Search: “national security”

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on December 3, 2018. Way back in medieval times there was a concept known as sanctuary.  Under this notion, those who had committed crimes could place themselves beyond the long arm of the law by hightailing it to a church or monastery, where supposedly divine law trumped the […]

I have just returned from a CVE (countering violent extremism) conference in Edmonton organised by the Organization for the Prevention of Violence (OPV), the Canadian Practitioners’ Network for the Prevention of Radicalization and Extremist Violence, and the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society (TSAS) where I gave a presentation on what we know about the extremist […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on November 26, 2018. We all know that many nations have a foreign intelligence service that sends spies here, there, and everywhere to collect the information its government tells it to in order to protect state interests. There is the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which has been featured […]

This piece appeared  in The Hill Times on November 19, 2018. I imagine that most Canadians are already very tired of this story and yet here I am weighing in on it, from the perspective of national security.  To sum up this debacle, not that I think anyone does not know the salacious details, MP […]

This piece appeared  in The Ottawa Citizen (online) on November 12, 2018. I never knew my maternal grandfather.  He emigrated to Canada in the early part of the 20th century from western Ukraine (or eastern Poland, the details on that are fuzzy) and settled in Montreal where he worked at the CPR’s Angus workshops, along […]

In the US there is a big debate going on, at least among some in Democratic Party circles, to do away with ICE – Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  In truth, parts of ICE have been involved in activities that some seen as inhuman such as the location, detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants who have […]

There is so much to write about when it comes to pointing out the lies, exaggerations and outright whoppers spewed by US President Trump that it is almost not worth doing anymore.  There is no challenge to it: it is like shooting fish in a barrel.  I am not suggesting that no one monitor the […]

While this may strike some people as arrogant and dismissive I have to confess that when I listen to ‘experts’ talk about national security issues in the media I first look at who is speaking. Some of those who offer opinions are journalists, others are politicians or political junkies, still others are academics. All have interesting perspectives […]

Foreign fighters are all the rage these days in Canada (hmm, ‘all the rage’ – kinda describes jihadis to a T doesn’t it?). Many, many Canadians are going ballistic over reports that some of our citizens who left our land to join Islamic State or other terrorist groups abroad have had a change of heart and […]

Canadians are justifiably angry at those among us who spat on our flag, burned their passports and left one of the world’s finest countries to join terrorist groups like Islamic State (IS). Not that the numbers are that high – a few hundred maybe compared with thousands from several European, African and Asian nations – but […]