Dosanjh Reveals War on Terror's Missing Link

Domestic terrorism matters. It's time to start addressing it

Today Liberal MP Ujal Dosanjh testified before the Air India Inquiry today, and what he had to say spoke volumes about Canada's anti-terrorism record.

During his testimony, Dosanjh noted the response -- or, rather, lack thereof -- by the Canadian officials he addressed his concerns to while he was the subject of a "reign of terror" consisting of arson, various threats, and a 1985 beating. He had previously spoken out against Sikh extremism.

"I believe that the institutions of our society were unable to understand or comprehend it to any great degree at that time and were not able to deal with it," he asserted. "We were left to fend for ourselves."

Dosajh even addressed his concerns to then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and did so two months before the bombing of Air India Flight 182.

Unfortunately, all too many people would probably be as swift as the authorities of the day to dismiss Dosanjh's plight as a problem internal to an immigrant community.

They're wrong.

The fact is, that Dosanjh's experiences reveal a much-ignored facet of the war on terror: the war on domestic terror.

Certainly, some may argue, Canada's Sikhs are an immigrant community. But as immigrants, they have, in a sense, petitioned to be included in the Canadian community, and we have accepted them. As such, the ****** directed at Dosanjh, and those Sikhs who shared his sentiments and outspokeness, very much qualify as domestic terrorism.

Many people believe that Canada is demonstrating its support for the war on terror merely by being in Afghanistan, fighting the Taliban, who harboured terrorists and allowed them to plot their attacks with impunity. This may be the case, but the war on terror abroad is only half the battle. We must fight this battle on the home front as well.

We need not necessarily fight the battle on the home front by cracking down on civil liberties (although we will need to decide to what extent -- if any -- we are willing to sacrifice such liberties in exchange for improved security).

We do, however, need to fight this war by cracking down on terror groups within our own borders. Whether or not Stephane Dion sidetracked this process when he defeated the renewal of sunsetting anti-terror legislation is actually largely immaterial. We have various laws on the books that would allow us to investigate and dismantle thesegroups.

Where, for example, are the crackdowns on organizations like the Ku Klux Klan? What have we done about Babba Khalsa? How about Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam?

They were all judged to be active in Canada as recently as 2002, when a CSIS reported stated, "…with the possible exception of the United States, there are more international terrorist organizations active in Canada than anywhere in the world. This situation can be attributed to Canada's proximity to the United States which currently is the principal target of terrorist groups operating internationally; and to the fact that Canada, a country built upon immigration, represents a microcosm of the world. It is therefore not surprising that the world's extremist elements are represented here, along with peace-loving citizens. Terrorist groups are present here whose origins lie in regional, ethnic and nationalist conflicts, including the Israeli Palestinian one, as well as those in Egypt, Algeria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, the Punjab, Sri Lanka, Turkey and the former Yugoslavia."

Groups like Calgary's Final Solution Skins and Terry Long's Heritage Front must, of course, be given equal attention.

Unfortunately, domestic terrorism is something that has been as ignored north of the 49th parallel as it has been south of it, and often these ignored warning signs have resulted in tragedy -- as was the case with Air India.

"We felt abandoned by the political leaders, by the government," Dosanjh testified. "We felt that nobody really cared very much."

He's entirely justified in feeling this way. Tragedy could have been prevented if the terror campaign propagated against him and those like him had been propery investigated and addressed.

Worse yet, Dosanjh's experiences with domestic terrorism are not yet over. "The fear and the reign of terror is still there," he said, and noted he still recieves threats to this day.

It's time to start addressing domestic terror now.

Only in Canada

Canada continues to ignore national wake-up call

One of the most-chronicled tales of recent American history has been the abject failure of various American intelligence agencies to work together to prevent 9/11.

While many of the aforementioned intelligence agencies had various pieces of information regarding the plot, they failed to share it appropriately. Even when the threat was made known to decision-making authorities, including the administration, it was ignored.

Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. Yet it’s all too easy to allow one’s vision to be clouded if they can’t see the entire picture or, worse yet, willfully ignore it.

In Canada, we have a catastrophic terrorist attack of our own which revealed the clogged channels of communication between our intelligence agencies – the 1985 Air India bombing.

In the years following the Air India bombing, the failure of the RCMP and CSIS to share key information regarding the plot has revealed various rivalries between the two agencies that served to undermine their effectiveness in preventing these attacks.

Air India, like 9/11, was preventable.

And while the United States moved quickly in realigning their intelligence gathering capabilities in order to prevent future terrorist attacks, Canada, with an additional 16 years of time to do this, has, as yet, failed to do the same.

Today, the National Post reports that CSIS is apparently afforded little knowledge regarding whether or not information they pass along to the RCMP is being used or not. Nor does the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada.

