Terror on Our Turf

[Sher]

All the information contained in this thread has been taken from the Edmonton Sun www.edmontonsun.com/SpecialSections/Terror/home.html


On a quiet street in Calgary, a man is plotting to kill you.

You will leave behind mourning family and you have led a charitable life. But these things are inconsequential. He'll revel in your death, because he has fulfilled a grand destiny.

Your individuality is unimportant. You are a westerner. Your existence offends his God and your nation, Canada, supports the U.S., which he believes has ruined his culture.

This particular man is with al-Qaida, a loosely knit terrorist organization responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which killed nearly 3,000 international citizens, destroyed the World Trade Center towers and damaged the Pentagon.

He has helped plan terrorist attacks. He has only been discussed in vague reference to two other terrorists, long since in custody. Intelligence sources will not reveal his name, citing operational security.


They also do not seem sure who he is. One pegs him as a teacher of what the west terms "Islamic fundamentalism." Others, along with a senior Muslim community member, believe he is a Palestinian who worked with Middle East aid agencies, themselves often terrorist fronts.

There are only two definite facts about this man that every Canadian can be sure of: if given the chance, he will kill as many people as he can. And he'll have plenty of help.

Across Canada and around the western world, violent dogma is being spread via the Internet and at mosques to people most willing to accept it: young men, sometimes second-or third-generation Canadians, who have been taught that unless the world accepts Islam as one true faith and removes western influence from the Middle East, they must go to war.

They are embittered by lack of opportunity or by racism, much perceived but some real. They are not common; experts believe they number in the high hundreds at most and are, by far, a minority among Muslims. They are distinguished not by piety but by violent natures.
Osama bin Laden, second from left, and his al-Qaida henchmen are shown at an undisclosed location in this television image broadcast in 2001. Because Canada is a Western country and has supported the U.S., we are at risk of attack from extermist organizations. - File photo

There are enough, however, to guarantee that for Canadians, terrorism is ever-present. As Europeans discovered more than a century ago, once terrorism has entrenched its roots, they are unmovable. You can destroy a hard target. You can immobilize a fighting force and render it ineffective. But you cannot extinguish ideals.

If we can't get rid of terrorism, we can at least be prepared for it, and on that front Canada has taken many steps. But a two-month Sun analysis indicates they have been ineffective and may even be making us more susceptible to terrorism.

Several factors have hampered our progress, including:


A decade of intelligence community funding cuts that left it scrambling to catch up to the use of the Internet and left it short of essential overseas intelligence agents.

Immigration policies that make Canada a haven for both real and phoney refugees, but affords them poor standards of living, making them susceptible to extremist propaganda.

An identity system and an electoral system that are rife with fraud and the potential for abuse.

A relationship with the U.S. that has promoted reactive instead of proactive policies, unnecessarily curbing civil liberties and dividing our society along ethnic lines;

An almost complete absence of security at public facilities that make likely targets for terror.
The intelligence community is convinced, as former RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster terms it, "it's not a matter of if, but when" we will be attacked. He cites promises by Al-Qaida and the fact that all other such targets save Italy have been hit. As recently as last year, the occasional online Al-Qaida training manual, Al-Battar, listed Canadian Christians as among the terrorist group's principle foes.

The question of whether Canada will be ready gets the same response from nearly everyone: we won't.

NO LACK OF TRYING

It won't be for a lack of trying. In the four years since 9-11, Canada has enacted wide-ranging omnibus legislation such as the Anti-Terrorism Act, along with using extreme existing legislation such as security certificate detentions under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

But when the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa brought al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden to prominence, we were already behind. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 saw western nations drop intelligence as a priority as they pursued balanced budgets.

Reid Morden was director of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, Canada's spy agency, until 1994. The intelligence community suffered during the 1990s, he says.

"What they did need - and to an extent have gotten some of - was a build-back of resources," says Morden, who is now head of the investigation into the UN Oil for Food scandal.

"There were cuts across the board in government, but in terms of both bodies and money, the intelligence community really suffered and lost about 25% of its strength.

"What makes it particularly awkward in terms of having adequate coverage on the terrorist front is that intelligence officers are not made in a day. You're talking five years plus to adequately train them.

"So not only do we need to rebuild that area, but we have to wait for it to happen."

According to its unclassified 2000 report, funding decreased to CSIS between 1993 and that year by about $70 million, and staff levels decreased 40%. RCMP were trimmed by 2,200 jobs and some $175 million in operational funding.

To the feds' credit, since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America, that funding has increased to the point where Canada's overall security budget for 2005 tops $9.5 billion, or about $1.5B higher than ever before. Much of that has gone into a six-pronged RCMP strategy that is designed to improve oversight of national ports and air carriers - slashed to the bone during the cuts - financial markets security and fraud prevention, as well as paying for various enforcement teams.


'We're looking at 2011 before we even have a new cadre of experts to analyze threats.' - Prof. Wesley Wark, a member of the federal Advisory Council on National Security.
But the damage was already done. Prof. Wesley Wark, a member of the federal Advisory Council on National Security, says the government was warned of outstanding threats that demanded more rigorous security budgets.

"The timing of the end of the Cold War intersected with the Liberal government of the day's efforts to get federal spending under control, which the public demanded," says Wark.

"It was shortsighted, because there were people saying that while that threat is gone there are others coming."

The government's direction "was clearly naive. But it fit into the Canadian mentality, the illusion that everyone likes us.

"We are driven by a greater sense of comfort of our place in international society than, say, the United States."

Instead, says Wark, "the case in favour of intelligence funding wasn't really brought to Ottawa, so the security and intelligence community as a whole suffered."

BUREAUCRATS LEARN QUICKLY

Bureaucrats quickly learn running a federal department is a battle to spend this year's budget in the hopes of justifying more next year. Those who appropriate the most money most likely to survive through next year. Retired Maj.-Gen. Lewis MacKenzie explained the practice in an interview with the Sun a few years ago, well after the cuts had started. In the military, any unspent money would be used to repave the office parking lot.

"The intelligence community - and it's hard for outsiders to grasp this - has a hard time sticking up for itself," says Wark.

"It's very leery of saying, 'We can't do the job with the money you give us'. It fears that there is simply not enough political understanding and support for intelligence work and if it pushes the case too hard, it might not only not get the money it wants, but even less."

Wark is also less flattering with respect to the impact.

"There's no question the money has been expanded exponentially but the problem is it takes a long time in intelligence to transfer money into capability," he says. "What CSIS primarily needed was a considerable increase in its ability to analyze information. It takes five years to create a junior officer and seven to 10 years to create a trained analyst.

"So we're looking at 2011 before we even have a new cadre of experts to analyze threats."

Canada is even farther behind on a technical front, he said. "And you need to invest in new technologies on pretty much a daily basis in order to keep up. What you're doing is re-engineering the intelligence community. But what you can't go through is cycles of funding, declines and increase. You have to have stable and expanding funding."

Internet terrorism expert Evan Kohlmann puts it simply: "When it comes to using the Internet (terrorists) are better than us," he says. "And perhaps the biggest reason is that the people running their media campaigns are in their 20s and 30s. The people running (western) defence policy and doing our research are in their 50s. Heck, the head of the CIA has admitted he doesn't know anything about computers."

