Search: “Al Qaeda”

Years ago when I first joined CSIS there was a veteran CT (counter terrorism) guy whom I’ll call Mike.  He had been around a fair bit and I had a great deal of respect both for his experience and his insight into Islamist extremism.  In all his time in the trenches he had seen a […]

Earlier this morning the suspect in the Berlin Christmas market attack that killed 12 and wounded dozens more was shot to death by Italian police in Milan.  An international manhunt ended successfully with the killing of Anis Amri, a Tunisian refugee who had spent time in Italy before moving on to Germany. He was known to […]

Soon to be former US President Barack Obama once famously said with respect to foreign policy “don’t do stupid shit (or” stuff” depending on your sensitivity to salty language)”.  That maxim could just have easily been applied to domestic policy.  And it is something that incoming president Donald Trump might want to pay attention to. […]

OK, it’s done.  Donald Trump has become the US’ 45th President, markets have swung wildly, people are panicking, some fear the Apocalypse.  Take a deep breath and calm down.  As the 44th President, Barack Obama, predicted last night, the sun did indeed rise this morning (even if I cannot see it in cloudy Ottawa). A […]

You have all heard of the butterfly effect, right? The idea that a very small event can have enormous implications well beyond its initial parametres.  The official definition, courtesy of Wikipedia, is “the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large […]

If there is one thing we know about terrorism it is that what we do – or what we don’t do – has a real chance of effecting what terrorist groups do.  For terrorist groups are really good at telling the world why they use violence and usually place the blame for their carnage on […]

One thing I have learned over three decades of working in intelligence and counter terrorism is that perspective matters.  As an analyst one of the gravest sins you can commit is to give in to what is called “mirror imaging”, the erroneous belief that everyone thinks like you do.  When you do that, you are […]

In the ill-named “war on terror” small victories, let alone crushing ones, are hard to find.  It seems that no matter how many terrorists we kill more rise up like the warriors that sprang from dragon’s teeth in Greek mythology and we see more attacks (one more today in Jerusalem).  So it is little wonder […]

In the Harry Potter novels the villain is known as Lord Voldemort.  He is in many ways a terrorist.  He is ideologically driven (he wants to take over the wizarding world and force everyone to conform to his way of doing things) and he uses violence to achieve his goals.  He recruits followers and tortures […]

Last week the Canadian Department of Public Safety issued its annual terrorist threat report.  You can read the whole thing here but I would like to comment on some of it in the paragraphs to follow.  The paper is unclassified and is intended to inform Canadians in a general way what the threat level is […]