Isn't That Typical?

Some entities are so powerful that they have no need to pause for introspection before accusing others of wrongs, lapses, lack of due diligence or malfeasance leading to potential harm toward others that they themselves are guilty of. In the case of the United States with all the cutting edge technologies and intelligence opportunities at their beck and call, one failure after another to apprehend attacks against themselves has led to greater emphasis on fail-safe security measures, all of which are meaningless because of a lack of scrupulous implementation.

Rather than empowering their intelligence agencies to commit to working with one another in a tandem of responsive and responsible intelligence sharing, rather than monitoring their homeland security measures on their home turf to ensure that all the measures committed to, to ensuring that terrorists cannot identify the weakest links and exploit them are consolidated and the parameters met, American authorities and the country's administration looks outward, toward its defence partners to find fault there.

Not for them the recognition that they have themselves failed to implement meaningful and useful measures to foil the plans of malevolently determined terrorists to exact as much blood and damage to the structure of the country as they possibly can, in the process sowing the threads of terror in the minds of the population. The executive body and its homeland security offices and intelligence-related arms prefer instead to look outward to assign blame.

And that blame generally goes out to the country nearest it geographically with a contiguous border, a shared language and partially shared culture, an integrated communications and energy and production network. To the timidly-assertive country next door which traditionally has gone out of its way to bow before the demands of its big neighbour. Despite all proof to the contrary, American legislators continue to believe and to express the opinion that the weakest link in its interior security is its proximity to Canada.

Canada with the leaky border, with the lax rules on issuing visas; the country that welcomes immigrants from all over the world. Despite the irrefutable fact that none of the 9/11 terrorists leaked into the U.S. from Canada, but were actually issued American permission to enter the country, the fiction still resonates that they entered from Canada. And now we learn too that in the weeks leading up to the inauguration of the first biracial American president the RCMP was advised that a Canadian of Somali extraction would attempt to assassinate the president-elect.

American intelligence received what they felt was a credible 'tip' that such an extreme event was on the cusp of being carried out. While an RCMP investigation had no trouble coming to the conclusion that the tip was a false one, attributing it to a 'poison pen' operation, a hoax, where some questionable individuals attempted to frame others whom they viewed as enemies. And this was too difficult for the CIA to ascertain, given the presumed gravity of the event?

The United States has its own expatriate Somali immigrant community. Some of the male youth of whom, like those in Canada, have been identified as potentially radicalized by absorbing and passionately grasping al-Qaeda's ideology, who have travelled to Somalia and to Yemen to be taught jihadi-effective techniques in terror and exploitation of their favoured position as citizens as launching pads for exacting Islamist revenge against the hated United States.

Through the periscope of its crooked vision, U.S. authorities are able to visualize danger erupting through the auspices of al-Qaeda agents emanating from Canada, but rarely from within their own borders. Finding it incredible, doubtless - and who can blame them? - that U.S.-born offspring of immigrants might choose to follow the road less travelled and become a threat to the very country that nurtured them and gave succour to their families.