MONEY ISN'T EVERYTHING

Inkster says money alone will never be the answer. But adequately staffing police and overseas intelligence and visa offices, where the required information to prevent attacks originates, can go a long way. So can properly trained domestic intelligence officers. Even when a Canadian is taught to believe in terrorism or converted to support it, they are likely getting direction or financing from foreign sources.

Once that happens, there must be improved communication between police agencies, says Inkster, who also sits on the national advisory council and is a former president of INTERPOL. "We have to make sure we are only letting the right people into the country in the first place.

"The better we are at gathering information, the fewer problems we will have."

The Internet has created a parallel criminal system, says Tony Cannavino, president of the Canadian Professional Police Association. "Police in this country are already so understaffed that they can't do the job with regular crime in regular cities," he points out.

"So how are they supposed to police an entirely new area of crime - which does relate to national security - with no extra resources or training?"

Cannavino's group, in tandem with the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, plans to make funding an issue again when he addresses federal hearings this fall into the efficacy of security regulations.

"We don't need to panic but we do have to realize that we need. ... that we MUST have these resources or society as a whole will suffer."

The strategy and much of the money may be in place now. But the lost time is going to be tough to make up.

[Sher]

The Canada we live in now is a little less free than it was four years ago.

As we struggle to fill the intelligence gap, we've followed a path familiar to the U.S.: the introduction of security legislation to ease pressures on the intelligence community. Whether they've been effective and necessary is debatable -- Canada's two most onerous legal provisions, for example, have yet to even be used.

Under the Anti-Terrorism Act and the Evidence Act, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association points out, Canadians could technically be arrested for supporting a revolution in a dictatorial state, such as communist China; or for financing striking workers supporting electoral protests in Ukraine.

Under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, landed immigrants can be deported without being convicted of a crime, sometimes to countries where they'll face execution, and without being told what evidence is held against them

The language of the terrorism act - currently under review by senate and commons subcommittees - encompassing "the disruption of essential services", or "a serious risk to health or safety." A peaceful protest might not intentionally cause either, but nothing says it has to be intentional.


Under regulations to curb fundraising, it's an offence to work with terrorist groups. Though the government keeps a terrorist entitities list, it is not all-inclusive. "How are we to know who and what is off limits?" asks the association brief.

Alexi Wood, the CCLU's director of public safety, says there's one compelling reason to scrap the legislation. "The question we need to ask isn't whether the federal government is using these powers, it's why they have them at all," she said.


More than 170 people were killed in a terrorist bombing attack on the Madrid transit system in March of 2004. - File photo
"The CSIS act was so broad already that it already had the power to do many of the things in the Anti-Terrorism act. What we have lost here is a layer of oversight."

CSIS actions are scrutinized by the Intelligence Review Committee. The RCMP is not. "A lot of the covert investigations going on have been shifted to other law enforcement such as the RCMP, which does not have the same oversight," she said. "That's why we're calling for a national oversight body to look at all national security and terrorism issues."

The federal government has created at least a measure of new oversight, via a cross-cultural roundtable. And the legislation's supporters cite realism: agents of the Crown are unlikely to go after domestic protesters or people who deal with Muslim businessmen.

That argument might hold more weight were it not for the case of Liban Hussein. Hussein was a new immigrant from Somalia in 2000 when he came up with two business ideas: to open a cleaning company in Toronto that could employ his family members, thereby giving him a route to sponsor them into the country; and to open a money transfer agency.

He chose Boston for the latter, and had his brother run it. He then contracted the services of Al-Barakaat, a financial conglomerate in Somalia, to actually transfer the money.

Two months later, the Somali agency was tied to al-Qaida by the U.S., and Liban Hussein joined the list of terrorist entities. That Hussein knew nothing of the ties between the financiers and Osama bin Laden was beside the point.

His assets were frozen, his brother in Boston was arrested, and the cleaning company revoked his franchise. The U.S. shared its list with other UN nations, including Canada, so Hussein became a terrorist to countries around the world.

The case was suspect; U.S. officials conceded it was possible Hussein was not aware the ties. Back home in Canada, Hussein turned himself, only to be released by a judge after the Crown produced no evidence. But his family were all laid off with the closure of the business and for nearly a year, Hussein remained persona non grata.

"It destroyed my life," he told media. "It took away everything I had worked so hard for, for my family. This shouldn't happen to anyone."

Canada refused to extradite Hussein and in August 2002 the U.S. relented to Canadian pressure and delisted him, although it refused to admit fault and stated that he was being delisted because he "disassociated" himself from terrorists.

Eventually, Hussein was given an undisclosed settlement by the Canadian government, regained his franchise and rebuilt his life. But to many, he remains a suspect. That includes some U.S. states: Massachussets, for example, includes earlier versions of the terrorist entities list on its state attorney's website, without updating any removals.


'There are things such as preventive detention and forced testimony that a number of people including myself feel have gone too far.' - Reid Morden, former director of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.
Liban Hussein feels the consequences of the 'War on Terror' daily. Other Canadians will as well, predicts Reid Morden, former director of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service. Powers such as preventive detention - in which Canadians facing no charges can be held - and forced testimony, in which people can be compelled to speak to investigators, again without charge, cross an uncomfortable boundary.

"There are things such as preventive detention and forced testimony that a number of people including myself feel have gone too far," says Morden.

"My view, certainly, was that the powers of the police and CSIS were perfectly adequate to do the job."

So adequate, in fact, that according to Justice Department statistics, the two provisions have never been used federally and compelled testimony has only been used once, during the Air India case. In fact, the Anti-Terrorism Act, which as an omnibus bill affected 17 different federal statutes, has had a limited role in fighting terrorism.

Instead, to the dismay of Amnesty International, the government has relied on existing Immigration act provisions to hold landed immigrants under security certificates. As much as it was worried by the ATA, the security certificate system frightens it more.

"The scariest part is that the individual being held doesn't get to see the evidence against them, which would seem to me to go against one of the basic principles of fundamental justice in this country," says Wood.

Sensitive information

The CCLA and other groups want a special court-appointed lawyer to be able to review the evidence, as is the case in Britain, but not be allowed to convey that information to his client. "In effect, there's be the same protection against giving out sensitive information but there would also be oversight to ensure the process is fair," says Woods.

Take the case of Adil Charkaoui. Charkaoui is a Moroccan under house arrest in Montreal as part of bail conditions. Charkaoui, who did not return calls for comment, has compared his detention to the troubles faced by Maher Arar, a Canadian handed over to the U.S. then deported to Syria despite little evidence against him.

The suspicion exists that "high risk" immigrants are deported to countries where torture is likely to obtain a confession, genuine or otherwise.

Charkaoui is getting the same public backing as Arar. Groups such as Homes Not Bombs and the Justice Coalition are demanding his security certificate be revoked.

But whether it's circumstantial or not, there is more evidence against the Moroccan. But any hearings into his arrest, detention and investigations are behind closed doors, so little of it has been supported publicly by CSIS or the RCMP.

Charkaoui has been identified by two convicted terrorists -- jailed 'Millenium Bomber' Ahmed Ressam and former Al-Qaida third-in-command Abou Zubayda - as taking part in 1998 in terrorist training camps in Aghanistan. Arar hasn't.

Charkaoui was identified by Nouredine N'fia, the former head of the terrorist group that bombed Madrid's train station in 2004 and killed 191 people, as a member of the group. CSIS further claims -- although it publicly cites only newspaper reports - that Charkaoui sent $2,000 and a laptop computer to one of the bombers.

Arar is the focus of a public inquiry, because neither CSIS - which lobbied to have him kept in the Syrian prison where he claimed torture - nor can the RCMP prove that Arar helped anyone. The two cases, then, are not really comparable but for one thing: an absence of public accountability.

Arresting and prosecuting terrorists, "is a shared responsibility," says Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International. "And we don't live up to that by just deporting them and making it someone else's problem."

Then there are more tangible examples of civil liberty concerns - such as the RCMP searching 0 reporter Juliet O'Neill's home.

"I mean, really, talk about clomping around in their size 13s," says Morden. "I think it's an abject lesson to all of whether it's appropriate for law enforcement to have those kind of powers. Because if you give it to them, ultimately they will use it."

Recognizing such potential problems, the government introduced a sunset clause.

Both detentions and the investigative hearings critics say force testimony will be wiped off the books if not amended to make them permanent before 2007. Until then, says Morden, the public must be vigilant.

"This has to be kept under pretty careful scrutiny at all times. You give an agency additional authority in national security and the next thing you know, you find somebody in some detachment in, say, Prince Rupert who's just about to the point where he's got a case. And it isn't quite there. And he starts thinking "if I were to just allege this is a front for a terrorist group, I'd be able to do things I can't do now."

But there's also a risk, says former CSIS agent Dave Harris, of blaming civil liberty violations that don't really exist.

"The reaction to everything from the Muslim community has been greatly complicated by the exaggerated and unreliable representations provided by some self-appointed Islamic advocacy groups," he said.

Unnecessary anxiety

Harris said politically driven statements regarding abuse by CSIS have likely been designed to make it harder for the agency to do its job.

The public would do well, he said, to consider whether the groups are providing any evidence when making harassment claims.

"They've caused a great deal of unnecessary anxiety within the Muslim community," he said.

Those same advocacy groups often get media attention, says Harris, because no one bother to look into their backgrounds.

If they did, he notes, they'd find that there are plenty of self-proclaimed 'moderate' muslims in north American who nonetheless support the same radical salafist position as terrorists.

[Sher]

In the years since 9-11, almost every major terrorist act involving extremist Islam has been committed by a person raised in the West. While the image of the bearded, robed Arab wearing a suicide vest comes to mind when the public thinks of terrorists, it is not reality.

As a country with open-door refugee and social safety net policies, Canada is an ideal breeding ground for extremism, say researchers.

"It is a 'born-again' process," says French researcher Olivier Roy. The author of Globalized Islam: The Search for A New Ummah, Roy spent years researching the mujahidin in Afghanistan. "They make a comeback to Islam but not to the traditional Islam of their country of origin or of their parents.

Western schools

"Many of them marry western girls and go to western schools. And when they convert to Islam, it's not to traditional Islam but to a kind of neo-Salafism."


Salafism is an ancient term meaning to follow the way of the Salaf, or religious messenger -- the Prophet Muhammad. It has been co-opted over, the last century to represent a blend of orthodoxies, and is sometimes called Wahabism although some Salafists consider it a derogatory term and prefer to think of themselves as unitarian.


‘Every Salafi is not a terrorist, but all of the terrorists are born-again Muslim Salafists.’ – French author Olivier Roy
Its followers support the views of political theorists such as the Indian philosopher Sayyid Maududi and the Egyptian philosophers Hasan Al-Bana and Sayyid Qutb, who believed western culture had so corrupted Islam and its political leadership that a world-wide Islamic homeland is required. Its largest exponent is a social movement called the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928.

They also proposed it can be accomplished through aggressive measures.

"Salafism is not necessarily politically radical," says Roy. "Every Salafi is not a terrorist, but all of the terrorists are born-again Muslim Salafists. The problem with the (Salafist Islamic leadership) is that they condemn the terrorists actions but can't condemn the religious ideas behind them, because they agree with them.''

The term "jihad" means "struggle." Whether it is an armed struggle or not often depends on the individual. Some clerics believe it can be aggressive, some believe the Qur'an dictates that it can only be in defence of a homeland. And some believe that homeland is the entire world.

But the effect is that orthodox imams and sheikhs across the West preach a message terrorists want to hear: Islam should be the only law, the West is corrupt and Muslims have a moral responsibility to jihad. One moderate American Muslim leader has suggested as many as 80% of the mosques in North America are run by Salafists spreading that message. It is popular with a disaffected, angry audience surrounded by people living better lives. They're disconnected from traditional Muslim life, have even less of a role in their new society, and seek glory.

"Young guys, rebels without a cause who are looking for something bigger than themselves, will be fascinated by the message and try to emulate it in how they behave," says Roy.

The new generation of terrorists is being created in our own backyards, through a combination of social factors familiar to anyone who has studied the roots of violence: social disconnection, cultural disillusionment and the need to improve their social standing.

In Canada, the pattern seems intact:


The As-Sunnah An-Nabawyah and Masjid as-Salam Mosques in Montreal preached a Salafi message to members of the GIA, an Algerian terrorist outfit that included Ahmed Ressam and supporters as a Canadian terrorist 'cell'.

The Salaheddin Islamic Centre in Scarborough, Ont. was spiritual home to the Khadr family and at least two Canadians missing while fighting the U.S. in Iraq.

In Wetaskiwin, Alta., the local mosque was used as a front by Kassem Daher, an al-Qaida affiliate with the terrorist organization Ansar al-Islam.

In British Columbia, a sheikh at the Dar al-Madinah Islamic Society mosque has been criticized for preaching in favour of violent jihad, and one of the mosque's members has gone missing while fighting with rebels in Chechnya.
Harassed

Using mosques to spread violent ideology - or even just as a gathering place for extremists - has become so common attendees across Canada complain of being harassed by CSIS intelligence officers.

There have further been ties between various university student associations and Salafist mosques and suggestions that the next generation of young muslims are being co-opted into a violent Salafist message even their own parents don't always agree with.

"Most of the parents, they don't notice that their children are becoming radicals," says Roy, who notes that attempted shoe-bomber Richard Reid was a good example of how even children raised outside Muslim homes can be co-opted.

"The London bombing story is interesting. The mother of one of the suicide bombers called the police because she assumed her son was a victim. When she realized and was told he was a bomber, she was devastated."

Closer to home, Mahboob Khawaja may be going through similar turmoil, although given his years of writing about the evils of western culture and its destruction of Islam, the public might be forgiven for doubting his sincerity. The professor, a Pakistan national who teaches in Saudi Arabia, insists his son Mohammed could never have taken part as authorities claim in a plan to blow up parts of London, England.

Eight British nationals face trial on the charges there this fall, while Khawaja, a former computer programmer for the federal government who was recently denied bail, remains the only person charged so far under Canada's Anti-Terrorism Act for aiding a terrorist plot.

"Who else would know my son better than myself?" says Khawaja. "He's brought up well and I do not even think for a second that he could do something like this."

