Is Canada Next?
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Posted by CCD in Business Report on 18:12:49 2005/09/10
by Paul Tuns
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Just a matter of where and when
The July 7 blasts in the London tube and in a double-decker bus on the street above that killed at least 55 and injured more than 700 may have finally awakened Canada to the possibility that it, too, may, be the target of terrorist attacks.
Despite the fact that Canada is a haven for terrorists and that there are holes in the nation's security blanket, Canadians have long thought themselves immune from terrorist attacks.
Whether it was the realization that Canada is the only nation on Osama bin Laden's November 2002 list of Christian countries that Al Qa'eda operatives and other Islamofascists should target that had not yet been hit, or whether our historic connections to England made the London attacks seem a little closer to home, the Canadian public and government seemed to finally open their eyes to the terrorist danger.
That Canada is a target is not news, yet Canadians did not seem to notice that this country had been mentioned on the bin Laden tape until the London bombings. In that tape, the Al Qa'eda leader warned that the United States and her allies Australia, Spain, the United Kingdom and Canada should be targets.
The U.S., UK and Spain were hit in high-profile attacks, while Australians have been attacked in Indonesia at a Bali resort popular with Australian tourists in 2002 and at the Australian embassy in Jakarta in 2004.
Canada is the only nation on that list that has not been attacked. Ominously, the bin Laden tape was again being circulated on several fundamentalist Mulsim websites in the days after the London attacks.
Some pundits and politicians continued to believe that Canada was safe because we did not send troops to Iraq. Howard Moscoe, a Toronto city councillor and chair of the Toronto Transit System, joked that Canada has nothing to worry about because "we have no troops to pull out of Iraq" and "the terrorists would have to find Toronto first."
Alastair Gordon, president of the Canadian Coalition for Democracies (CCD), said that whether a group of people are attacked by Islamic terrorists has nothing to do with Iraq or Afghanistan. He noted that many innocents in countries that have nothing to do with American Middle Eastern policy are the victims of Islamist terror, including hundreds of farmers in Thailand, the murder of 300 schoolchildren in Beslan, Russia, the ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Kashmir, and countless other attacks around the world.
As the "Winds of Change" website has noted, Al Qa'eda has killed at least 4,895 innocent people and injured in addition 12,345 more in 16 countries since 1998. Told of these numbers, Gordon suggests it is folly to imagine Canada can long elude an attack. "Involvement with U.S. foreign policy has no relationship with being attacked by Islamic terrorists." he said. "They hate our way of life." Liberal Senator Colin Kenny, chair of the Senate committee on National Security and Defence, wondered whether London caught the attention of Canadians, noting "Canada is the only country on the Al Qa'eda list that hasn't been hit yet."
Anne McLellan, the deputy prime minister and minister for public safety, has finally taken notice of the threat of terrorism. She told a security conference in Toronto held the week following the London attacks that Canada was not psychologically prepared for a terrorist attack on our own soil. She said that too many Canadians hold the view that because we were not involved in Iraq, somehow Canada is immune from the threat of terrorism, and urged greater vigilance: "We need to be constantly checking our systems, doing exercises and rehearsing."
Gordon said that he does not know "if psychological preparedness matters." He added, "What matters is prevention. Everything else is a red herring."
He said Canada urgently needs to take steps to prevent terrorist attacks, and that starts with "observing, arresting and deporting Islamist agitators."
He also said if people are unprepared for terrorism, it is because the government has not demonstrated they are serious about capturing, prosecuting and deporting terrorists.
The government's own intelligence agency would seem to confirm that analysis. According to a report from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), there are 50 terrorist groups in Canada, including Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Force 17 and Egyptian al Jihad. While there are some supporters of the Irish Republican Army, and it is suspected that the headquarters for the Tamil Tigers is in suburban Toronto, most groups on the CSIS list are Islamist groups. CSIS called the presence of such groups "a direct threat to Canada."
Such findings are not terribly surprising. In his 2004 book Cold Terror: How Canada Nurtures and Exports Terrorism Around the World, National Post terrorism specialist Stewart Bell found that Canada was "an extremely effective base from which to spread terror throughout the world." Terrorists exploit Canada's open immigration rules, lax refugee system, laws that are ineffective at shutting down charities and ethnic associations that serve as fronts for terrorist groups, and political leadership that utterly fails to draw a line in the sand on terror.
Bell stressed that while Canada has "relatively competent" police and intelligence agencies, they are not given the right tools to be effective. While the RCMP has done a good job of monitoring terrorist groups, there has not been the political will to put them out of business by deporting or prosecuting terrorists the same point that the CCD's Gordon made.
