Why we will never ‘eradicate’ terrorism
OTTAWA—Scientists have made great progress in eradicating diseases that once maimed or killed millions of people. Think of smallpox. Or polio, which a few years ago was on the verge of disappearance though state instability and war allowed it to cling to life. The reason why these scourges were defeated (apparently there is a difference […]
Public Safety Canada, CSE set to start cyber-threat sharing pact with private sector
With threats like cyber-espionage and ransomware targeting businesses and governments across the world, cyber-security has never been a more stark reality for Canadian businesses. Examples like the ransomware attacks that devastated the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) earlier this year, or the more recent attack on container shipping giant Maersk, which cost it nearly […]
Omar Khadr and values in a time of ‘war’
Societal values, especially “Canadian” ones, have had recent public airings. In the 2015 election and the subsequent leadership campaign for the Conservative Party there were a variety of comments offered on the values that should be associated with Canadian society. Those debates offered little since they were largely abstractions, far removed from the preoccupations of […]
Terrorism isn’t as big as you think
LONDON, U.K.—London in March: five dead. Stockholm in April: another five dead. Manchester in May: 22 dead. London again in June, this time on London Bridge: eight dead. Barcelona in August: 14 dead. Five mass-casualty terrorist attacks in Europe in six months, and all but one (Manchester) carried out using rental trucks. Is it safe to […]
Terrorism is a public safety issue, not national security threat
The other day I had lunch with an old friend who, like me, used to work in the Canadian intelligence community. We had a wide-ranging chat over a number of issues—Donald Trump, what each of us was up to these days, etc. But as inevitably happens when two people with our backgrounds get together, the conversation […]
Now not time to divert resources to guard against alt-right terrorism
OTTAWA—A lot of people are worried about the rise of the far right these days in light of what happened in Charlottesville, Va., recently. At least that seems to be the case, based on the number of articles and op-ed pieces that I have come across in my news scanning, as well as the number […]
Afghanistan has become the endless war
LONDON, U.K.—In 2010, Barack Obama’s vice-president, Joe Biden, vowed that the United States would be “totally out” of Afghanistan “come hell or high water, by 2014.” In 2014, Obama said that he would leave about 8,000 U.S. troops there after all, and made an agreement with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani that extended their stay “until […]
Barcelona and Charlottesville: similar crimes, very different Trump responses
OTTAWA—In a scene from the 1980 classic comedy movie The Blues Brothers, the title characters are stuck in a traffic jam. The cause of the delay is a group of Nazis blocking a bridge while police restrain a heckling mob of anti-Nazi protesters. When informed by a policeman that the protesters had won a court decision authorizing […]
Barcelona-style vehicle attacks almost impossible to defend against
The carnage last week in Barcelona is getting to be depressingly familiar. An individual drives a vehicle (car, van, 18-wheeler) into an unsuspecting crowd of people, strewing them like bowling pins. Innocent people are injured, some horribly, and some die (maybe mercifully quickly or agonisingly slowly). Even before ISIS claimed responsibility, its fan boys, in the […]
How did skill save cabby from Aaron Driver?
Re: “What have we learned from the Aaron Driver case one year later?” (The Hill Times, Aug. 14, p. 13). I agree that skill and luck are needed to thwart terrorists, but I still wonder how skill played into the near death of the cabbie who by all accounts waited several minutes for Driver to […]
