Last Monday May 30, Jack Hooper (right), the deputy director of CSIS, was a witness in front of the Senate Committee on Defence and National Security [Read his opening remarks]. No one, of course, could have known that what Hooper would talk about would be front page news around the world a week later.
Here is one interesting exchange between Hooper and Senator Wilfred Moore (Liberal-Nova Scotia). Moore is trying to get a sense of what CSIS is facing in terms of terrorism threats and whether it has the resources to adequately pursure those threats. At first, Moore wants to get a sense of the number of terrorism threats CSIS has identified:
Hooper: We are talking about basically 350 high level targets and around 50 to 60 organizational targets.
Moore: In terms of the homegrown terrorists, I take it the basis of that is the fact that you know who and where they are.
Hooper: We know who and where some of them are.
Moore: Okay. If we know where and who some of them are, do we remove them from Canada? Is it better to have them here so we can keep an eye on what they are doing? Does the law stop us from having them removed? Are they more dangerous if they are back in Afghanistan, for example?
Hooper: The homegrown terrorists present fewer remedies than international terrorists who have arrived in Canada. We used to have what we called a three tiered approach to targeting. We tried to keep known terrorists out of the country; if that failed, we would interdict them at ports of entry; and if that failed, only then would we embark on aggressive investigations against them. When we talk about the homegrown terrorist phenomenon, in most instances, these are people who are Canadian citizens. You cannot remove them anywhere.
Moore: Most of them are Canadian citizens?
Hooper: Yes. Most of them are very young. A lot of them were born here. A lot of them who were not born here immigrated to Canada with their parents at a very early age. We have two options. We can work in collaboration with law enforcement to prosecute them or we can work to disrupt their activities