Newsletter July, 05

Table of Contents:

[Another Badly Needed Anti-Terrorism Law] [Left-Handed Gifts -- Thoughts on the London Bombings] [A Revolution in Canada’s Cops] [Voices of Freedom]

Another Badly Needed Anti-Terrorism Law

It has long been recognized that there must be one constant limit on free speech: That nobody should be allowed to scream ‘Fire!’ in a crowded movie theatre.

When we were children most of us were told the instructive story of the boy who cried ‘Wolf!’ It was a helpful and satisfying conclusion to the tale that the boy, who falsely screamed that the wolf was coming for his own amusement, was finally devoured when the real wolf turned up and nobody came to help him as a consequence of all his false alarms.

So, what to do when it turns out that the person who screams that a fire has broken out in a movie theatre actually wants several dozen people trampled to death in a rush for the exits? What are we to make of it when we are confronted by a boy who cries ‘Wolf!’ and is actually working in collusion with the beast — and that the alarm call is to test our defences until such time as we refuse to react anymore?

Over the last two years (as was partly mention in the ‘Games Jihadists Play’ column in our January 2005 Newsletter), there have been a number of strange activities inside those Western nations that have been threatened by Al Qaeda. For example, in Australia in early 2004, a Pakistani man arrived in Canberra on a tourist visa but without any luggage. That night, Australian police arrested him pacing around their parliament buildings with a GPS set, tracing out the exact coordinates of the building.

Last year, paramedics in seven US cities described being approached by young ‘Middle Eastern-looking’ men (more racial profiling at work no doubt) and being asked questions about how much weight their ambulances could carry, what were the procedures for crossing a police barricade, and could anyone buy paramedic uniforms somewhere?

In March of 2005, a similar series of incidents occurred in six US hospitals (three of them in New Jersey) where unauthorized visitors attempted to ‘inspect’ or visit children’s and emergency wards. In each case, they left as soon as they were confronted and their prepared cover stories were rejected.

A little earlier, a group of eleven musicians from Syria amused themselves on a domestic American airline flight by suddenly congregating in the front passenger section — almost, but not quite, making it look as if another 9-11 style hijacking was in the offing. The flight was diverted, but the musicians claimed they were merely all stretching in one go, and really didn’t mean to frighten anyone, honest… As US authorities could find no direct connections among them to any terrorist group, no charges were laid, but many of the passengers insist that the act was malicious and that the musicians knew exactly what effect they were having.

In Toronto in early 2004, Kassim Mohamed, an Egyptian Fundamentalist Muslim was noticed videotaping in the subway, around the CN tower and at other landmarks. Although a Canadian resident, he had earlier sent his children back to Egypt, apparently because he disliked the secular qualities of Canada’s education system. When detained at the airport by CSIS officers when he was about to leave the country, he explained that he had taken the footage because his children were ‘homesick’ and missed Toronto. The CSIS officers made a copy of his tape and had a translator go over it while the Egyptian was en route to Cairo, via Athens. At Canada’s urgent request, the Greeks detained him and returned him to Canada for questioning.

After a couple of weeks of interviews by Canadian police and security officials, the Egyptian Fundamentalist was allowed to depart, but our inquiries evidently tipped off the Egyptian police that he was a subject of some scrutiny here, and he was jailed on arrival in Cairo. Evidently, he was abused while in Egyptian custody — although all Jihad sympathizers are instructed to always claim that this is the case, just as every arrest or detention is invariably claimed to be the result of racism or racial profiling. On returning to Canada, this individual launched a million dollar lawsuit against our government, and has threatened to leave Canada altogether… one can only hope.

The members of our police intelligence organizations and security agencies seldom get a chance to defend themselves in public, and the inevitable accusations of racism and abuse by Jihadist suspects and sympathizers go almost entirely unanswered as a matter of policy and habit. Privately -- say when grousing in their beer at a quiet conference -- the other side of the story can come out amongst themselves... How homesick would a child have to be to find three minutes of footage of subway track engrossing? How enthralled would the little tykes be by the details of the fire exits from the CN tower? And just who was telling the cameraman (in Arabic) to point the camera down as somebody was looking?

It might seem that other children must also intrigued by detailed footage of the front of Bnai Brith’s Toronto headquarters — all that lovely frangible glass! Sure hope nobody ever plans to demolish the place with a truck bomb — thus creating a blizzard of razor sharp glass shards. There have been other filming incidents reported at some Ontario chemical plants and Jewish schools -- where the staff tend to be more aware of the threat than are many non-Jewish Canadians. For those who grow complacent, remember Jihadists have bombed several Christian churches and contemplate some large scale attacks against Cathedrals; for all we know some public schools and hospitals may have been reconnoitred too.

