Earlier this year Ford told The Guardian that the "Swedish model" of anti-prostitution laws in Northern Ireland would also be unworkable because the devolved government at Stormont has no powers to use anti-terrorist telephone bugging operations.
They include complaints about restrictions on the correspondence of prisoners, inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists, telephone tapping, detention of mental patients, criminal laws prohibiting homosexual acts between consenting adults and birching by judicial order.
(The Israeli security services have managed to kill at least one prominent terrorist with an exploding telephone).
The police and security services face obvious difficulties in foiling the threat, lacking the advantage offered by others affiliated to known terrorist organisations who make telephone calls and send emails to each other, often in a surprisingly wide sphere, which can be intercepted.
Mr. Yasin maintained the Jersey City apartment where the terrorists received mail, made telephone contacts in Iran and Pakistan and bought and helped mix the bomb chemicals.
And a text-and-graphics message began to circulate, via the mobile telephones of terrorist sympathisers throughout the Middle East, showing an aeroplane crashing into a skyscraper with the caption: "It hit and did not miss" in Arabic.Less free societies are in many ways less vulnerable.
While stressing that the Real IRA bomb plot could not have been prevented, the ombudsman, Dr Michael Maguire, said the Royal Ulster Constabulary's anti-terrorist unit withheld the telephone numbers of dissident republican suspects and other intelligence matters to the police investigating Omagh.
"There's no place else you can house these terrorists," he said in a telephone interview Wednesday, adding some former detainees have re-engaged in terrorist activity.
He was accused of arranging and participating in three-way telephone calls connecting terrorist leaders around the world to further the group's activities.
One has been its steadfast refusal to grant Mr Bush powers to listen in to the telephone conversations of terrorist suspects without the inconvenience of having to get a court warrant.
His crew speaks with old lions of the Algerian resistance, with aging militants of the European new left and even with Carlos himself, the mysterious Venezuelan terrorist mastermind who chats by telephone from a French prison.
