Scary Canada! The "Northern Border" Lurks

"I've seen first-hand the issues that our nation faces countering violent drug trafficking, organized crime and potential terrorist acts."
"It is one of the least recognized threats to our national security ... it is scary."
John Katko, Republican Congressman, New York state

U.S. Border Patrol agents on duty along the Quebec-Vermont border. The U.S. Congress has passed the Northern Border Security Review Act, which calls for a 'threat analysis' of the United States' border with Canada.   Photograph by: Joe Raedle, Getty Images Files , National Post

Hungary has built a wall, fearful of having too many Muslim refugees enter the country, fleeing the sectarian violence that has triggered conflict in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Eritrea and Nigeria, among the many countries of the world where Islam reigns as the religion of peace and understanding between peoples. On the island of Cypress there is another wall, separating Cypriot Greeks from Turks who have decided they like Cypress for themselves.

The separation wall that the State of Israel built between itself and the Palestinians served nicely to stem the tsunami of 'suicide' bombings that took a horrific yield of Jewish lives in enabling Arab martyrs to reach their destination of Paradise, and whose presence the world decries as a symptom of an 'apartheid' state, a Jewish state where Christians, Jews and Arab Muslims are all guaranteed the protection of the law as citizens.

North America is separated into three countries; Mexico to the south, the United States above, and to the  north, Canada. Canada and the United States share the longest border in the world. Canada, a peace-appreciating country where firearms are used for hunting, a country whose reputation is one of polite boredom, sits next to a country where personal firearms are used to burden the country with one of the highest murder rates in the world; a nation whose power and prestige is limitless.

Darryl Dyck / Canadian Press  Canadian border guards are silhouetted at an inspection booth at the Douglas border crossing on the Canada-USA border in Surrey, B.C., on Thursday August 20, 2009.

The United States, however, is fixated on keeping those Canadians who harbour terrorist tendencies far from their borders -- even while reaping the benefits of millions of vacationing Canadians -- at bay, with the aid of a restraining wall. For countries whose economies are inextricably intertwined, and whose commercial trade and production is similarly attached, a separation wall will make trade more difficult to achieve, despite the free trade status achieved, while its function  as a terror-deterrent appears the last word in paranoid pathology.

Despite which, against all reason, the U.S. Congress has passed a bipartisan Northern Border Security Review Act ordering a "threat analysis" of the Canadian border to be delivered in six months. A former Homeland Security chief infamously stated that the 9-11 Islamist jihadists entered her country through Canada, when the stark reality was that the U.S. had given them visas to enter from Germany and other points excluding Canada.

Not only were they given visas to enter the United States, but that country's aeronautical training industry courteously taught them the skills they required to pilot their one-way hijacking tragedies traumatizing and victimizing American citizens as well as citizens of Canada. But the task set before Homeland Security is to determine which "terrorism and criminal threats" may be on the cusp of entering America through Canada, and to decide the direction to take to "prevent terrorists and instruments of terror from entering the United States".

Some of the 9/11 attackers were on the radar of the CIA and they, unfortunately, neglected to inform their partners in homeland security intelligence at the FBI, quite the oversight, speaking to the rivalry between the two groups. Speaking as well to the inefficiency and dysfunction of the American intelligence community, including Homeland Security. In the search for someone to blame for their ineptness, who else but a neighbour?

And, as borders go, it's a loooong one, 8,800-km in length, with another 2,400 km with Alaska. A one-time Republican contender for the U.S. presidency, Senator John McCain warned a year ago that ISIL terrorists were preparing an attack against the United States; that "our northern border is porous and that they will be coming across". From where, pray tell? Via Syria through Canada, of course, why would you even ask!

"There have been no terrorist attacks on the United States coming from Canada", Canada's ambassador to the U.S. responded in a 2010 letter, after Senator Joe Lieberman had spoken of the low security on the Canadian border as "absolutely alarming". No one seems to be listening. Isn't that what 'intelligence' does? It listens, to be able to formulate reasonable conclusions? Dunces and Dunderheads!

Such a wall would be 62 times longer than Hadrian's Wall, 34 times longer than the militarized border between North and South Korea, 54 times longer than the Berlin Wall, and end, with little doubt, in Canada regarding the United States as pitiably unintelligent.