Some of the frontline workers in our Border Agency have also interrupted the possible entertainments of other children in far-off countries. One caught a traveller from an Islamic nation coming through a Canadian airport with dismantled Casio digital watches (as endorsed by the time bomb-makers of the Provisional Wing of the IRA as far back as 1983). It was later noticed that another such traveller was filming the interior of the same airport with his brand-new pre-activated Canadian cell phone and transmitting the footage as he did so.

In an environment where every cry of ‘Wolf!’ needs a response, there is the perennial question: Is this a real attempt at reconnaissance by an al Qaeda sympathizer, or is it just an attempt to yank the chains of our guard dogs and see if they will react? Every reaction is expensive, and provokes the inevitable accusations of racism and complaints of abuse from those who get scooped up. Presumably, the day we don’t react will quickly lead to an even more costly day…

In counter terrorism, the nation that is challenged by a terrorist is always presented with a "Heads I win — Tails you lose" dilemma. The terrorist despises the vitality and strength that only an open and free society can generate and so hopes to punish it; to protect that society, some measure of its normal freedoms and conveniences are curtailed. Hopefully, this curtailment is temporary, but then the temporary tax measures and government regulations generated by the First and Second World Wars haven’t gone away yet, have they?

Canada’s new anti-terror laws and regulations are dangerously flawed, but in the current environment they are also necessary. Our Senators and MPs are right to periodically review them to see if they are still needed. Some of the new laws do make enormous sense — it is now, for example, illegal to make your own biotoxins and nerve gases in the privacy of your own home (strange how we missed this before 2002, given our state’s predilection for rigid gun control). Some laws are practical only in the context of an anti-terror campaign, and disturbing otherwise — such as those that address front organizations and fund raisers who work on behalf of a terrorist campaign. Some new capabilities, like the ability to detain some suspected terrorists for years without a trial, are abusive and potentially dangerous to all of us — Habeas Corpus must not be set aside so casually.

Yet perhaps we do need one more law... for those who seem to be crying ‘Wolf!’ on behalf of the wolves. We need a law that prevents somebody from tacitly threatening a whole building or planeload of passengers, and then putting on a silly "Who, me?" look when the cops turn up. Let’s return a joke for a joke, only our punch line is either instant deportation or imprisonment.

There is adequate provision in Bill C-36 for criminal charges for aiding and abetting a terrorist attack — including undertaking reconnaissance activities or by participating in the planning of an offence. Filming public buildings in itself is not an offence — tourists are expected to do so, but those acts that rouse the suspicion of astute citizens or the police because they are unusual perhaps should be considered as part of terrorist planning. Ordinary citizens don’t drive up to obscure office buildings and photograph every inch of the façade; don’t take minutes of footage of fire exits from public buildings; or don’t act in a way that they know will intimidate people. If somebody wants to pretend to be a Jihadist, let’s take their pretence seriously. If they really are working for Jihadists, so much the better.

In short, if you want to act for a wolf, then you should pay the consequences. If you want to shout ‘fire!’ in a crowded theatre, then we should exercise our freedom to prevent you from ever doing it again.

There is an old and hence now little used expression about a Left-Handed Gift from the Gods. A man who fears being burned to death above all things and who gets a fatal heart attack in his sleep five minutes before his bedroom erupts in flame has received such a gift; so has a boy whose broken arm keeps him from being in a fatal bus accident with the rest of his hockey team. A left-handed gift is the one you don’t welcome, save in retrospect.

The bombing of three subway trains and a bus in London on July 7^th 2005 was a left-handed gift. It was a deadly terrorist attack, 56 people (including four apparent suicide attackers) are known to have died and hundreds of Londoners were injured. This is an attack that nobody would appreciate, but… Al Qaeda’s long desired attack on British territory could have been much worse. In comparison to some of the plots that Jihadists have been incubating for Britain, four bombs on a mass transit system with home-made high explosive really wasn’t that much in the scheme of things.

In January 2003, British police raided a flat in Birmingham where an al Qaeda cell associated with Ansar al Islam (a group then headquartered in a remote part of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq) was brewing ricin. Ricin is a biological toxin that is untreatable once a miniscule lethal dosage — about 1.5 micrograms for a typical adult — has been ingested or injected. It can be weaponized for aerosol delivery via the lungs. Once someone is infected, toxaemia rapidly sets in and death is virtually inescapable.

