The Al-Qaeda Target List

by John Thompson

November 18, 2002

Our first war of the 21^st Century continues… The week after our annual Remembrance Day ceremonies was filled with a cascade of developments that remind us that the trials our parents and grandparents faced have not vanished from history.

The war to topple the Tyrant of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein, has inched closer; Osama Bin Laden (or his voice anyway) has urged his followers to attack Canada; and a list of possible targets inside Canada has surfaced. These are all firm reminders that we are at risk.

In a strange way, Osama Bin Laden has done us a favor by mentioning us among his enemies, for we might not have done enough yet to truly deserve that honor. However, Canadians should remember two key points about Islamic Fundamentalists.

Firstly, they do not see the nations they come from as defining who they are; being an Afghani, Algerian, Bahraini or whatever, is very much second to being a Muslim, and they see themselves as the champions of all Islam (and it is important to remember that the Fundamentalists have killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims to ensure that no rival perspectives arise).

Secondly, the Fundamentalists look at people from the Western world and they do not see Americans, Britons, Canadians, Danes, French, Germans, Italians, or what have you… they see Westerners. For them, our identity as members of a rival -- and superior -- civilization to their own is enough to guarantee their hatred.

In short, Canadians were already at risk from Islamic fundamentalist violence long before Osama Bin Laden had the courtesy to openly mention us. Canadians were killed in the World Trade Centre, in the Bali Bombing, and have certainly been present at other planned targets. Being a Canadian was no guarantee of safety from their attentions, and today is no different from last year.

Now that Bin Laden has specifically mentioned Canada, however, perhaps we might finally develop the political willpower to get serious about our security. Moreover, it might even be that some of the "root causes" crowd of reflexive liberals might be convinced that the Fundamentalists can’t be mollified, explained away, or safely ignored… but this might be too much to hope for.

Hard on the tail of the unveiling of Osama Bin Laden’s latest diatribe comes the State Department’s list of potential targets in Canada. The source of the information remains unexplained, for the US State Department is not located in a Washington neighborhood called "Foggy Bottom" for nothing; and their right hand seldom knows what their left hand is doing.

Still, the US has been pawing through the records gleaned from Al-Qaeda’s lost Afghan bases for almost a year, are able to intercept some message traffic between its leaders, and have been interrogating hundreds of detainees. Very little information gathered from these sources has been released to the public, but the little that has come out has been disturbing enough. It would be useful to know if this Canadian target list consists of sites that have been discussed by Al-Qaeda leaders, or if it is merely the musings of Americans about likely places that the Fundamentalist network might attack.

Some things on the target list do not make much sense. Attacking the Confederation Bridge between PEI and New Brunswick or the Peace Bridge over the Niagara river would be both technically challenging (ask any military combat engineer — knocking bridges down takes a lot of time and explosive), and not likely to yield a large death count. Likewise, nuclear power plants (Pickering, Point Lepreau in New Brunswick and Chalk River are all on the list) are difficult to attack too. Yes, it would be easy to park a truck bomb at the front gate and startle the world, but stealing nuclear material or causing a deadly environmental catastrophe is a far greater challenge than toppling a bridge.

Other attacks on listed targets would be appallingly easy — a series of bombs on the Toronto subway, attacking a major synagogue (or church…) during a holiday, sinking a ferry, or bombing a sporting or tourist site could easily yield a horrific casualty rate and cause the concomitant economic damage that Al Qaeda prefers.

However, it would be a profound mistake to imagine that this target list is definitive or complete. Islamic Fundamentalists might be rigid ideologues, but they are flexible and imaginative when it comes to generating death and destruction. Moreover, Al Qaeda is a ‘meta-network’ of terrorists — a network of networks. It’s component networks, their cells, and even individual members are capable of making autonomous attacks on targets of their own choosing.

Any target in Canada could be attacked at any time in any number of ways, and it would be a profound mistake to limit our imagination and resources to just protecting the "target list" sites. Everything and all of us are at risk, and after this past week, we should all be taking a personal interest in the War on Terrorism.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca