Search: “Al Qaeda”

Sigh. Another day another mass shooting in the US. Except that this time there were two mass shootings, back to back. On August 3 in El Paso, Texas a man opened fire in a Walmart, killing 20 and wounding 26 and a day later in Dayton, Ohio a gunman killed nine people. More needless deaths […]

Here we go again. After more than 1,000 blogs on terrorism it is inevitable that my readers will encounter some repetition. While I have tried to keep my writings new and fresh it is perhaps – I hope! – understandable that some topics will rise to surface more than once. After all, there are simply […]

All of Canada is living through a real time manhunt as I type. Three people were killed in remote northern BC on July 15, a young American woman and her Australian travel mate as well as a 64-year old man from Vancouver. The suspects in the case, Bryer Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod, are believed to […]

Ya gotta feel for Nigeria. This West African country is, and has been for some time, beset with all forms of violence, from organised crime to ethnic clashes to jihadi terrorism. In the latter category we have Boko Haram (BH), an Al Qaeda affiliate wannabe that has been very active since the late 2000s largely […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on July 8, 2019 If there is one buzzword that has gained a lot of ground in Canada and elsewhere in the post 9/11 period it is CVE (which stands for Countering Violent Extremism; sometimes it is also called PCVE – Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism). This field […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on June 17, 2019. It might strike the reader as odd that someone with so much invested in counter terrorism is here making the suggestion that we need to worry less about terrorism. After all, if we stopped spending so much time talking about it, wouldn’t that put […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on June 3, 2019 Canada had nothing to do with the US decision to use the anachronistic Guantanamo Bay military camp in Cuba as a highly controversial – if not internationally illegal – detention centre for suspected terrorists. That people alleged to have been linked to terrorist groups […]

Is it just me or is it starting to feel like ‘deja vu all over again’, to quote the great New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra? Did I tumble down a time wormhole only to find myself back in 2003? Are we on the cusp of going to war in the Middle East – again? […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on April 15, 2019 As all Canadians know, our country has a longstanding relationship with Afghanistan. In the aftermath of 9/11 the government decided to send our military, first special forces, then regular troops, to engage in what began as counter terrorism (CT) and ended as a combination […]