I have long been fascinated by violence and our species’ propensity to use it. This interest does not stem from any personal experience of it – I grew up in a middle class southwestern Ontario home at a not too dangerous time in Canadian history – so I suppose that the draw for me stems […]
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When I used to work in counter terrorism at CSIS many analysts used to say that of all the terrorists and terrorist groups in the world, and there were far too many to monitor at any given time, the real ‘A-team’ was Hizballah. The Lebanon-based group which was created in the aftermath of the Israeli […]
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Once more into the breach
I remember my very first day as an ‘insider’ in the Canadian intelligence community as if it were yesterday. It was July 13,1983. I had moved to Ottawa from my hometown of London (Ontario) to accept a job at CSE – Communications Security Establishment, Canada’s signals intelligence agency. I had already been accorded a top […]
On this day in 2006, four gunmen attacked the US Embassy in Damascus, storming the compound with grenades and automatic weapons before being repelled by Syrian security forces.
This piece is a bit of a cheat. Rather than an entirely new thought it is a cut and paste from the introduction to my fourth book An End to the War on Terrorism, published in 2018. Given that today marks the 18th anniversary of the single greatest terrorist attack in our planet’s history I […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on September 2, 2019. It should come as a surprise to no one that people in many parts of the world lack confidence in important public institutions. Whether we are talking about governments in general or more specifically agencies such as law enforcement and security intelligence, there is […]
There is a constant battle between what are commonly called good and evil. Good in this case consists of the men and women who toil on our behalf to keep us safe: in Canada that would be the security service (CSIS), law enforcement agencies (RCMP as well as provincial and municipal police services) and others. […]
As hard as it is to believe we are approaching the 18th anniversary of 9/11. That event was for me, and many others I know, the ‘where were you when..’ time in our lives (interestingly, for my older brothers, born in 1949 and 1952, theirs was the JFK assassination: I was not quite 3 at […]
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Is Antifa a terrorist movement?
I cannot imagine that the Canadian government, or any other Western government for that matter, will try to list Antifa as a terrorist entity any time soon.
When you work in national security you do the best job you can to stop bad things from happening. If those bad things involve terrorism what you are trying to do is to prevent attacks from taking place. You identify potential terrorists, follow them, determine which ones are serious about actually doing something, run sources […]