Search: “Terrorists”

I don’t get it.  We make a big deal of terrorism these days, too big in my opinion, but we have collectively decided that terrorism is a serious threat (which it is) and that we need to deal with it. Part of our response is making sure organisations like CSIS and the RCMP have enough […]

Before this piece goes any further I need to spell out that I am not a big fan of the use of force unless absolutely necessary (and when necessary it is best to use it wisely while still protecting the lives of the force wielders).  Clearly it is required in some situations but if public […]

When most people think about terrorism and terrorists they probably go immediately to explosives, suicide vests, firearms and,  increasingly, the use of cars and vans.  Attacks in which these ‘tools’ are used are ubiquitous and have become a scourge in far too many countries.  Nary a day goes by without news about an incident somewhere […]

There is a theory out there that killing terrorists, especially those in leadership positions, acts to put a damper on violent extremism, especially for those not quite committed to the cause.  The idea is that if wannabes see that joining a group leads to being targeted by an airstrike or a drone or special forces […]

When we come across a phenomenon that is new and strange to us we often struggle to gain an understanding.  What we are seeing or hearing is beyond our realm of experience and hence our ‘comfort zone’, and we don’t have a readily available framework to make sense of it.  As a result we have […]

What happened in Barcelona last week has taken some  interesting twists and turns.  A heinous act that we all thought was yet another quasi-random example of ‘vehicular terrorism’ (Nice, Berlin, Stockholm, London, Charlottesville…) has become a carefully planned albeit badly executed plot.  We thought that the use of a van was the original intent but […]

The other day I had lunch with an old friend who, like me, worked in the Canadian intelligence community.  We had  a wide-ranging chat over a number of issues – Donald Trump, what each of us was up to these days – but as inevitably happens when two people with our backgrounds get together the […]

The carnage unfolding in Barcelona as I type is getting to be depressingly familiar.  An individual drives a vehicle (car, van, 18-wheeler) into an unsuspecting crowd of people, strewing them like bowling pins.  Innocent people are injured, some horribly, and some die (maybe mercifully quickly or agonisingly slowly).  While no group has yet to claim […]

A lot of people are very worried about the rise of the far right these days in light of what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia on the weekend, at least based on the number of articles and op-ed pieces that I have come across in my news scanning as well as the number of media interviews […]

A year ago Canada dodged a terrorist bullet when the almost 25-year old Muslim convert Aaron Driver climbed into a cab outside his sister’s home in Strathroy, a small town not quite 40 km from London, Ontario, set off an explosive device that didn’t do a lot of damage to either himself or the taxi, […]