Heard it before


Gen. Pervez Musharaf
American ally Mahbood Khawaja
Defends his son
Canadians have heard that before. Until he was killed in a firefight on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the family of Ahmed Said Khadr insisted he was just an aid worker. Once he became a "shahid", a martyr to Islam, the tune changed.

Ahmed Khadr taught his children those values. For 30 years, Khawaja has followed a similar political perspective as many Salafists.

He says he does not support violence. "Whatever happened in London, no civilized society can accept this way of life."

Is he sincere? In his writings, Khawaja makes no attempt to hide his disgust for western values and the expediency of relationships between Islamic leaders, Israeli leaders and the U.S.

He's said as much in a series of books as well.

Some of his contentions:


"America will impose its dictates to utilize (Pakistani Gen. Pervez) Musharaf and his collaborators to eradicate Islamic values and influence from this region. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban are readily available myths and stunts which are being used by the western world, and America in particular, to check and stop the popular Islamic evolution for a future state."

"India and America believe that 'Islam Breeds Terrorism' and freedom fighters in Kashmir, the Middle East and elsewhere are seen as terrorists."

"The nation will mourn the loss of time and opportunities for change only after General Musharaf is either replaced, killed or exiled."

"American Zionists planned the war against Iraq, made the Arab leadership fearful more of Commander Bush than All-Powerful God. Educated Arabs begged their leaders to speak out, challenging the western nuance of "Islamic Terrorism" and its linkage to the occupied Arab heartland, Iraq."
Those are familiar extremist views. But familiarity can breed contempt, and many muslims believe that if they complain about America, they are automatically labelled.

Religion is in charge

To Khawaja, there is no conflict between supporting a theocratic government and free elections -- he supports democratic reform in another article and rails against the use of military power to run a country. You can, he proposes, have your faith and voting, too. It's just that ultimately, it's religion that is in charge.

"I do not believe that terrorists represent Muslims or Islam when they commit these acts, and none of them claim to be representing Islam," says Khawaja.

Sheikh Muhammad Iqbal Nadvi says Khawaja's perspective is common. A former professor of Sharia law at King Faud University in Saudi Arabia, where Salafism is the state religion, Nadvi is imam of a mosque in Oakville, Ont.

"I can explain in my own way that these are two different things we are talking about,'' he says. "One is that some Muslim countries are actively doing resistance against people in their own lands. This is one issue.

But to expand this resistance outside those lands is a different thing.

This kind of action, this feeling, does not exist properly within jihad.

"If I see what the majority of intellectuals think about this issue, they feel the efforts are now going into creating divisions between the Christian and Muslim worlds and there are many factors contributing to that division."

The rich irony, notes Internet terror expert Evan Kohlmann, is that the people who flock to support jihad as an offensive tactic are looking for easy answers, as were Germans who flocked to support national socialism during the 1920s and 1930s -- even though Maududi and Qutb both preached against nationalism, fascism, feminism and capitalism.

But both advocated all-or-nothing dogma, attracting the kind of supporters who'll kill innocent civilians just to make a point, like any good Nazi might've done.

Social disconnection also helps to explain why small terrorist cells began appearing in Europe 40 years ago, but are only just now becoming known in North America.

Social dimension

"The patterns of immigration are different," says Roy. "In Europe, we have an overlap between immigration and social exclusion. In America, immigrants are part of a bigger picture and are not lower class and underclass. So there is a social dimension in the radicalization."

That social dimension is rearing its head in Canada due to two factors: public divisions between Muslims and the rest of society and, far more importantly, the disparity between the standard of living of long-time residents and recent refugees who, unlike legal immigrants, have plenty of trouble finding work and putting violent pasts behind them.

[Sher]

It is important for Canadians to realize that immigration itself does not produce terrorists, says Dr. Don Devoretz.

As one of the nation's foremost immigration authorities, the Simon Fraser University prof is quick to concede that the average immigrant to Canada does not do as well as the average multi-generational Canadian. But the disparities aren't big enough to fuel social disconnection and in some statistical classes, recent immigrants - who go through a weighted point system to enter the country - do even better.

ANOTHER MATTER

Refugees are another matter. And traditionally, Canada has accepted refugees at a rate that dwarfs other nations. Again, many make worthy contributions. But understanding their connection to terrorism is not hard, he says.

"Refugees tend to come from violent, war-torn countries," he says. "That seems to be the core of it. And their fanaticism is magnified by their poverty."


The problem was identified 30 years ago in Germany with the influx of Turkish refugees from Turkey. The Germans hoped they would slowly integrate themselves into the mainstream through marriage or through language, says Devoretz. "Instead they did neither and just stayed. Now, Germany is going to allow them to vote, which maybe will do the job."

Even refugees tend to do fairly well in Canada, he said, despite the lack of training, language or support - unless they come from a country involved in conflict. Among those who've done poorly are refugees from north Africa, particularly Algeria and Morocco, who have struggled with Islamic extremism. "These are often violent people before they get here, so it doesn't take brain surgery to figure it out," he says.

Coupled with that are the economic realities facing new Canadians. Charles Campbell has studied immigration for 30 years and is a former deputy chair of the Immigration Appeals Board. His 2000 book Betrayal and Deceit: The Politics of Canadian Immigration highlights a litany of problems with the Canadian system. Some of Campbell's findings:


Over a 10-year period between 1980 and 1990, the average income of immigrants dropped by nearly $20,000, with numerous age groups regularly falling below the poverty line.
A 1985 report of the immigration commission noted the highest unemployment sub category in the country was family immigrants 35-64 at 16.5 percent. Some 42 percent of landed immigrants were living below the family poverty cutoff line.


Auditor general reports between 1985 and 1997 repeatedly described the system as on the verge of collapse and riddled with loopholes, allowing virtually anyone into Canada.

From 1989 to 1992, Canada's refugee acceptance rate was between 54% and 75%. The average of the 15 other leading refugee intake nations was 14%.
By the end of 1990, Canada was taking in 70% of the world's claimants. Illustrating the depth of the issue, during the period 1987 to 1997, some 170,000 Tamils moved here, the largest population outside of Sri Lanka.


A 1991 report showed many politically appointed claim reviewers with the Immigration and Refugee Board didn't have the skills or background to make determinations.
Additionally, more than half didn't follow proper procedures and file paperwork to have hearings on schedule.


Refugees were usually admitted despite coming from countries that would not qualify them as refugees and were believed fleeing economic circumstances, not persecution.

A former Yukon deputy minister of justice, Padraig O'Donahue was among the many IRB claim reviewers who said they were routinely pressured to pass people who shouldn't have qualified. He told the Vancouver Sun in 1994 he doubted he'd ever seen one legitimate refugee.
UNCHECKED


An entrepreneur sponsorship program touted by both Tory and Liberal federal governments went unchecked, allowing notable criminals -- and anyone with the means -- to buy Canadian citizenship for between $150,000 and $250,000 of anticipated investments in Canada, most of which never occurred. Further, short-lived amendments that placed entrepreneur holdings in investment funds contained so many loopholes that immigration mills quickly figured out the base requirement could be lowered to $97,000.

