Working as a homeland security specialist means living life a little paranoid. The nature of the job requires you to find threats, where everyone else sees safety. The question is: How much fear is too much? The other day, word leaked of a knee-knocking report from U.S. Northern Command, warning that Canada could becoming a terrorist sieve. Some might see the brief as a dose of healthy precaution. To one informed source, it's just "the latest of a steady drumbeat of fear mongering coming out of Northcom." He points to pronouncements like this:
July 24, 2007: "I believe there are [al Qaeda] cells in the United States, or at least people who aspire to create cells in the United States," Northcom chief Gen. Victor "Gene" Renuart tells the AP. "To assume that there are not those cells is naïve, and so we have to take that threat seriously." He added, "Am I concerned that this will happen this summer? I have to be concerned that it could happen any day."
March 7, 2008: But "we need only to look at Spain and see that [terrorists] are certainly willing to try to do something that is significant that could effect an election process," Renuart says. Not that there's any specific intelligence pointing to a pre-election attack. "I think it would be imprudent of us to let down our guard believing that if there's no credible threat that you know of today, there won't be something tomorrow."
December 17, 2008: "It would make news for a terrorist element or rogue element to interrupt that event," Renuart says of President Obama's inauguration. Again, there are no specific warnings to that effect. But "it is prudent to plan for the possibility of that event and to deter it or to respond to it."
January 27, 2009: Renuart says that a Department of Homeland Security warning of a Somali terror strike on the inaugural proceedings turned out to be bunk. But he warns warns "that ongoing security concerns still face the Obama administration during its early days," according to the Associated Press.
"If you look back in our history, every time we change an administration there has been some event seen to challenge the new administration," he says. "So I wouldn't let down our guard to say we are past the period of vulnerability."