Imagine that Kamel Bourgass (the Algerian chemist who was assembling the toxin) had succeeded beyond his own dreams and several kilos of this substance were strewn through the London Underground. Thousands of people might have gone home feeling they were coming down with a slight cold, and in the morning they would have all sought hospital care with a raging fever — a symptom of the blood poisoning that would have killed them in a few more hours.

As it was, the Ricin plot was broken up thanks to a timely warning to the British from the Algerian government. Moreover, the planned attack with the toxin did not consist of an aerosolized agent dispersed in the subways, but with an infected handcream that was to be smeared on doors throughout a London neighborhood… not the most effective means of causing mass panic, especially as Ricin cannot penetrate through intact skin (although one wonders if a hand moisturizer would facilitate penetration by the toxin). Even so, nobody noticed Aum Shinrikyo’s first attacks in Japan with biological and chemical attacks either, and Ansar al Islam might have learned more quickly from its mistakes than the Japanese religious cult ever did.

Then there was the spree of ammonium nitrate truck bombs envisioned by another British al Qaeda cell in early 2004. This plot had some input from a Canadian, Momin Khawaja, who now awaits trial in Ottawa under the first application of our new Anti-Terrorism law. After the ring was broken up in March 2004, it transpired that this terrorist cell had amassed some 600 kilos of the fertilizer they needed as a base for their explosives; and that they were planning to use most of it for a single attack at Heathrow. One of the wrinkles planned for this attack included the acquisition of a rare industrial chemical which could have been added to the basic bomb. The chemical would not have evaporated or burned away in the explosion, but would have been scattered about; waiting for the chance to contaminate the wounded and emergency responders — where an hour’s exposure would have resulted in blindness and significantly eroded lung capacity.

There was also British Muslim involvement in another al Qaeda plan to manufacture nerve gas (Sarin) for attacks inside Europe — rapid action by police from several European nations broke this ring up in early 2001.

British Muslims have also been active inside Israel — where two attempted the classic vest-pack suicide attack; one of which went off. Another was arrested in Georgia after enrolling in a flight school. After 911, didn’t he think the Americans would be watching? Other British Muslims have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kashmir, fighting in the ranks of Muslim guerrillas.

The left-handed gifts from what the British are now calling the 7/7 attacks is that the attack could have been attempted years ago with sarin nerve gas, or ricin toxin, or even with a chemical-laced conventional bomb of 500 kilos in size. There is another gift to consider. So far, it seems possible that three of the four bombers on July 7^th weren’t even contemplating suicide, but may have been involuntarily ‘martyred’ by the bomb builder’s deliberate plans. One of the common indicators that a Jihadist intended to die in his attack has yet to be mentioned by British police — Islamist suicide attackers have often been known to wear seven or eight pairs of underwear and perhaps a jockstrap or two (In expectation of their 72 virgins, some like to make sure their equipment is especially safe).

If the attackers of July 7^th were ‘martyred’ against their will, it should be useful for the British and other Western news media to make frequent note of this. It might affect the Jihadists’ recruiting efforts next time round.

Post Scriptum: On July 21^st there was yet another left-handed gift… a failed second wave of attacks on London’s Underground. This time, the four attackers were using an improvised explosive compound made of commonly available substances, but which is extremely unreliable and ages poorly — the ‘Shoebomber’ Richard Reid attempted to use sneakers saturated in the same mixture to down an airliner in mid flight. To the consternation of the four candidate suicide bombers, each of them failed in his mission. Their detonators went off but the main charges barely even fizzled. All of the attackers were caught on film and a vigorous investigation is now underway.

This second attack is disturbing in that it suggests the possibility that a long planned al Qaeda offensive may be underway in the UK. Dire news, but every attack — particularly the failed ones — cost the terrorists much by providing new leads for investigators and a stronger taste for action in the general public.

For the last few decades, Canadian police have had to cope with an increasingly sophisticated criminal environment and severe technological challenges. Yet today’s police officer is now a part of a series of networks reaching through our entire society, and are far more likely to engage in predictive policing—getting ahead of problems before they manifest themselves. How was this done?

One of the maxims in the War on Terror is that "it takes a network to fight a network." Most modern terrorist groups and criminal societies evolved into networks years ago, with loose cells clustered around specific localities or activities, and group reliance on shared backgrounds and common ethnic/cultural identities for socialization between these nodes. Traditional police and security approaches could only tackle one node at a time, seldom with decisive effect.