Ahmed Ressam arrives at Federal Court in Seattle in 1999. Ressam, who had been living in Canada under a fake passport, faced charges in the U.S. of transporting nitroglycerin from Canada and making false statements to U. S. Customs. (File photo)
"We have this open border without reference to literacy, to training, to skills. Without reference to anything but health and criminality," says Campbell.

Numerous federal reports, shelved or ignored by successive governments, support his position, which Campbell is careful to qualify has nothing to do with ethnicity. "We let people in from around the world who have no training, no language skills, no skills period, and we expect them to just do well? It's never made any sense for the country," he said.

"It's not an issue of race. It's about refugees coming from countries where education levels are low, where they have broad social problems, no training and no ability to adjust quickly to life in Canada. It's just the people that are coming here. It's a matter of screening. And successive federal governments went out of their way to ensure there basically wasn't any.

"Why? Because in Canada, the ethnic vote is seen as everything. And there is an entire industry that has sprung up around immigration to Canada that was ready to remind federal politicians of how important it is."

WORKING HARD

For its part, the government says it is working hard.

"The government of Canada is committed to ensuring that the country does not become a safe haven for people who have been involved in serious acts like war crimes, crimes against humanity, terrorism or genocide," said spokesman Greg Scott.

The problem is, Canada is by law a safe haven to everyone, no matter what they've done. A 1985 Supreme Court decision held that under Charter of Rights and Freedoms, everyone in Canada has the right to a hearing before being deported. That's led to endemic problems of people simply skipping hearings and staying in Canada illegally, although the federal government is quick to point out that of the 30,000 outstanding immigration warrants, only about 3,500 have criminal convictions, and of those the majority are not for violent crimes.

Coupled with that, mainstream immigrants who properly qualify to come to Canada face a difficult time adjusting, Campbell notes.

"There's a study out of the University of Calgary that indicates 78% of English Second Language students are high-school dropouts, because they aren't given sufficient time and support to learn the language. And the figure for the whole of Canada over the last seven years has been that 45% of new immigrants to Canada don't speak either French or English. So they're not speaking either in the home, and kids aren't learning the language quickly enough as a result."

That in and of itself raises the threat, says former CSIS agent Dave Harris. "If they can't speak either official language, then they have to turn to people from their own community for help. And sometimes that means turning to individuals who may not have their best interests at heart."

Refugees have to be given a chance to make it in their own terms, added Amnesty International Secretary-General Alex Neve. "Whether within our own borders or anywhere, it's when people live a marginalized, dispossessed, impoverished existence, that kind of misery and unhappiness makes them susceptible to extremist views."

Even if Canadians are willing to accept the economic consequences of an entire new class of low-income Canadians - with the trade-off of offering them a better life here regardless of how little they make - the long-term security implications are obvious, says Campbell.

"Anyone can get in," he says simply.

ON WELFARE

A case in point: Ahmed Ressam, who was caught in late 1999 trying to drive bomb materials across the border into Washington State as a prelude to blowing up L.A. International Airport. Ressam was living on welfare in Montreal, as were several of his 'cell' mates. He entered the country on a fake passport that was immediately spotted. However, even as an illegal immigrant, he was allowed a hearing. He just didn't bother showing up.

He was convicted of criminal offences and released no fewer than three times, and ordered deported. And yet under Canada's rules, a criminal conviction is not grounds to waive a deportation appeal hearing. Typically, it's merely grounds to ask for a further delay while criminal charges are dealt with.

CSIS was, by the time of his deportation order, already monitoring Ressam due to his associations with men felt to be more of a threat. But the agency never bothered to inform Immigration.

Ressam even managed to visit Afghanistan and train at a terrorist camp, then return to Canada, without being spotted. When he was caught crossing the Washington state border with enough bomb-making equipment to blow up L.A. International, he was only pulled aside because he was travelling alone and sweating profusely from latent malaria.

Canada's open borders have long been recognized by security experts as a problem. Regular unclassified updates from the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service have highlighted the issue, such as in 2000, when the agency stated: "In order to carry out these efforts, terrorists and their supporters use intimidation and other coercive methods in immigrant communities, and they abuse Canada's immigration, passport, welfare and charity regulations. A multitude of examples illustrates the activities of international terrorists in Canada."

Former RCMP Commissioner Norm Inkster believes choking off immigration is not the answer. He agrees with Campbell's assertion that the problem lies in selectivity.

'IMMIGRATION, YES'

"When we address these issues, we need to keep within the framework that we live in a country that was made and continues to grow based on immigration," said Inkster.

"We can't say 'immigration yes or immigration no'. It has to be immigration, yes.''

But legitimate immigrants and bogus refugees,while afforded the same legal protections, are not the same. Campbell and other critics argue the 1985 Singh decision, which cemented the right to a hearing, was a perfect example of why the notwithstanding clause exists. Without using it, every bad guy on Earth knows Canada is the perfect place to disappear.

"It's difficult," says French researcher Olivier Roy.

"When these guys turn radical, they do that in the framework of a small local network of friends.

It's not a real social movement, and we have trouble connecting people who don't have any prior connection, which makes them very difficult to track."

And if they're difficult to track, they're difficult to stop.

[Sher]

You don't actually have to get into Canada to become a Canadian: just steal someone's identity.

Police have long argued Canada's poor security surrounding birth and death records makes us a haven for identity forgers. A mail seizure earlier this year demonstrated just how far gone the system is and left no doubt that if you can't cheat your way into Canada, you can still enjoy all the benefits of citizenship.

Improper travel

"The types of documents seized reflect the range of travel and identity documents most commonly used for improper travel to Canada," said a report from Citizenship and Immigration Canada.

"Seizures also consist of documents that people need after they enter Canada, for example to support a non-genuine refugee claim, to apply for immigration status or to qualify for social welfare or other benefits.


The toll? More than 4,000 items seized over five years, and that was just from spot checks. "The extent of fraudulent or blank supporting documents moving between Canada and other countries shows that almost every aspect of the application process is vulnerable and that fraud is widespread," the report concluded.

Most of the items were blanks used to make new passports, permanent resident cards, and letterheads for fake professional qualifications, along with the now-usual assortment of counterfeit credit and debit cards.

None would be particularly surprising to a typical urban cop in Canada; recently, the Edmonton Police outlined to the Sun how easy it is to obtain a Canadian passport through the process known as "tombstoning."

"What tombstoners do is they go to libraries or to archives and they pull old obituary records from newspapers. And in the obituary records, people write lots of stuff, especially small-town obits where they tend to put in the whole life story of the person," explained former Economic Crimes Det. Joe Pendleton.

"And when you consider that we were kind of a small town back in the 1960s, when somebody died on vacation it was almost always a story on the opposing side of the obit page. And the story always goes into more detail."

Obits also nearly always contain the mother's maiden name under the "survived by ..." section. Still, a graveyard visit is usually required by the fraudster.

"They're called tombstoners because the one piece of information that is almost never in the obit is the date of birth. But the date is almost always on the tombstone."

Once the crook has both the maiden name and the date of birth, he'll usually make supplementary calls to try to get more information, sometimes even directly to the family.

DURING THE FUNERAL

"Sometimes he'll even pull a break-and-enter. But he'll do it during the funeral because he knows no one is at home," said Pendleton.

