I remember my very first day as an ‘insider’ in the Canadian intelligence community as if it were yesterday. It was July 13,1983. I had moved to Ottawa from my hometown of London (Ontario) to accept a job at CSE – Communications Security Establishment, Canada’s signals intelligence agency. I had already been accorded a top […]
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On this day in 2006, four gunmen attacked the US Embassy in Damascus, storming the compound with grenades and automatic weapons before being repelled by Syrian security forces.
OK, OK, I am a little sensitive when it comes to articles on CSIS. I did work there for 15 years after all and was (and still am) very proud of what I and my colleagues did to help keep Canadians safe. No, we were not perfect but I think we did our best. So […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on August 26, 2019. These days when we read or think about terrorism we tend to go in two directions. Either we think about terrorist groups: Al Qaeda, Islamic State, the Taliban, Boko Haram, Al Shabaab, etc. Or we talk about ‘lone wolves’ even if that term is […]
There is so much that has gone awry in the so-called war on terrorism that a complete list is probably uncompilable – and certainly too much for a blog piece. I have already made many arguments as to why this is not a good way to view or frame our efforts at preventing or thwarting […]
Terrorism: plus ca change (part 1)
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9) For many in the post 9/11 world it may seem as if terrorism is something new – and terrible. We are constantly inundated with news about attacks here and attacks there, sometimes […]
FaceBook has pissed a lot of people off lately. If it is not their use of your data (which, by the way, you gave freely to the company) it is their inability to prevent or take down extremist material from their platform in a timely fashion or sanction those seeking to circumvent the democratic process […]
He’s back!!!! Just when you thought – or at least when the US President thought (hey, at least he didn’t say, er I mean tweet, ‘Mission Accomplished!!’) – that Islamic State (IS) was yesterday’ problem, lo and behold a video appears in which the leader of the terrorist group and ex-‘Caliph’ (of a pretend ‘Caliphate’) […]
The Muslim Brotherhood (or MB as it is often abbreviated to, not to be confused with MBS, which is Muhammad bin Salman, or ‘Mister Bone Saw’, Saudi Arabia’s powerful king-in-waiting) has been around for a long time – since the 1920s. It is a political party infused with Islamic principles that seeks to govern by […]
For those who have been following me over the years you know that the title of this blog is a little facetious. I have been arguing for a long time that the phrase ‘the war on terrorism’ is not helpful and should be dropped. Hell, I even wrote a book about it! Still, even I […]
