Our intelligence services are failing us

It makes for grim reading, the criminal complaint filed by a federal prosecutor in New York City, ripe with details about a thwarted plot by a devotee of the Islamic State group to massacre Jews after slipping across the border from Canada.

- ROSIE DIMANNO

Alarming content in the wake of another recent arrest — an accused Egyptian-born father and son terrorist combo — allegedly conspiring to slaughter civilians in Toronto, in the service of Islamic State. A father who somehow managed to slither through security screening, claiming asylum, granted a visa, then permanent residency status, then Canadian citizenship (in May) before a gruesome video surfaced of the now 62-year-old Ahmed Fouad Mostafa Eldidi allegedly dismembering a prisoner with a sword.

Canada can thank France’s intelligence apparatus for that heads-up.

The apprehension this past week of Muhammad Shahzeb Khan in a small Quebec town less than 20 kilometres from the New York state border, allegedly headed to commit violent mayhem in New York City — that interdiction can be attributed to FBI vigilance.

Where would we be without friends and allies seemingly more quickened to terrorist treachery?

A pair of undercover agents with the FBI’s counterterrorism squad had, since last November, been tracking the encrypted social messaging and phone calls of Khan, a 20-year-old Pakistani national who lives in Canada. Khan’s alleged scheme, both grandiose and horrific, was, according to the charging document, to slaughter “as many Jews as possible” and, if successful, perpetrate the largest terrorist attack inside the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland at a news conference last month. Thanks to the FBI, a Canadian resident has been arrested in Quebec over an alleged terror plot to commit violence in New York City. Canadians have reason to worry our surveillance establishment isn’t up to the task, Rosie DiManno writes.