Search: “russia”

On my first trip to Singapore many years ago I was struck by signs placed throughout the airport that warned of severe penalties for drug trafficking.  If my memory isn’t failing me, I seem to recall that those signs didn’t mince words.  They made it quite clear that the penalty for peddling in illegal drugs […]

Another successful terrorist attack, another inquiry as to why it was not stopped.  This is becoming a common occurrence at least in Western societies where the exigencies of liberal democracies demand accountability. There may very well be post facto reviews in non-democracies like Russia and Saudi Arabia as well but we do not tend to […]

I suppose that in many ways none of this should be unexpected.  Its obviousness does not make it right, however.  There are lots of things that we do not question that are nevertheless the wrong way of looking at things. I am referring here to the belief that we are at ‘war with terrorism’.  The […]

Three cheers for Saudi Arabia!  The conservative Kingdom has ruled that women can now drive and no longer need to be accompanied by a mahram (essentially a male guardian) when they are in a car.  Many are celebrating this decision although some conservative killjoys have accused the government of ‘bending the rules of Sharia’.  Some […]

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 […]

Well, we are coming up to the six-month mark of the Donald Trump era and it is time for a reckoning.  So much print and coverage has been devoted to the Donald that I hesitate to add to this amount.  And yet there is quite a bit that bears on counter terrorism policy and strategy […]

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 […]

The President of the US is a very powerful person.  The so-called leader of the free world has a lot of influence on all kinds of issues and has a great deal of leeway in deciding what to say and do (within the system of checks and balances of course).  The current holder of office, […]

Terrorism is sure getting complicated.  The good old days, if I may call them that, were easy by comparison. Terrorists were easy to spot because they tended to chuck bombs or fire weapons at people, the larger the crowd the better.  Then we got to the airline hijacking phase in which most incidents ended relatively […]

Some potentially disturbing news on the terrorism front came out the other day in Canada. According to reports, four employees at Pierre Elliot Trudeau airport in Montreal (it used to be called Dorval) had their security clearances revoked over concerns that they had become ‘radicalised’.  The men had access to restricted areas, one had talked […]