Gordon said the "application of common sense from this government to protect us from terrorism is non-existent." Terrorists know this and make decisions about fundraising, recruiting and activities based on the clear signals from Ottawa that they will not be in any immediate legal jeopardy. What is becoming increasingly clear is that all the elements that make Canada a haven for international terrorists also contributes to the domestic danger.
While McLellan highlighted a reactive response to terrorism (checking our systems and rehearsing for emergencies), Bell and Gordon advocate a more proactive response that prevents terrorism by punishing and removing terrorists.
But Canada even lags in prevention, as the security shortcomings have been well documented. Both the auditor general and the Senate standing committee on National Security and Defence have both found serious problems with the government's anti-terror plans.
In March 2004, in the wake of the Adscam scandal, Auditor General Sheila Fraser released another damning report, this one on Ottawa's inaction on addressing national security concerns. She highlighted the vulnerability of Canada's ports and airports to terrorist attacks, especially with regard to those who work there. She found that 5.5 percent of a sample of airport employees had possible criminal connections, a flag for national security concerns. If extrapolated to the entire airport workforce, there would be 4,500 employees with possible criminal connections the implications being that employees are not being properly screened, and those with criminal connections may also be tied to terrorist groups.
Senator Kenny's Security and Defence committee has released several reports over the last three years raising concerns about the country's lack of preparedness for terrorist attacks. In December 2004, Kenny released the 2005 edition of the Canadian Security Guide Book, which highlighted the same concerns Fraser drew attention to: improperly guarded and underguarded borders, and vulnerable ports and airports. In one example, he noted that Canada's ports of entry were jeopardized by the disappearance of 1,127 uniforms or uniform items belonging to Canadian airport screeners over a nine-month period, including 91 security badges.
Kenny's committee also alleges that the government is "cutting corners on intelligence." This seems to confirm Fraser's findings that nearly $9 billion in anti-terrorism money is not ending up where it is supposed to go, and that there are intelligence gaps resulting from fiscal mismanagement and oversight confusion. Kenny says the problem is not merely money but training; he said it can take years to properly train intelligence officers, but that there is no commitment to train a sufficient number of analysts.
Fraser's report also found other problems with the government's response to 9-11. Fraser said the official watch lists of criminals and terrorists were outdated, and that such information was not being shared among departments so that, for instance, the list of 25,000 lost and stolen passports each year is given to front-line border officers. She concluded, "These matters are serious and need to be addressed."
Although McLellan admitted that Ottawa could be doing more, her ministry of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness points to its publication "An Overview of Canada's Counter-Terrorism Arrangements" to highlight what is being done. The overview outlines communications protocols and which minister is responsible for what under different circumstances, but it is all rather mundane, day-to-day issues of what happens within government. None of it makes Canadians safer; it only assigns responsibilities if a terrorist attack were to occur.
To the CCD's Gordon, that reinforces the idea that, at best, Ottawa is ready to react to attacks and not prevent them. While he does not consider the Martin Liberals serious about tackling the issue of terrorism because to do so would require a politically incorrect honesty that would alienate their core of Muslim voters, he would suggest that if Ottawa wanted to prevent terrorism it should stamp out its root cause Islamic fundamentalism and the hatred it engenders. He urged Ottawa to apply hate laws to deal with preachers of hate such as Younus Kathrada, who teaches at the Dar al Madinah Islamic Society's information centre in East Vancouver and who preaches that Jews are "monkeys" and "swine," exhorting followers to kill Jews and infidels.
Gordon said Canada must also stop repatriating into Canada Al Qa'eda families such as the Khadrs. He said that the immigration system had to be fixed, including imposing higher standards on refugee claims from countries known to incubate terrorism.
Dave Harris, former chief of strategic planning for CSIS, agrees. He told a recent disaster-management conference that Canada needs "to get a grip on our disgraceful immigration policies because we don't know what radicals are coming in."
Gordon adds another, perhaps unpopular, measure: Canada must recognize "that we are at war" and "invoke a type of war measures act in which we would accept some temporary suspension of civil rights, as opposed to more permanent suspension of civil rights that comes with terrorist bombings, death and the loss of freedom."
For Gordon, until such measures are enacted to prevent terrorists from coming into Canada and operating freely here, it is only a matter of time until they successfully kill a massive number of innocents.
"When we are scraping up bodies in Toronto, we know today that the killers will be Muslim and that they will be incited to commit these atrocities in mosques or Muslim community centres." Gordon said we have the power to clamp down on such incitement, but it remains clear that McLellan's tough new tone notwithstanding, the political will is still not there.
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