"He goes in and what he'll take is things that no one will ever notice is missing. I mean, if you're dead, who's going to notice? He goes in and carefully takes secondary items.

Now they have more than enough to get a legitimate birth certificate."

Getting a passport requires a guarantor, but good identity thieves just invent a guarantor, since most of the checks are done by phone.

The system only works because for decades most countries didn't register out-of-jurisdiction deaths. That's true in Canada, where registries between provinces have only recently started sharing such information and don't intend to make the move retroactive - meaning that for years, it's been possible to obtain the birth certificate of someone from Manitoba who died in Alberta, without the birth site registry ever knowing its real owner is already dead.

Of course, terrorists aren't in the habit of skulking around graveyards and committing break-ins during funerals. That's up to the people from whom they buy the information.

One such forger, Edmonton's William Black, was selling passports and identities to criminals all over the world when he was busted in 2001, including a Romanian gangster named Marcel Iordache who is wanted in several nations. Black was eventually convicted and jailed.

But when police busted him, the latest in a string of similar convictions, Black possessed more than 1,800 stolen identities. At least nine of his fraudulent passports had been used internationally.

Ahmed Ressam, however, demonstrated it doesn't take much to get into the forger business. The Algerian terrorist, now in prison for 22 years in the U.S. for a plot to blow up L.A. International Airport, made a profitable sideline of identity thefts from people he robbed in Montreal and he continued the trend to change his own identity.

BLANK CERTIFICATES


Border crossing between Canada and the U.S. An open gate for terrorists with fake documents? – Sun Media
He simply stole blank baptismal certificates from a Catholic parish in Quebec and invented Benni Antoine Noris. That, a forged priest's signature and a photograph got him a Canadian passport.

When he flew to Afghanistan for training in late 1997 or early 1998, no one noticed. After all, he wasn't officially Ahmed Ressam anymore.

The government has tightened up security procedures surrounding passport applications since the Ressam case and notes that there are fewer than 400 passport applications that need to be checked for irregularities.

But how tight the security is, given the seizure statistics, is anyone's guess. Long-time CSIS intelligence officer Dave Harris, now a security consultant, is not optimistic. As expensive as it would be, registries should be cross-referenced retroactively, he says.

"I'm dismayed by the approach they are taking," he says. "It's a false economy because of the long-term costs of the ramifications and because it's bad for security. My only guess as to why they have never fixed it is that politicians are so busy passing profitable loopholes that can benefit them that there's no time or money left for taking care of the basics."

***

Canadian politicians are experts when it comes to hiding loopholes. One that plays into national security in particular allows them to take kickbacks without having to report them - in effect they can hide donations from interest groups completely legally.

Duff Conacher has been trying to get Canada's fundraising rules amended for years. It's bad enough to be beholden to voting blocs without also being beholden to individuals, he notes.

"I find it incredible that we are 130 years into Confederation and we still allow secret donations of unlimited amounts of money to federal candidates," says the head of Democracy Watch.

"At the federal level, if you are not a cabinet minister and you are running as a candidate - or even have just declared that you're running for a nomination for MP - it's perfectly legal to accept any amount without declaring it, as long as you don't spend any of it on the campaign."

Even if police and the Crown found out about such a donation and tried to prosecute the individual for accepting a bribe, there is the loophole that only an elected official can be convicted of accepting inducements. Candidates aren't technically elected officials.

"And even if they amended that so that the Criminal Code did apply, the code says you have to ask for something in return for the payment. If you just give them the money and there's no discussion of what it's for, you can't charge," Conacher notes.

They don't even have to disclose the money as taxable income because it's a gift.

NOT A LAW

"The Liberals suggested they were fixing this with an 'MP ethics code'. They said the MP ethics code would make it a requirement to disclose gifts and anything else that could impact impartiality, but a) it's only a code, not a law, and therefore can't really be enforced and b) it only impacts MPs," said Conacher.

"People running for office or for a nomination, even if they're the sitting representatives, aren't technically MPs during the campaign, which is when this money can be accepted."

Conacher says his organization believes there are multiple Canadian MPs who have secret accounts, although proving it "is pretty much impossible."

If they weren't, however, Conacher suggests the politicians likely would have fixed the problem. "They all know it exists, so I guess we have to ask why they wouldn't fix it if they weren't taking advantage of it.

[Sher]

For all the precautions Canada and the U.S. take to keep bad people out, the future holds a massive challenge that immigration controls can't address: the Internet has made the world effectively borderless. And the people it helps recruit to jihad are already here.

"It's an extremely important route, perhaps the most important now, in terms of recruiting, especially among the younger generation who are first and foremost open to new technologies and new adventures," says Rita Katz, of the SITE Institute, which tracks terrorists on the Internet. "The beauty of it is that al-Qaida and other terrorist groups appreciated that and have established a fascinating and extraordinary online recruitment network."

Katz has a personal stake; as a Jew born in Iraq, her family was persecuted and her father kidnapped and murdered. Fluent in both Hebrew and Arabic, she has been one of the world's pre-eminent terrorist hunters for a decade. "There is no tool that they have not taken advantage of. Chat rooms, e-groups, voice-over Internet protocol, message boards, directly accessible websites, oral discussion - you name it. They have basically hijacked every tool that exists online."

When al-Qaida's training bases in Afghanistan closed during the U.S. invasion, the group went online, using chat rooms and temporary sites to post training manuals, videos and, perhaps most importantly, the names of people it wants killed by jihadists, which it and affiliate groups term "calls to combat."


Rita Katz Al-Qaida sites since mid-'90s
Governments frequently use private businesses such as Katz's organization and other sites like globalterroralert.com and the Terrorism Research Centre to gather Internet intelligence. They're staffed with specialists, and each has someone on staff who speaks Arabic - an important consideration given many working in government anti-terrorism do not.


"This did not happen quickly," says Katz. "It was a long process that started about a decade ago and the people who should have been paying attention just ignored it or preferred to ignore it. But we've been monitoring this for a long time. Al-Qaida had websites up since the mid-'90s, collecting money, disseminating information and recruiting."

The openness with which jihadists pursue their goals has always surprised Katz, who once noted her amazement on attending a U.S. mosque and hearing the imam preach peace and tolerance in English, only to switch to Arabic a moment later and call for the destruction of the U.S.

The same is true online. She points to an Internet site shut down after the London transit bombings. "The Azzam.com website run by Ahmed Babar, the investigation showed that it had been there for a long time and it is just fascinating. It existed in a dozen different languages. It provided military instructions, everything you needed to know to support Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, videos for recruitment.

"There were many times when it was taken down but it appeared again on a new server almost immediately, which is exactly the phenomenon that we see today. Back then, there were a handful of al-Qaida sites. Now, there are too many to count. It's just ridiculous."

VERY SMALL WORLD

The upside, says Katz, is that everything on the Internet leaves a footprint, meaning the methods used by terrorists can be turned against them. The downside? "The beauty of the Internet world is that it's a very small world. What's happening in Iraq can now impact every Muslim in the world. Everything is there, from the propaganda that recruits you to instructions on how to carry out jihad. What this means is that there is no country on earth that is safe anymore.

