Tom Quiggin.

By Jennifer Green, The Ottawa Citizen

Canada and the United States haven’t shown as much savvy as Britain, Israel or Singapore in dealing with terrorism, says an Ottawa-based intelligence expert.

Instead, they rely on measures like “border theatre” along the 49th parallel, says Tom Quiggin, a court-qualified expert on global jihadism and a former RCMP intelligence and national security expert.

“The whole business of border security is 90 per cent theatre. There’s nothing to show that anybody’s any safer at the end of this.”

Luggage checks and line-ups make governments look like they’re on the ball, but the terrorists who attacked New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, had legal documents. These new border checks would not have stopped them, he says.

Even though the U.S. is home to the world’s slickest public relations machine, it has bungled an important aspect of the war on terror, with allegations of torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Americans look worse, or at least not any better, than the terrorists.

“That has done so much to destroy the credibility of the West,” says Quiggin.

“The damage is just incalculable because people around the world go, ‘what’s the difference between that and what Saddam Hussein did in his prisons’?”

And, Quiggin noted, Canada has not separated itself from the debacle as clearly as it should have.

“The only western country left with a guy in Guantanamo Bay is us. And that’s Omar Khadr who was 14 or 15 years old at the time and fits the definition of child soldier.”

The consequences go beyond simply looking bad, he said.

Western intelligence officers have little credibility when they try to approach the Muslim community, either here or abroad. In some mosques, Muslims refuse to even discuss jihad or other issues with their teens, for fear that someone might report them to police.

It is particularly tragic, because many imams have tried to preach against violence, telling youth that suicide is forbidden. In fact, Muslim teaching holds that someone who kills himself will spend eternity dying. A suicide bomber, then, would have his head, arms and legs blown off forever, said Quiggin.

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Tags: Abu Ghraib, border, Canada, Guantanamo Bay, Muslim Community, Omar Khadr, United States

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