Search: “Terrorists”

Breaking news out of Afghanistan is that the Taliban and US have reached a tentative deal in which the former agrees not to allow Afghanistan to be used by terrorist groups (wait! Aren’t the Taliban themselves terrorists? Read on….) and the latter would agree to pull its forces out, in the country since 2002, in […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on January 21, 2019 Third parties are an interesting bit of Canadian political history. I am not well-versed in the blood sport of politics and thus have no intention of pretending to be a pundit on these matters. What I do find intriguing, however, is how certain parties […]

Here we go again. It must be that time of the week to take a swipe at the RCMP, or CSIS, or CSE or (fill in the blank ___) police services. A high-profile arrest is made or an action taken and everyone is a critic over what was done, what wasn’t done, etc. Everyone suddenly […]

If you were to ask the average citizen, the eponymous ‘man in the street’ (as sexist as that may sound), about religious intolerance, hate and violent extremism and which particular faith, if any, is most guilty of these crimes, I would be very, very surprised if the answer you did not receive is ‘Islam’. We […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on January 14, 2019 I realize that CSIS is not well understood by most Canadians and this is of course partly by design. It is, after all, an intelligence service and it has secrets it does not want to disclose. What intelligence agency flings its doors open for […]

All the jokes about civil servants aside, governments around the world do have some useful functions. Governments have the bodies and funds to look into important matters and provide advice to their citizenry on a whole host of things. Whether we are talking about food safety (the recent romaine lettuce scare in North America is […]

We Canadians may be shy folk (at least when put next to our southern neighbours) but we also tend to point out, nauseatingly perhaps, when one of ours makes it big on the international scene. Think Saturday Night Live, created by Canadian Lorne Michaels and featuring many, many Canucks over the years: Martin Short, Mike […]

According to breaking news a Canadian, Guleid Abdihakim, has been arrested by Kenyan police in connection with the attack on a hotel/office complex in Nairobi that killed at least 21 people and was claimed by the Somali terrorist group Al Shabaab. It is vitally important to stress that Mr. Abdihakim has been arrested and is […]

Writing as an old spy, I have despaired of late on how the Canadian justice system has dealt with national security cases, and more specifically terrorism cases. The BC loser couple John Nuttall and Amanda Korody had their jury guilty verdict overturned twice on appeal after they placed pressure cooker bombs on the grounds of […]