Search: “afghanistan”

Terrorism is a dirty, dangerous business.  Terrorists are nasty people who  engage in nasty acts.  To thwart attacks you have to work with sources and groups whose reputations are, shall we say, unsavoury.  As former CSIS Deputy Director Jack Hooper once said, however indelicately, “sometimes you have to take the ugly girl to the dance”. […]

I had the pleasure last week of hearing former Canadian Senator Hugh Segal give a talk at an event sponsored by the Canadian International Council on his book ‘Two Freedoms: Canada’s global future‘. He spoke of the famous ‘freedoms’ first put forward by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941: freedom of worship, freedom of […]

There sure seems to be a lot of hand wringing over travel these days.  We have had two bans imposed by the US, one ridiculous (the generic ban on anyone coming from 6 Muslim countries) and one more realistic, albeit still open to question (the ban on electronic devices for passengers boarding aircraft in 10 […]

I see that Martin McGuinness died the other day. Mr. McGuinness was an Irish republican, a member of the Sinn Fein political party and, until he left politics in part because he was stricken with cancer, the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland from 2007 to early 2017. He was also, according to some, a […]

Last week news came out that two grassroots organisations in Minneapolis had received between them over $600,000 to do CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) work in the state of Minnesota, as part of a $10 million disbursement by the US Department of Homeland Security in what has been called an ongoing, but controversial, programme.  Minneapolis is […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]