Declaring ‘victory’ over a terrorist group/terrorism may be a nice sound bite, but it is rarely accurate.
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What do you remember of the dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile? Even if you are not well versed in Latin American history you are bound to know that his reign, from 1973 to 1990, was not good. Thousands of opponents, dismissed as ‘Communists’ or ‘leftists’, were killed, tens of thousands were probably tortured and close […]
In case you didn’t notice – or don’t care – today marks the 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution. It was this day in 1979 that the Ayatollah Khomeini-led revolt against the Shah of Iran consolidated victory in what became known as the Dah-e-fajr (the ‘ten days of dawn’ in Farsi, the period between Khomeini’s […]
There is an old saying “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar”. It means that if you want to exert influence and win people over it is better to use nice rather than nasty means. US President Trump has clearly never read this saying (from what I hear he doesn’t read, period, and […]
Well, the Saudis may have really put their foot in it this time. The mystery surrounding the disappearance of vocal Saudi critic and journalist Jamal Kashoggi at the Kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul ten days ago is deepening. Saudi claims that he left of his own accord are laughable: his fiancee was waiting for him outside […]
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Insecurity and security clearances
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 […]
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 […]
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State the obvious
Further to my previous blog on when to call something terrorism, there has been an ongoing debate on what to call the Islamic State (or as it is also known, ISIL or ISIS or DAESH or…). A recent op-ed in the English edition of Asharq Alawsat (see it here) calls on us to stop calling […]
On February 16, 2001 Albanian terrorists were suspected to have been behind a bus bombing in which 12 Kosovo Serbs were killed in Podujevo.
On January 3, 2015 ‘militants’ captured and killed a Tunisian police officer, stabbing him and slashing his throat as he traveled home off-duty south of Tunis.