In the early 1960s, some Canadian police were already beginning to recognize the limitations of conventional approaches in tackling criminal societies. A meeting of Canada’s Attorney Generals in 1966 proposed to create a central clearinghouse for information on organized crime. By 1970 this had manifested in the Criminal Intelligence Service of Canada (CISC) with a central bureau in Ottawa and nine provincial entities. The CISC has grown slowly, with every sign of the usual cautious reticence about public involvement that is typical of Canadian civil servants and senior police officers. Yet even as early as 1976, it led to the creation of the Automated Criminal Intelligence Information System, one of the world’s first police computer networks. The CISC gathers raw data and specific intelligence and pools it for further refinement and analysis.

Currently some 380 agencies and entities contribute to and make use of the CISC. The RCMP’s Commissioner heads the organization, and 22 representatives from other police forces with permanent intelligence units meet twice a year to steer the group, share new concerns, and direct new priorities.

The main focus of the CISC is on criminal societies and major criminal activities. Counter-terrorism is not a part of its usual brief or mandate, but there are many ways around this. The report for 2004 highlights the leaky security at Canada’s ports and airports, a situation that organized crime already capitalizes on, but also one which represents a risk from opportunistic terrorists. A central role for Canada in North American security also revolves around the Smart Border Initiative along the Canada-US border, and the CISC is expressing concerns about organized criminal activities on the border and supports the new Integrated Border Enforcement Teams (IBETs) in countering them.

Some police intelligence units are large formal organizations and mirror the CISC in their own right. The Criminal Intelligence Service of Ontario (CISO) is largely run by the Ontario Provincial Police, but has representation from several municipal and regional police forces. Others face complex jurisdictional environments in their localities—Halifax and Vancouver police have to contend with major rail and port facilities within their cities, which are often administered by federal laws and once had their own specialist agencies. Vancouver, like Montreal and Toronto, also have seen large suburbs evolve into cities in their own right, leading to a need to coordinate more closely with nearby municipal police forces than might be the case for Saskatoon, Saint John’s or Yellowknife.

The initial role of police intelligence services, particularly in cities, is to collect and collate data concerning criminal activities that occur on an ongoing basis. One of the usual functions of these groups, particularly after the formation of the CISC, was to liaise with other forces to facilitate the sharing of information. Most members were long time detectives or specialist investigators recruited from vice, narcotics and homicide squads. They also facilitated the internal transfer of information between such squads, which sometimes was not easily accomplished.

While the RCMP Security Service was concerned with foreign spies and members of hostile political groups within Canada (such as the Communist Party of Canada or the KKK) provincial and municipal police forces had no mandate to investigate these issues. Outside of Quebec, where police faced FLQ bombs throughout the 1960s, terrorism was barely on the mental horizon of most police.

In preparing for the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal, the memories of the massacre of athletes in Munich in 1972 loomed large. The RCMP was aware that Black September and other Palestinian groups were trying to stick their toes into Canadian waters as early as 1972. Police in our major cities were also coping with increased political violence from émigré communities and had learned from the European and American experience with radical leftist terrorists.

The 1985 Air India bombing and the takeover of the Turkish embassy in Ottawa proved instructive and more forces started to devote intelligence resources to potential sources of terrorism. An additional spur came from the growing activities of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). But while free to investigate a terrorist attack and treat it purely as a criminal matter, collecting material on Anarchists, ALF supporters, activists for the Khalsa movement or the Tamil Tigers was only incidental for most police forces. Without the authority and the legal tool kit to act against terrorist groups, most could only collect material for background purposes.

Another development in police intelligence emerged from investigations into high profile serial offenders in the 1980s and ‘90s. Police were slowly learning the benefit of using multiple professional perspectives, particularly from the forensics side, in trying to uncover the habits of some serial killers to learn more about their behaviors and future patterns. Some vital pioneering work in this field came out of the geographical profiling methodology that was developed in British Columbia in the mid-1990s by the Simon Fraser University’s School of Criminology in cooperation with the Vancouver Police Department and the RCMP. This is one of several tools in suspect prioritization and data management that have emerged within the last decade in Canada, the U.S. and Great Britain.

Another technique that emerged from organized crime and street-gang investigations in the U.S. has become widely accepted. Police intelligence agencies now start to map out the organization by taking known gang members or mobsters, and then charting out all of their movements and all of their social contacts. Eventually sufficient data enables analytical models to provide a picture of the larger network, and to identify pivotal figures who might have otherwise escaped the notice of the police.

The creation of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) was the result of a lengthy inquiry into the RCMP’s Security Service, its long time intelligence branch. The whole history of the service has been recounted elsewhere, and someday the service might actually get the plaudits they often deserved, but it was clear that the federal government wanted to make a new start.

