Search: “9/11”

CVE – short for Countering Violent Extremism – gets a bad rap sometimes, and the criticism is not always unwarranted.  The term has come to mean whatever people want it to mean as its remit expands into all kinds of areas of social engineering and capacity building.  Many movements have received funding from governments by […]

It is natural for like to gravitate to like.  We tend to associate with people that look like us, think like us, have the same fundamental beliefs as us.  We also tend to read news items with which we agree, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias.  There is probably something to do with evolution behind […]

Here we go again. The fact that Alexandre Bissonnette was able to get a gun, walk into a mosque, slaughter innocent people and not be detected is a failure. On whom? On everyone – CSIS, the RCMP, la police de la ville de Quebec, the Surete, the government of Canada, average Canadians for not standing […]

In the wake of the tragic events in Quebec City Sunday evening there is much more that we don’t know than what we do know. We now know the identity of the one suspect as well as those who lost their lives.  We have some idea of what transpired and when.  But we have nothing […]

Well, if there was any doubt about what a Trump presidency means for the US, and by extension for all of us, over the next four years there is little doubt now.  In the first week alone a flurry of executive orders have been signed on a whole bunch of issues that Mr. Trump promised […]

Lawyers don’t get a good rap most of the time.  After all, wasn’t it Shakespeare who wrote in Henry VI, Part 2 “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”.  A tad harsh that. I’m not sure what it is exactly that elicits such anger and fury when it comes to lawyers.  Is […]

The list of “causes” of violent radicalisation and terrorism never seems to end.  First it was “they spring from poverty”, then “they are all mentally ill”, then “they feel alienated and marginalised from society”, then…  As if any one driver explained every case of an individual taking up a terrorist banner.  You would have thought […]

I have just finished watching a very interesting film, the 2012 drama The Company You Keep.  Starring Robert Redford, Susan Sarandon, Shia LaBoeuf and Julie Christie and based on a novel by Lem Dobbs, it tells the story of the Weather Underground (WU), a violent left wing group that came out the Students for a […]

I have just returned from Oslo where I was thrilled to catch up with one of my favourite terrorist experts, Thomas Hegghammer.  Thomas and his colleagues at the FFI – Norway’s Defence Research Establishment – have published some amazing work over the last decade or so and I have personally learned much from them. When […]

I know for sure that this blog is going to raise some hackles, especially among my US friends and colleagues.  Why?  Because I am going to argue that the current US counter terrorism architecture is inadequate to deal with the threat and needs a serious overhaul.  The solution I am proposing, however, will go against […]