"You can destroy a camp in Afghanistan, but then you'll be amazed to see training videos in which they offer one-on-one instruction from those same camps show up on the Internet. You can rewind it, fast forward it, study it again and again."

The quote at the beginning of this chapter was taken off such a website, and was part of a much longer message, in which the means of an attack was described in the sort of detail that only those committing it would know. They got one part wrong - the two Canadians were lightly injured, not killed.

But as Evan Kohlmann points out, in the world of Internet terrorism, it's the thought that counts.

"It's an unusual skill set we're talking about, for people who are both trained in counterintelligence and have computer skills," says Kohlmann, a New York-based Internet terror consultant. "In the past, those were separate worlds because the computer guys were the geeks and the spies were the 007 types. But all that is changing, and is seems there are many more of them in the Muslim world, obviously, than there are here.

"There was a case in Iraq where a bunch of guys who'd been arrested were thrown into the back of van together and they didn't know each other by their actual names, but within a few seconds they realized they all knew each other by their chat handles. They were all from different countries and places, but they were all members of the same forum! So it was like an forum GT, a get together."

Of course, instead of trading s'mores recipes, these chatters talk about how to sew suicide bomb jackets and when they're going to be martyred.

"There was a message put on the Ansar forum, for example, in which someone released a statement explaining that a number of their members had been martyred in suicide bombings in Iraq, and there are at least two more members of the forum that are going to be (martyred) soon, on behalf of Al-Qaida," says Kohlmann.

Rebecca Givner-Forbes was a Maine high school student when she made some Arabic friends, then developed a fascination with the language and culture. A decade later, she's poring through websites for the Terrorism Information Centre that describe gruesome methods of killing as many people as possible. It's an odd living, she concedes.

"There was this particular metro stop in Washington, D.C. that they were talking about on one site recently," she says, "and the person suggesting it be attacked said it was especially crowded between 8 a.m. and 9:30 a.m., so that would be the best time.

"And this person went on to suggest that a chemical attack would be ideal but explosives would work really well in the event that anyone attacking it couldn't find the chemicals."

Givner-Forbes believes the 'war' on terror has taken a paradigm shift, from a conventional struggle between extremists to a virtual war, where terrorists are like consultants, incited via propaganda and appeals to their personal vanity or disillusionment, then recruited for specific jobs via the Net.

"We see a lot of suggestions for targets on these sites. Just last week we came across a suggestion from al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula to attack Gulf oil pipelines because of the economic consequences, which could include driving up the price of oil worldwide," she said.

"What's difficult to determine sometimes is how seriously these calls are taken, and that's where a lot of analysis comes into play. What we're often looking for is suggestions of how a cell can carry out an attack down to the minute details.

"But even bin Laden has come out and made a long audio statement that was posted on the Internet urging terrorists in the Arabian peninsular to attack oil infrastructure - and that's bin Laden, the sheik of the mujahedeen, and still no one has done it."

There could be several reasons for that, she notes, including a weakening of al-Qaida forces in Saudi Arabia due to conflicts with national security forces, and the ongoing rumour in the Muslim world that bin Laden is dead. "It could just be that (Abu Mus'ab) Al-Zarqawi has replaced him as the terrorist they are looking to please."

Al-Zarqawi was an unknown Jordanian jihadist a few years ago. Since becoming the most dominant of the terrorists using the Internet, his reputation rivals bin Laden's, and the U.S. recently upped the price on his head to $25 million. Al-Zarqawi has put out a lot of communiques. And for an organization that's supposed to have scattered, Al-Qaida puts out an awfully large number as well.

One such posting, a video, was released in the first week of August and is of an elderly man reading his will. Abu Sayed al-Iraqi asked Allah to accept his soul into paradise, then later blew himself up, killing at least 13 U.S. soldiers.

"Your brothers in al-Qaida organization are carrying on their jihad and fight with Allah's enemies, till Allah's Sharia prevails in all countries and all people. It will either be victory or to Allah with the immortals," says a statement released with the video.

WARY OF SURVEILLANCE

In the era of instant communication, kids interested in violence are becoming less likely to hang out at extremist mosques, and already fear that if they do, they'll be placed under surveillance.

"This is a new and fairly recent phenomenon and I suspect we haven't seen the full impact of it yet," says Givner-Forbes. "We'll see more autonomous, entrepreneurial cells springing up, relying heavily on the Internet for tactical guidance and for training suggestions."

Givner-Forbes and Kohlmann cite a common fear of Internet analysts, that the legion of amateurs who have just as much access to the Internet will muddy the waters, either with lousy analysis, poor translations, personal politics or a combination of all three.

"The problem is, if you treat every post that goes up on a site with an alarmist tone, you can get into a 'boy who cried wolf' problem," says Givner-Forbes. "I see attack suggestions that don't make sense, where the individual presents very little sophisticated information on how to carry it out. And they may also hold very little resonance with the online community and not be taken very seriously.

"It takes detective work to figure out which ones are (taken seriously), to have familiarity with various sites and their users. There are sites that we know are used by actual terrorist groups on the ground and they send correspondence and material to the sites. And there are others where the site admin will kick them off if it seems the material isn't accurate."

Canadians can take some comfort, she suggests, in the fact that since the warning last year, little to none of the traffic has focused on targets here. "That doesn't mean there's not a danger, it just means that there's usually a juicier target somewhere south of you."

[Sher]

The picture is not pretty: a border that is wide open, citizenship that can be both bought and paid for - or merely stolen - with ease, terrorists who can recruit in anonymity, politicians who can be legally bribed, and intelligence and police funding that is 10 years behind where it should be.

And if you think that's bad, says Oliver Revell, just wait until something actually blows up.

The FBI's former director of counter-intelligence says he loves Canada, sits on Canadian corporate boards and owns property here. But he's waiting for the proverbial other shoebomb to drop.

"I love Canada, always have,"says Revell. "But the naivete there has always been of great concern to me. Burying your head in the sand and expecting problems to always happen somewhere else simply doesn't work, and the price will be difficult for Canadians to accept, perhaps even more so than it was for us after Sept. 11."

During Revell's 30 years in the bureau, he became its most decorated agent and was involved in everything from the JFK assassination investigation and Watergate to Iran Contra. They had a nickname in the U.S. intelligence for Canada: "The Aircraft Carrier," due to the ability of suspects to take off and land at will.


"If there happens to start a campaign of attacks on us from Canada it will have a major effect on our relationship, the border, the economy, you name it. The U.S. will not accept sanctuary for jihadists in Canada," he says. "Trade, travel, tourism, and all of the elements of economic partnership will be affected."

And most importantly, Revell cautions, we Canadians should get used to the idea of how they'll react when something blows up on our soil.

"It's not just a matter of aiding America. Canada has been the subject of terror attacks in the past, particularly the Air India bombing," he says.

"(Terrorists') specific goal is to spread throughout the world and be the dominant religion and political force, but first to secure the homeland of Islam," says Revell. "It's totally naive to think Canada is immune just as it was to think Great Britain would be immune. Their goal is to dominate the world.

"They've made that very specific and the fact is a good deal of Islam's religious teachings are supportive of that goal even if they do not participate in violent actions."

In Canada, such "actions" are likely to take the same kind of form as the recent subway bombings in London, suggests former CSIS boss Reid Morden.

