Author: Phil Gurski

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on August 20, 2018 I may not be a military expert and I am certainly not as knowledgeable as Scott Taylor, whose column often appears right above mine in The Hill Times, but I am pretty sure that whenever an army deploys abroad it relies a lot on […]

I was very privileged to work in the Canadian intelligence community for more than 3 decades.  My career spanned 17 years with CSE – Communications Security Establishment, Canada’s signals intelligence agency – and 15 with CSIS – the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.  There was not a day when I could not wait to get to […]

Quick!  What is your favourite oxymoron?  Awfully good?  Peacekeeping missile?  Tight slacks?  Jumbo fried shrimp? Military intelligence? How about ‘violent vegans’? I suppose there is a wide variety of opinion on veganism in many societies ranging from admiration for their campaign to get us to eat less meat in order to save the planet to […]

Well, you have to give terrorists some credit.  They certainly have settled on a winning approach to carrying out acts of violence and causing mayhem.  And that approach is remarkably simple and easily accessed.  I am talking of course of vehicle attacks.  We have seen a lot of these lately, in Barcelona, in Stockholm, in […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on August 6, 2018 Well, it has been a week since the mass shooting in Toronto’s Greektown and we have been subject to countless voices in the media as to what happened, what could have been done (if anything) to prevent it, and what it all means to […]

Charitable institutions are usually seen as good things in society.  Ones we normally think of – the Red Cross, Amnesty International, the Canadian Cancer Society, etc. – play a very important role in raising money and spending it on the most needy: people suffering in war zones, prisoners of conscience, those suffering from serious disease.  […]

Alex Jones is many things.  A social media star.  A conspiracy theorist.  An inspiration to many.  A passionate defender of free speech.  A king-size jerk.  A very dangerous man.  I suppose which one of these descriptions of him appeal to you will depend on whether you support what he does.  Put simply, what he does […]

You gotta hand it to MBS, the power behind the throne in Saudi Arabia.  Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, son of the current king, has sure made a name for himself of late.  Letting women drive.  Promising a new future for his country with shiny impressive technological cities and the like. Corruption has been nipped in […]

Shortly after I joined CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) in January 2001 I attended a presentation by a friend who was working at the Canadian embassy in Kenya in the late 1990s.  He related that he was at home on August 7, 1998 when a massive blast took him and a colleague off their feet […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on July 30, 2018 In the wake of an attack, whether it be terrorist in nature or a mass shooting/stabbing/vehicle ramming incident, we often read comments and statements such as the following: no one saw this coming it was completely unpredictable (and by extension unpreventable) who would have […]