Category: Perspectives

Terrorists are hateful people, of that there is no doubt.  What they hate varies based on the underlying ideology of the group to which they belong or through which they derive their inspiration and yet there are similarities at times.  Most of them hate society or governments or policies or something else and have concluded […]

Once in a while I come across (or, in this case, have someone point me in the right direction) a story related to terrorism that surprises even  me, a 30-year grizzled veteran of intelligence and counter terrorism.  I saw a lot in my time at CSIS and had the incredibly amazing opportunity to work on […]

The third attack in the UK in a little over two months has people panicking, and not just in Great Britain.  On March 22 a man ran over people on Westminster Bridge in downtown London, killing three and wounding 50, before exiting his car and stabbing an unarmed police officer near Parliament before he was […]

In the wake of yet another horrific – but not ‘cowardly’: the terrorists most likely knew they would die in their efforts – attack  in London, UK Prime Minister Theresa May has said ‘enough is enough‘!  She added that there was ‘too much tolerance of extremism’ in her country and that the UK’s counter terrorism […]

Terrorism is a charged term and for good reason.  The crime  evokes fear and an inability of states to keep their citizens safe from outside (or inside forces).  And fear of course is the goal of those who are behind this nature of attack.  Even if there is little agreement on how terrorism is defined […]

No Canadian is unfamiliar with the name Karla Homolka.  She was the wife, and partner in crime, of Paul Bernardo, currently serving a life sentence for the brutal sex slayings of two young women in southern Ontario in the early 1990s.  Ms. Homolka only got a lesser punishment because of a controversial side deal with […]

There is a famous line in the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz where the protagonist Dorothy, who has just  landed in a strange country courtesy of a tornado, looks around and tells her dog Toto “we’re not in Kansas anymore”.  That sentence has been used countless times over the decades and has come […]

Here we go again.  I have lost track of how many articles I have read over the last few days all written in an accusatory tone that when you distill it comes down to a very simple claim: British intelligence should have known that Salman Abedi was a terrorist and should have stopped him before […]

Terrorism is a dirty, dangerous business.  Terrorists are nasty people who  engage in nasty acts.  To thwart attacks you have to work with sources and groups whose reputations are, shall we say, unsavoury.  As former CSIS Deputy Director Jack Hooper once said, however indelicately, “sometimes you have to take the ugly girl to the dance”. […]

Donald Trump promised during his presidential campaign that if elected to the highest office in the land that he would do things differently.  No more Washington business as usual, he said.  This was welcomed by many who are convinced that the capital, and by extension the government, had fallen into paralysis and inefficiency.  What better […]