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After months of intricate planning, three teams of ISIS-linked terrorists attacked soft targets in Paris — including a soccer stadium where President François Hollande and other foreign dignitaries were sitting in the stands — murdering 129 people and injuring scores of other innocents.

So where were France’s security services? I’ll tell you where they were: AWOL, and they’re already making excuses for their abject failure to prevent yet another mass murder in Paris (not to mention losing track of one of the alleged terrorists, who apparently slipped through the dragnet).

You may recall that, after three terrorists stormed the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher market in Paris last January — killing 20 and injuring another 20 — French security services got more money, spies and extraordinary new surveillance powers, presumably so they could prevent the kind of atrocity that struck the city last Friday. Clearly, they didn’t.

Every time French, British, American or Canadian security services fail, they trot out the same excuse, which — stripped of all the self-serving embroidery — goes something this: Hey, you don’t expect us to stop them all, do you? If you want us to, we’ll need more money, powers and resources.

That’s what happened after one suicidal man with a gun went on shooting spree in Ottawa; Stephen Harper obliged our security services by making Bill C-51 law and giving a largely unaccountable security intelligence infrastructure a lot more money and powers.

But here’s the thing: Governments can’t stop terrorism with laws and money. What these security services offer is the illusion of security. It doesn’t matter whether you live in Paris, New York, London, Toronto or Ottawa; the sad fact is that if you happen to be in the wrong place and time — where a terrorist happens to be bent on mayhem — chances are you’re going to be killed or hurt. The actual odds of you being anywhere near that terrorist are, of course, vanishingly small. You’re much more likely to die drowning in your bathtub than slain by a terrorist.

Your basement — if you have one — is better able to protect you from terrorists than any spy service operating anywhere in the world. That’s not a flippant crack. It’s just the unvarnished truth. Your basement — if you have one — is better able to protect you from terrorists than any spy service operating anywhere in the world. That’s not a flippant crack. It’s just the unvarnished truth.

So please pay no attention to the career fearmongers who always pop up on TV after events like this telling you to hide under your bed. Guys like the ubiquitous ex-CSIS manager Ray Boisvert; apparently CBC News has him on speed-dial. He’s an expert all right … in whipping up hysteria. Exhibit A: Listen to Boisvert tell CBC radio listeners in July that a mysterious tunnel discovered in Toronto on the eve of the Pan Am Games may have been built by the same “malicious” types who build tunnels in Gaza and may have been intended for attacks on university students and spectators. That tunnel, by the way, was the brainchild of a couple of guys in their 20s — not Hamas agents — and was intended as a cool place to hang out (a “man cave”, police called it).

I spent years reporting on spy services, so I can tell you this with confidence: Stop listening to Ray Boisvert and people like him. Your basement — if you have one — is better able to protect you from terrorists than any spy service operating anywhere in the world. That’s not a flippant crack. It’s just the unvarnished truth.

Western security services are simply large bureaucracies, and much of the work that goes on inside these bureaucracies bears little, if any, resemblance to the cartoonish, action-packed world of espionage portrayed in films and on TV. A lot of it is mundane desk work. Complacency often sets in — sometimes with disastrous consequences.

Spy services are notoriously slow to change, let alone evolve. Most Western security services were built to catch Russian spies, not Islamic terrorists. They remain wedded to the old way of doing things, and the people they hire are generally the same people they’ve hired since World War Two … mostly white, English or French-speaking males.

I challenge reporters to ask Canada’s spy service, CSIS, how many Arabic-speaking intelligence officers (not translators) are on the payroll right now. This is what CSIS will tell them: It’s a state secret. The real reason CSIS won’t share the figure, of course, is that it’s embarrassingly low.

Predictably, Conservative politicians and their allies in academia and corporate media — rather than asking spy services such prickly questions — are demanding that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau halt plans to accept 25,000 desperate Syrian refugees and to continue dropping bombs on Syria and Iraq.

Newsflash to to all these chairbound Jack Bauer-wannabees: All 19 of the al Qaida killers who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks entered the U.S. not as refugees, but with their business, visitor and (in once case) student visas officially in hand. (And none of them entered U.S. via Canada; can we please stop talking about that now?) Fifteen of them were from Saudi Arabia. (I guess that means that the bombs-away crowd wants Canada and its allies to start bombing Riyadh, right?)

For what it’s worth, here’s my advice to Trudeau. Stick to your guns, stick to the plan. Bring in the refugees and the stop the bombing. It’s not like the old plan — a decade of invasion, bombing runs and assassination-by-drone — has done much good, has it?

For my small part, I plan to do what most Parisians are doing today. They’re not succumbing to the fear. They’re living life. I still intend to visit Paris in the spring — as I’ve done many times. I’ll do so knowing that if, by some remote chance, I find myself in the wrong place and time, it might be my last visit to that beautiful city. And I don’t expect any so-called security service to do much to stop it.

Andrew Mitrovica is a writer and journalism instructor. For much of his career, Andrew was an investigative reporter for a variety of news organizations and publications including the CBC’s fifth estate, CTV’s W5, CTV National News — where he was the network’s chief investigative producer — the Walrus magazine and the Globe and Mail, where he was a member of the newspaper’s investigative unit. During the course of his 23-year career, Andrew has won numerous national and international awards for his investigative work.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.