Sobering Intelligence

Canada's senior RCMP officer is spending some very restless nights of late. So he would have us believe. For he has shared with the public in Canada the fascinating reality that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is currently investigating seven suspected terrorist plots of an extremely perturbing nature, so much so that Assistant Commissioner Mike McDonell claims just thinking about the situation is enough to "keep me awake at night".

The cynic in me wonders why this kind of enormously troubling information is being fed to the public. Isn't it better to keep this information close to the intelligence community's proverbial bullet-proof vest? Why alert potential malefactors? Unless there's a move, a rather flat-footed one, to alarm Canadians and their lawmakers to the point where they're willing, even eager, to pry open the coffers and provide an understaffed anti-terror unit with more funding to make them more effective...?

Perhaps, on reflection, not. Mr. McDonell tells us that these carefully observed cases are "spread right across the country", each being matched in scale to the 2006 apprehended insurrections of 18 Toronto-area people in their suspected plot to bomb federal buildings, and more. Of course, 7 of those alleged perpetrators of terror have since been released from prison, as a result of police work that, albeit diligent on behalf of public safety, failed to assemble sufficient evidence against the accused.

And, on further reflection, why would we think to doubt the professional insider knowledge, experience and trepidation voiced by this senior RCMP officer? The facts being the facts. These seven cases of which he speaks represent a minuscule proportion of the 848 national security cases currently under investigation. Now there's food for scary thought, huh? The assistant commissioner of the RCMP happened to be addressing an Ottawa conference on critical infrastructure protection.

"What we're onto scares us", he stated; elaborating, "What we're not onto really scares us." You?!! How about us? Thanks a whole bunch. You're the guys whose expertise, experience and dedication the lot of us depend on, fella. All right, I get it, you're talking about the magnitude of the problem, the vexing reality that these are Canadians, for heavens sake, who are spending their time and their energies fomenting plots to commit murder and mayhem in Canada, upon other Canadians.

That is worrying, and frightfully sobering, no doubt about it. He explained that since September 11, 2001, the RCMP's specific national security caseload ballooned exponentially, seeing the force having to beef up its capabilities, "borrowing people from here, there and everywhere, there's just that much work out there. It's a no-risk environment. Our people are running at the limit."

"No risk"? How does that work? "What we're facing" he explained further, "is a violent Islamist born-again social movement" whose membership it would appear, is comprised for the most part of young, second- or third-generation immigrants (Hey, guess what? if they're second- and third-generation, they're not immigrants. Their parents were; the suspects themselves are born of immigrant-stock, solid Canadians.)

The investigators identify these malcontents slipping into psychopathy, as secular, non-al-Qaeda-affiliated, members of a disaffected minority agreeing that Canadian society has no place for them, and they have no sympathy with Canadian society. The conclusion being that these clusters of social deviants, feeling no allegiance to the country and nursing festering grievances clutch at opportunities to secure revenge.

"I look at them as terrorist wannabes", Mr. McDonell explained helpfully. "Being a wannabe does not make them any less dangerous; in fact, I would argue it makes them more dangerous. Not ideologically motivated, they are emotionally motivated, motivated by images: rapes, murders, arrests creating moral outrage. This all adds up to making them extremely difficult to identify and their behaviours difficult to predict.

"And in my experience, the realization that they have been identified and that we're onto them, only emboldens and legitimizes them. That doesn't slow them down." No, I wonder why that might be? They've grown up in an atmosphere of egalitarian opportunities, with the assurance that their individual rights and freedoms are guaranteed them under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

They've watched carefully as suspects of terror have been released by a judiciary that bends over backwards to ensure that no errors are made in incarcerating the innocent. Erring on the saintly side of caution, the judicial system looses back into society men nursing their grudges against everything and anything that smacks of democratic liberal values. While they themselves take utmost advantage of those liberal assurances of justice.

It's like the little hoodlum in the neighbourhood who gathers late at night in small gangs with others of his ilk, to pilfer, to destroy public property, to beat up on some unsuspecting late-night ambler or hooker, knowing that even if their identity is discovered and they're arrested, charged and stand trial, as minors they'll be handled with kid gloves. So, fellow night travellers - let's roll!

It's nice to know that CSIS and the RCMP are getting their acts together so that they're a matched act, sharing intelligence and working in tandem to protect us poor cowering citizens. And then that little homily about how difficult this work is, how well balanced decisions must be, lest all that slugging sleuthing come to naught - as, indeed, happens from time to time; the seven dismissed Toronto terror suspects, a case in point.

For our diligent security agents and national police must act to protect the public when they suspect that a terror strike is close. Yet, if they act too soon, before sufficient evidence has been gathered, of a court-admissible variety, they blow their case. The pain of it all.