Canadian Security Intelligence Service Director Richard Fadden delivers a speech at the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies annual conference in Ottawa Oct. 29.

By COLIN FREEZE

Canadians are blind to the threat posed by terrorists who publicly espouse their rights while privately believing in nothing but “nihilism and death,” Canada’s new spy chief says.

“We have a serious blind spot as a country,” said Dick Fadden, who was appointed the head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service this summer.

Public skepticism about intelligence agencies has built to a point where being an accused terrorist in Canada is now akin to being a “status symbol” in certain quarters, he lamented.

The speech yesterday at a security-intelligence conference amounts to Mr. Fadden’s public debut as a CSIS director. A peeved, almost bellicose tone, marked his comments, as he pushed back against recent intelligence controversies.

A career civil servant, Mr. Fadden complained that the public too readily embraces terrorism suspects as “folk heroes” and too eagerly dismisses government intelligence to the contrary. He said that security and liberty should not viewed as a zero-sum balancing act, but rather as a DNA-like double-helix structure where the two strands reinforce one another.

“I would argue security is a human right,” he said, adding that “terrorists are the ultimate enemies” of liberal-democratic states.

Mr. Fadden said that a “loose partnership” of non-governmental organizations, advocacy journalists and lawyers have skewed the public debate even though “terrorism is still the most important threat we face.” He harangued unnamed journalists for being too credulous and Canadian “elites” for being aloof to the threat of terrorism entirely.

“Why then, I ask, are those accused of terrorist offences often portrayed in media as quasi-folk heroes, despite the harsh statements of numerous judges?”

He added: “Why are they always photographed with their children, given tender-hearted profiles, and more or less taken at their word when they accuse CSIS or other government agencies of abusing them?

“It sometimes seems that to be accused of having terrorist connections in Canada has become a status symbol, a badge of courage in the struggle against the real enemy, which apparently is government.”

CSIS, created 25 years ago, has lately been beset by a number of controversies inside and outside the courts.

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Tags: Canada, CSIS, journalists, Lawyers, NGO, Richard Fadden, Security, Terrorists

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