis and focusing for the main part on the various illegal activities being carried out in foreign countries.

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This in turn means that the very evolution and the resultant changes and the intermingling and combining of law enforcement agencies and intelligence efforts has led to the phenomenon of a blurring and disintegration of the distinctions and the differences between the law and the security policy, which has been hitherto been kept separate and individualized and distinct from each other until now. The FBI or the Federal Bureau of Investigation, one of the most important law enforcement agencies in the United States of America, has therefore, been able to attain a much more important and a more prominent role in international affairs in recent times than ever before.

This is because of the fact that it has indeed been assigning more and more numbers of its agents overseas, for the purpose of not only expanding contacts with foreign governments so that more information could be obtained well in time about any types of potential and planned transnational threats to national security, but also to keep abreast of the latest relevant information about such threats. In the same way, the CIA, or the Central Intelligence Agency, and various other intelligence agencies are today devoting increasing amounts of time and energy and resources to issues of counter terrorism, and to anti-narcotics activities. One CIA official has stated that today, there is no real primacy for either law enforcement agencies or for the various intelligence communities as far as issues such as international terrorism, narcotics and drug trafficking, and so on is concerned. However, the fact is that law enforcement agencies and intelligence communities both remain operational and functional in basically dissimilar ways, and they also retain different legal authorities, and different modes of operation, and different paradigms for their governance.

The need of the day is therefore, to enhance a feeling of closer cooperation among law enforcement, and intelligence agencies in the United States of America, but the problems that come hand in hand with such an approach are manifold. For example, it is innately difficult to employ intelligence agencies for the purpose of laying the groundwork for criminal proceedings. At the same time, however, the decisions to consider certain serious threats to security from outside of the borders of America as being law enforcement issues presumes the fact that there are adequate legal channels in existence in both U.S. Law as well as in International Law, through which such issues could be satisfactorily resolved. The point is that if International Law is insufficiently developed, then it means that the extraterritorial reach of domestic statutes would naturally become quite limited. When law enforcement is utilized against international threats, then it would mean that non-legal instruments, like for example, the use of military force, or a covert action carried out by an intelligence agency, would be more often than not be considered as being less important, and this may result in its de-emphasis. In the year 1999, military force was deployed for the purpose of the protection of international issues, and law enforcement agencies were used for the purpose.

The United States Armed Forces undertook air strikes as a part of the 'North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Serbian Forces', and the purpose was to not only stop the destabilization of other Balkan countries by the numerous Serbian attacks being carried out on Kosovar Albanians, but also to arrest and put a stop to the numerous violations against international law, as well as the violations being carried out against humanity, as being a part of the so called 'ethnic cleansing' that had been organized in that country. The then President of the United States, Bill Clinton, stated that he felt that he had a 'moral responsibility' to put a stop to or to oppose crimes carried out against humanity, and to oppose religious cleansing and ethnic cleansing, and the mass and completely unjustified killings that went along with it.

What all this means today is that the strict distinction between law enforcement agencies and security issues are becoming more and more blurred and indistinguishable as time goes by, and this has become very evident in several instances wherein the numerous and different approaches to transnational issues seem to have become quite confusing, and also unproductive as a direct result. One example of this phenomenon was the incident in….....

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