Since 1984, the agency has managed to mature as a security service. Between mishandling the Air India investigation, jurisdictional issues, and teething problems, there were numerous press reports about CSIS/RCMP infighting, even though both organizations report to the Solicitor General. But the seeds of a fruitful cooperation with police were planted with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act that mandated the creation of the organization and defined its powers. The act allows CSIS to enter into joint activities with Canadian police forces, with the oversight of the Special Intelligence Review Committee, and the various provincial attorneys general. It took a few years for the cops and CSIS to warm up to each other, especially as both tended to remain protective of their sources.

In the early 1990s, the police were starting to recognize the worth of networking through CISC and its satellite organizations, and were getting used to occasional inputs from CSIS. For the criminals, a major engine of growth was the black market in cigarettes, although the overall size of this industry at its height in 1993 was a fraction of that of the ongoing market in narcotics and illegal drugs. But the tobacco smuggling conduit across the Canada/U.S. border was also leading to a flood of illegal small arms inside Canada, most of which were ending up in the hands of an increasingly diverse criminal scene on our streets. Cops are invariably the first to recognize a new problem, and the flood of firearms triggered "Project Gun-Runner," a collaborative investigation among five Ontario forces between 1992 and 1994.

The startling findings from Gun-Runner lead to the creation of Ontario’s Provincial Weapons Enforcement Unit (PWEU) to try and tackle the problem. The unit was created as a subset of CISO and became a task force with involvement from the RCMP, OPP and numerous metropolitan/regional forces in the province.

The growing diversity of Canada’s criminal scene was also noted in the early 1990s. This also led to a proliferation of police task forces, oriented toward particular problems. Expertise especially with municipal police in some major cities and long- serving detachment commanders with the RCMP, led to a greatly increased appreciation between various police forces. The task forces were also holding seats open for representatives from Transport Canada, Canada Customs and Revenue, Immigration Canada and for occasional liaison officers from America. (Canadians should note that Customs and Immigration are now combined in a new Border Agency).

The rapidly accumulating experience in joint task forces would soon stand Canada in good stead. With the passage of Bill C-36 and a set of tough new anti-terrorism laws in early 2002, Canadian police had the go-ahead for even closer work with CSIS and started to aggressively develop intelligence on terrorism. One early spin-off was the creation of Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams (INSETs). These combine police with assets and personnel from Transport Canada, National Defence, CSIS and the Border Agency. INSETs have been created in several Canadian provinces, particularly for work in major ports and other areas with complex jurisdictional environments.

Ontario has also seen the creation of the first JFO (Joint Force Operation) which again combines municipal, provincial and federal police with CSIS and input from other federal and provincial agencies. The JFO is mandated to undertake strategic intelligence work and is developing its own ‘human sources’ informers, to facilitate its own investigations. In Ontario, both the JFO and the CISO have also established regional task forces and a similar process is at work in other provinces.

PATS is another new acronym on the Canadian policing scene: Provincial Anti-Terrorism Sections. Most provinces have created them to work with their INSETs and IBETs. These preceded work on the new smart border initiative between Canada and the United States and combine a variety of Canadian and American agencies working as joint forces around critical border areas. The successes of the smuggling industry in the early 1990s are not likely to be repeated.

This alphabet soup of acronyms shows how Canadian police intelligence has been extensively re-organized in the last five years. Most major municipal and regional police now have reorganized their intelligence services to reflect the multi-agency task force concept. Some Canadian municipal police forces also have liaison officers from major American cities and vice versa. These networks of interlaced agencies at the federal, provincial, regional/municipal, and local levels are working in loose conjunction. The organized criminal and the terrorist/security-focused networks operate in loose tandem to add an extra dimension to their capabilities.

Canada’s police intelligence agencies at every level of government have become nodal points in overlapping networks, which share information and intelligence data on a timely basis and can work on joint investigations without any of the time consuming delays and obstructions that occurred so often in the past. Being a network-oriented structure, they can now be more flexible and responsive. To fight networked problems, the police have finally developed networks of their own.

"The twin pillars of political correctness are willful ignorance and a steadfast refusal to face the truth."

• -- George MacDonald Fraser, novelist (The Flashman Papers) and historian

"The world as it is today is how others shaped it. We have two choices: Either to accept it with submission, which means letting Islam die, or to destroy it, so that we can construct the world as Islam requires."

• -- Mohamed Baqer al-Sadr, an Iraqi Shiite cleric in 1980 (and father of the self-appointed Mahdi in current Iraq)

And this just in from the That-Explains-Everything Desk…

"Genghis Khan wasn’t really a bad guy. He just had bad press. "

• -- Elbegdorj Tsahkia, the Mongolian Prime Minister at a press conference, May 2005