Photo ops by leaders of states with the military are no-brainers I suppose. The president/prime minister/king/grand poobah gets on plane, flies to Lower Slobovia to meet his/her country’s soldiers serving to maintain a war/keep the peace in a faraway land, thanks them for their service, assures them that what they are doing is right, acknowledges […]
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This piece appeared in The Hill Times on December 3, 2018. Way back in medieval times there was a concept known as sanctuary. Under this notion, those who had committed crimes could place themselves beyond the long arm of the law by hightailing it to a church or monastery, where supposedly divine law trumped the […]
Here we go again. Another terrorist attack, this time in Melbourne, Australia, another chorus of ‘he was mentally ill’ and, I guess, not responsible. Last Friday (November 9) an ethnic Somali man drove to that city’s central business district with a bunch of gas cylinders turned to the open position (seeking one surmises to cause […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on October 15, 2018. There is no question that when the topic around the water cooler turns to terrorism – not that I hope or think that it often does – as far as the average citizen is concerned the particular brand of terrorism that garners the most attention […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on October 15, 2018. There is no question that when the topic around the water cooler turns to terrorism – not that I hope or think that it often does – as far as the average citizen is concerned the particular brand of terrorism that garners the most attention […]
Shortly after I joined CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) in January 2001 I attended a presentation by a friend who was working at the Canadian embassy in Kenya in the late 1990s. He related that he was at home on August 7, 1998 when a massive blast took him and a colleague off their feet […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on June 4, 2018 Carrying out a terrorism investigation is not easy. The stakes are high since many (erroneously) see terrorism as an existential, pervasive threat and no one is willing to accept failure as an option: dead bodies in our streets are not something anyone wants to […]
Do you get emails offering you massive amounts of money in exchange for a little personal information – say your bank account number? I do, every day. My spam folder is full of messages from Nigerian princes who have chosen me to share their wealth with. I am flattered by their generosity but I politely […]
A common refrain to many issues is ‘follow the money’. Whether we are talking about organised crime or campaign irregularities or other social ills it is believed that if you can establish who is paying who you can devise ways to interdict that cash flow and hamper the activities that it is supporting. If successful, […]
This piece was published in The Hill Times on May 14, 2018. I must confess that I hesitated quite a bit before putting pen to paper (fingers to keyboard?) on this topic. I was sitting in a Maple Leaf lounge at LaGuardia Airport in New York when CNN broadcast its ‘breaking news’ coverage of US […]