Humans are really good at categorisation. Babies learn pretty quickly how to group different objects into sets depending on a variety of criteria – colour, texture, function, etc. This ability may actually be ingrained in us and it is believed to play a huge role in language acquisition. But sometimes our knack for categorising things […]
Search: “Syria”
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I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. Almost a year ago I wrote that the Canadian government would be placed in a difficult position should one of our citizens who chose to travel to Iraq to fight the terrorist group Islamic State alongside Kurdish forces was caught by the […]
I am a glass half full kind of guy, someone who seeks to find the positive in life. I am an optimist tinged with realism. Three decades in intelligence and 15 years in counter terrorism do tend to give one a good look at the less savoury aspects of life on this planet and as […]
It makes sense to adapt existing models to handle new phenomena where there are enough commonalities between the existing and emerging issues. I am not so sure it is easy to make that determination but if the costs and downsides of modifying approaches we already know well are low then I suppose no harm is […]
As scarcely a day goes by that we are not accosted with yet another story on a terrorist attack somewhere it is of little surprise that this form of violence has become a topic of conversation everywhere. What was once of interest to a niche market of specialists and confined to articles in little read […]
It has been yet another difficult day on the terrorism front. A truck plowed into a crowd of Christmas shoppers in Berlin, killing at least nine. The Russian Ambassador to Turkey was killed by an off-duty police officer at an art gallery in Ankara. And three people were shot outside an Islamic Centre in the Swiss […]
I have just returned from the 2016 Anti-Terrorism and Active Shooter conference in Niagara Falls where I was honoured to have been asked to open the 2-day event with a talk on Western foreign fighters. The conference, now in its fourth or fifth year, has rapidly become a go-to event and one of the premier […]
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 […]
In the wake of a Canadian Federal Court decision that my former employer – the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) – illegally retained data that it had collected legally under a court warrant, the fur is really flying. Every major Canadian media outlet has been all over this story and the reporting has been uniformly […]
In many instances historically amnesties were offered to former combatants in the interests of getting the violence to stop and giving a society a chance to rebuild itself. A really good example where amnesty seemed to work would be in South Africa where it was part of that nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission after Apartheid […]