Senior RCMP Mountie: What We’re On To Scares Us, Keeps Me Awake At Night – Canada
May 8, 2008 by national
Filed under World Report
The RCMP is investigating seven suspected terrorist plots so disturbing they “keep me awake at night,” the senior Mountie for national security disclosed yesterday.
Assistant Commissioner Mike McDonell said the cases are “spread right across the country” and each is comparable in scale to Canada’s biggest alleged jihadist conspiracy, which resulted in the arrests of 18 Toronto-area people in a suspected plot to bomb federal buildings in 2006.
The seven cases are among an unprecedented 848 national security cases, most related to terrorism, currently under investigation, Assistant Commissioner McDonell told an Ottawa conference on critical infrastructure protection.
“What we’re onto scares us,” he said in a later interview, without elaborating. “What we’re not onto really scares us.”
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the RCMP’s national security criminal investigation section’s caseload has grown 780 per cent, with the $40-million-a-year section “borrowing people from here, there and everywhere, there’s just that much work out there,” he said. “It’s a no-risk environment. Our people are running at the limit.”
His comments are the most detailed and candid yet from police on the threat confronting Canada.
“What we’re facing is a violent Islamist born-again social movement,” comprised mostly of young, second- or third-generation immigrants with a secular background, he told the Conference Board of Canada gathering of security, industry and government experts.