The Toronto transit system and the Montreal suburb of Outremont, which has a large orthodox Jewish population, have already been identified as having been surveilled for an attack.

An intelligence community source says Toronto transit is particularly attractive, because an attack at one particular downtown transit centre would also hit an attached mall, potentially hiking the victim count and doubling the propaganda value by striking out at capitalism.

Morden points out that any target which both attacks capitalism and could cause a high death toll would suit terrorists. West Edmonton Mall would be ideal, he says.

"Of the people who've been on that list of targets, that list on which Canada now finds itself, we're the ones that so far haven't had an attack," he said. "Symbolic places like West Edmonton Mall are very easy to get in and out of, there are lots of nooks and crannies if you want to stash something that may go 'boom.' "

Alan Bell, a former SAS man who now runs Globe Risk Holdings, also believes WEM would be a terrorist's dream. "Oh yeah, without a doubt," he said.

Similarly, Alberta's oil industry infrastructure would be attractive because it could not only cause a much larger explosion, and more casualties, but would also choke off the largest import source for U.S. oil, Morden noted. Corporate Calgary makes a fine target for the same reasons.

ARREST UNNOTICED
Experts say extremists would gain a propaganda victory if they bombed Toronto’s subway system, especially one downtown station next to a mall. – File photo

To get an idea of how easy it would be to kill a large number of Canadians, just consider that back in 1993, a man named Thomas Lavy crossed the border from Alaska to B.C. carrying a small plastic baggie containing 30 grams of ricin. If you've never heard of Lavy or ricin, that's understandable. Lavy's detention and release was not long for the headlines.

There's not much information available on Thomas Lavy except that he was originally from Arkansas and was driving to North Carolina when he was pulled over. He'd been working as an electrician on a pipeline project in Valdez. Inside his car, inspectors found guns, $98,000 in cash and white supremacist literature.

And a baggie of fine white powder.

Ricin wasn't illegal at the time in Canada, so it was merely confiscated and Lavy was sent on his way.

There was enough of the powder, drawn from castor beans, to kill 35,000 people. Canadian authorities didn't know what it was and left it in a locker for two weeks before sending it on to Edmonton Garrison for testing and forwarding to U.S. authorities.

U.S. agents later searched Lavy's home and found more toxins, including more material for producing ricin, which is about 6,000 times more lethal than cyanide. While they were building a case, Lavy committed suicide in prison.

Eight years later, the federal government acknowledged in a report on bioterrorism that ricin and other toxins that are water soluble - which means they can be introduced to drinking water systems - pose a significant threat to the general public.

Morden is not surprised by the possibility any more than he's surprised people will ignore it, when paying a little attention could prevent tragedy.

"Be a little prudent. On mass transit, for example, in New York there is a looped recording on every bus and subway train saying 'If you see an unattended parcel, do something about it: talk to a transit employee or call a cop.' What's the deterrent effect? I'm not so sure. But just for that nanosecond, it reminds people to be vigilant and pay attention.

"If you just look around downtown Edmonton or Toronto or Calgary there are so many potential targets. But you don't have to do very much to make them more unattractive. You be prudent. You check the lock on the water supply to the building. And maybe all you need is a slightly better lock. Or, on the same grounds, you want to make sure access is restricted to the heating or air conditioning.

"I did a briefing for the Canadian Council of Chief Executives after 9-11 and I was walking back to the office with the chairman of one of our big banks. And he said it was all very interesting, but it wouldn't happen here. It was just completely naive."

Bell tells a near identical story. "I was supposed to do a terrorism workshop and the police chief of this area near Toronto asked me if I could find something else to call it besides terrorism," says Bell. "He told me he didn't want to frighten people."

He agrees one big difference between Canada and its British and American allies is that the public here has not faced an attack, and therefore isn't engaged by the issue. In Britain and the U.S. the public has been taught what kind of behaviour and individuals to look out for.

The government has created an Emergency Preparedness Week, and a website of educational materials on being prepared at www.psepc.gc.ca.

Bell is inclined to think most people haven't visited it.

"The average Canadian thinks the average terrorist looks like the Muslims they see on TV or something. They have no idea how to spot someone based on suspicious behaviour and have no idea how these guys work.

ATTACK INEVITABLE

"I've been saying for seven years, from before 9-11, that we will eventually have an attack here. And people call me a fearmonger. But it's just the likely reality. We'll get a bloody nose, the public will be terrified, the government will start blaming other people and talking about how much money they've spent trying to prevent terrorism.

"They'll continue the knee-jerk reactions of spending where they don't need to and not spending where they do. They'll keep throwing money at domestic law enforcement and ignoring emergency response workers - who need the money most, because we can't prevent attacks and will need them to react - and foreign intelligence.

"The average Canadian has a typical deny-and-repress syndrome. We know there's a problem, but it hasn't happened here yet, so we're gonna deny it's a problem and throw money at it, and hope it goes away.

"But it won't."

MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE ONLINE
Here's a selection of websites to help you further your understanding of terrorism, national security and the underlying religious and social debates.

i-cias.com/
The most extensive online encyclopedia on Middle Eastern and African nations and issues, from religion to politics to current news. There are even free basic online Arabic language classes.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Wikipedia is an evolving online encyclopedia that includes debate and dissent over its own entries.

www.tkb.org/Home.jsp
The MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base is a U.S.-government sponsored online clearing house for information on terrorism.

www.csis-scrs.gc.ca/eng/miscdocs/director20050222_e.html
This link leads to a presentation by the director of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service to a senate committee, highlighting the agency's perspectives on terrorism.

seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/nation-world/terroristwithin/
An exceptional 2002 series from the Seattle Times explaining how former Montrealer Ahmed Ressam went from being the son of an Algerian war hero to a terrorist.

www.dwatch.ca/camp/moneydir.html
A link to Democracy Watch's 'Money in Politics' campaign to reform political financing.

www.rewardsforjustice.net/english/wanted_captured/index.cfm?page=Wanted_Terrorist
The main page of Rewards for Justice, the U.S. government's terrorist reward page.

internet-haganah.us/
An online site combatting internet terrorism. It brings to light corporate internet cover sites for terrorist activities, among other items

www.thewahhabimyth.com/
A site explaining the differences between orthodox Salafists and Qutbists

www.siteinstitute.org/
The Search for International Terrorist Entities homepage. A consultant firm that tracks terrorist activities around the globe, notably on the Internet, and contains much more daily information on the war than most news sites.

www.understanding-islam.com/
A project led by the Al-Mawrid Institute of Islamic Sciences, a moderate Islamic research group in Pakistan.

english.aljazeera.net/HomePage
Homepage of the Islamic world's principal news network, with updated daily stories

www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html
A copy of the U.S. Patriot Act, which is mostly greek to, well, pretty much everyone.

www.cbc.ca/news/background/khadr/
A CBC news in-depth look at the Khadr family.

www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/terrorism/alqaida_manual/
Excerpts from an al-Qaida training manual.

www.jihadwatch.org/
Although generally anti-Islam, this site does bring to light the many hypocracies presented by leaders of Islamic nations who condemn the U.S.

www.islamicsupremecouncil.com/
A Canadian Muslims website that is also home to Muslims Against Terrorism.