Madam Speaker, I too would like to express my total support for Bill C-36 and the fight against terrorism. I would also like to take a moment to congratulate our Prime Minister for going to Halifax to bid farewell to our soldiers. I hope when everything is said and done they will all come back safe and sound to their families and loved ones. I also hope they will come here one day so we can honour them in the House of Commons.
Over the last couple of days we have had many discussions. During one of the discussions a colleague from this side of the House mentioned the fact that any time we have a demonstration that turns violent it is a terrorist act. Someone else from the other side mentioned that it is not a terrorist act but rather a free expression of will.
As far as I am concerned, I do not think we can come up with a scientific definition of what the word terrorism means.
I will give an example. In the 1950s Nelson Mandela, the leader of the African National Congress, was a terrorist for the white supremacist government in South Africa. I am glad to say that he was here a couple of years ago and will be here again to receive an honorary citizenship for Canada.
To re-emphasize the point I made earlier, there is no scientific definition for the word terrorism.
However, having said that, there is no justification whatsoever for anyone to engage in terrorist acts, especially the ones that happened on September 11 which killed over 5,000 innocent people working in their offices.
I want to focus my next few minutes not on the bill alone. I would like to say that to fight terrorism is like having a chair. It needs four legs to have balance.
I think the Minister of Justice is doing a fantastic job on the legal end of it. However what is missing in our fight against terrorism here, and especially in the United States, is the intelligence aspect of it.
As we all know, the Middle East is a hotbed of international problems. In the early 1950s attempts were made in Iran to overthrow the shah. The CIA was involved. It brought back the shah but it failed to protect its interests in the Middle East in 1979 when the shah was thrown out by Ayatollah Khomeini. I think we have regretted that from that time onward to this day because we were not able to predict what was going to happen following the shah's fall . Then we had the Iran-Iraq war.
We then had the Lebanese civil war in 1983 where 241 U.S. marines were bombed by terrorist acts. Again, the Americans were not able to get the intelligence required to defend themselves or prevent these terrorist acts.
In the late 1980s the U.S.S.R. fell. It was the biggest empire in the world. Everybody was afraid. It was a powerful nation for over 1,000 years but nobody knew it was crumbling from within.
The CIA and the FBI have a $28 billion budget. If they could not figure out what was happening in the Soviet Union for the last 50 years, then I am really concerned about what will happen in the next 50 years.
What happened on September 11 was, I think, an intelligence failure. The U.S. knew full well that the same place had been bombed by terrorists 10 years ago. Obviously they failed, and I am glad, but they should have failed this time around too. The U.S. knew this thing was coming up.
In history there are many situations that could have been prevented if we only had good intelligence. We have failed to have that.
The bombing of a U.S. navy ship in the south Yemen Sea was due to an intelligence failure. The African embassy bombing two years was also due to an intelligence failure.
We had many warnings that our intelligence system was failing us but we never took the time to review the status of our western intelligence.
Over the last few weeks there were quite a few documentaries on CBC telling us about the failures of our intelligence system, the American intelligence system and the whole western intelligence system to prevent the attack that took place on September 11.
If I may say so, I think this discussion should focus on improving our intelligence system so we can prevent further attacks.
To describe what is happening now, I would describe it as a snake. The snake's head is in Nigeria.
The House may recall three or four years ago that the foreign affairs committee had a delegation of Algerian parliamentarians here on an exchange program. The people in that country had a coup d'état against the democratically elected government. It was in the news, on TV and in newspapers over the last couple of years. Individuals were concerned that Muslim fundamentalists were taking power from the democratically elected government. From that time on things have changed. All disguised fundamentalists have now congregated in Afghanistan.
The hotbed of this conflict is of course the Middle East. One does not have to say anything more when they say Middle East because everyone knows what has been happening there over the last 50 years, and more intensely over the last year or so.
I believe that by bombing Afghanistan only part of the problem has been solved, not the whole problem. We have to go to the root of the problem. No matter how many laws we pass in this place, there will not be a final solution to terrorist acts.
As far as I am concerned, rule number one is intelligence. Rule number two is more intelligence. Rule number three is even more intelligence to fight terrorism.