Canadians seem to have a love-hate relationship with their security and law enforcement agencies. They rightfully demand to be kept safe and want their spies and cops to stop terrorism and serious crime before it happens. At the same time they sometimes express horror at the methods used to guarantee that safety. I am fully […]
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This piece originally appeared in The Hill Times on December 11 (http://www.hilltimes.com/2017/12/11/death-terrorists-necessary-not-necessarily-death/127716) All is fair in love and war, or so the saying goes. Except that nothing is usually fair in either, especially when it comes to war. We ought to have learned over the several millennia that we have been killing each other on […]
This article appeared in The Hill Times on December 4, 2017 Canada is a nation of immigrants. After all, each and every one of us, with the exception of our First Nations, an immigrant or the offspring of immigrants, whether we can trace our families back to the 16th century or the 21st. Among many […]
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Was Charles Manson a terrorist?
The word ‘terror’ is a very powerful one that tries to describe, insofar as language can, a very powerful emotion. Terror is ultimate fear, a heightened sense of threat to oneself that can freeze one’s ability to react and cloud one’s ability to use reason to get out of a highly dangerous situation. It is […]
This blog appeared in The Hill Times on November 20, 2017 (http://www.hilltimes.com/2017/11/20/can-canadians-trust-csis-help-keep-us-safe/125620) This piece was never going to be an easy one to write. The organisation where I proudly worked for over 15 years – CSIS – is now the subject of a $35 million lawsuit by five employees alleging racism, Islamophobia and homophobia. Canadians […]
This piece appeared in the online edition of The Ottawa Citizen on November 27, 2017 (http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/gurksi-why-parliament-needs-a-dose-of-intelligence) At long last Canada is getting some serious oversight for its intelligence agencies. Well behind most of our closest allies, including the US and the UK, the Trudeau government has created the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians […]
Don’t say I didn’t warn you, because I did (here is the blog post in case you did not see it first time). Yet another person is planning to sue the Canadian government for its ‘complicity’ in alleged abuse in connection with a counter terrorism investigation. An Algerian citizen, Djamel Ameziane, says that Canadian security […]
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How one boy became a terrorist
Terrorism is very simple and very complicated at the same time. Its simplicity comes from the set of axioms that underlie every terrorist and every terrorist group. We can summarise terrorism in three compact phrases: My people are suffering. I/we know who is responsible for the suffering. I/we need to use violence to stop the […]
Years ago I attended an International Studies Association (ISA) conference in New Orleans and found myself in a small room at a hotel listening to a former CIA guy give a talk on something or other under the rubric of the ‘Intelligence Studies Group’ (or something to that effect). I do not remember what his […]
It has now been almost 24 hours since a man in a Chevy Malibu drove up to an Edmonton police officer doing traffic duty outside a CFL game, struck him at some speed, knocking him in the air, and proceeded to stab him several times before fleeing. The suspect later was stopped in what appeared […]