“I cannot speak a great deal about the downstream results -- the charges, the prosecutions,” said FinTRAC spokesperson Mark Potter. "We are not in a position to answer questions about how many convictions there have been."

This actually contradicts recorded comments by FinTRAC director Horst Intscher, who, in the agency’s last annual report, announced, “It is especially gratifying to see the results of our work now being reflected more and more frequently in criminal investigations, charges, prosecutions and convictions. The positive feedback we are getting from law enforcement agencies and from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) shows us that our efforts are making a valuable contribution to protecting the Canadian financial services sector from abuse by criminals and terrorists."

If the seeming inability of Canadian intelligence-gathering and law enforcement agencies to work together toward a common cause seems silly to the average Canadian, it seems equally so to Air India Enquiry Commissioner John Major.

"It just seems to me that this is getting awfully complicated, that there could be easier ways if we weren't sort of wrapped in barbed wire about exchanging information between agencies,” Major said.

Only in Canada would our intelligence-gathering agencies be allowed to continue to work is disaccord and disarray more than 22 years after such a terrorist attack, which should have been interpreted as a national wake-up call. The United States took less than a year to overhaul its ability to gather, share and act on intelligence related to national security.

It should be considered a national embarrassment – at best – that Canada has, with more time to work with, failed to do the same.

CBC Highlights Potential Darkside of Dion Leadership Win

Rex Murphy shines spotlight on Liberal leadership controversy

On 28 June, 2007, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation featured a segment by Terry Milewski that underscored the discomforting relationship between Canadian politicians and extremist (often terrorist) groups.

Members of all three of Canada's political parties have been known to have their brushes with these extremist groups (the NDP's El-Farouk Khaki marched in a pro-Hezbollah demonstration, Jean Chretien was once photographed with child soldiers at a Tamil Tigers fuction, and Conservative MP Jason Kenney once addressed a rally in support of an Iranian terrorist group).

Milewski's segment underlined, in particular, a recent controversy surrounding the Liberal party, and one of its MPs seeming links to Sikh separatist groups, possibly including those responsible for the Air India bombing.

At the 2006 leadership convention, when Bob Rae gave a speech mentioning the Air India bombing, a word-of-mouth campaign was seemingly organized against him by Sikh delegates at the convention. "My wife was approached by a delegate who happened to be a Sikh, not supporting Bob Rae and not knowing who my wife was," Dosanjh explained. "He said 'well, you shouldn't vote for Bob', because Bob expressed the issue of violence about Air India in his speech."

Rae's report on Air India identified Sikh separatists as being responsible for the bombing.

"It baffles me that you have delegates on the floor of a major political party (to which I belong) who do not want a reference to Air India in a candidate's speech," Dosanjh added.

When Gerard Kennedy lent his support to Stephane Dion, many analysts credited Mississauga-Brampton South MP Navdeep Singh Bains for putting the new Dion/Kennedy coalition over the top with the 250 Sikh delegates he had under his influence.

When Dion lead the Liberals in opposition to renewing the anti-terror act, this raised serious questions about Bains' father in law, Darshan Singh Saini, who was a potential witness to be called before a judicial investigative hearing being sheduled by the RCMP.

When the Liberals led the opposition parties in defeat of the anti-terror act provisions that allowed for such hearings, RCMP deputy commissioner Gary Bass announced, "while I do not dispute that the vote on this critical issue involved perhaps valid considerations beyond the Air India investigation, without a doubt, it represents a serious and damaging blow to the interests of the families in this case."

"The interests of the families in this case" being finding important answers regarding the bombing.

The Liberals insisted that Prime Minister Stephen Harper was "smearing" Bains. Stephane Dion insisted that his actions hadn't damaged the investigation at all. Yet, his actions also allow Darshan Singh Saini -- a former spokesman for Babba Khalsa Panthak, a Sikh terrorist group -- to refuse to testify at any Air India inquiry.

In fairness, it should be considered that Saini -- and Bains -- might have nothing at all to hide. Yet, Canadians are still waiting for definitive answers more than 22 years after the most deadly terror attack in Canada's history.

The opposition of Dion -- who won the Liberal leadership with significant support from Bains -- to the anti-terror act (which protects Saini, Bains' father-in-law) may be entirely coincidental. Unfortunately, because Saini cannot be compelled to testify at any type of hearing, and seems unlikely to testify voluntarily, Canadians can never truly be certain.

And while all of Canada's political parties have, from time to time, cozied up to extremist groups in exchange for political support (one has to especially wonder about support for Sikh separatists despite most of Canada's opposition to Quebecois separatists), the controversy circling Stephane Dion, Navdeep Singh Bains, Darshan Singh Saini and the anti-terror act stand as one of the few examples where such relationships have impacted public policy.

Without such answers, this controversy could be relegated to being one of the unsolved mysteries of Canadian politics.