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White. Male. Academic. Check off those three boxes and you’ve got a good chance of being anointed a “national security expert” by the mainstream media … no questions asked.

You’ll be contacted by reporters for instant comment on the terrorist attack du jour, based on information that you’ve likely gleaned from reading newspapers and watching TV — just like everybody else. But you’ve got a PhD, so that’s all that really matters.

One frequent rider on the national security pundit carousel is Christian Leuprecht, a professor at the Royal Military College, Queen’s University and a ‘senior fellow’ at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Last week, Leuprecht penned a column for the Globe and Mail that was rife with inaccuracies, offered a vacuous defence of Bill C-51 and made the breathtakingly absurd suggestion that “self-righteous” critics of the “surveillance state” (presumably including journalists like yours truly) have prevented the forces of order from “leveling the playing field with the bad guys” responsible for the Paris atrocities.

According to Leuprecht, troublesome civil libertarians, pesky journalists and perhaps even skeptical French citizens are collectively and in large measure to blame for the terrorist attacks that prompted President François Hollande to declare “pitiless” war against ISIS.

Readers may recall that in a March column I dissected the equally laughable remarks Leuprecht made before the Senate’s Public Safety and National Security Committee considering Bill C-51. Caught in one act of ill-formed hyperbole, Leuprecht has chosen to double-down. He starts his latest rant in the Globe by chastising unnamed “critics” for pointing out that many of the terrorists who murdered hundreds of innocents all over Paris were hardly in deep cover — that, as the Wall Street Journal has so meticulously reported, the killers made their deadly preparations in “plain sight” of somnolent French and other European intelligence services.

Leuprecht absolves France’s intelligence agencies of any responsibility for their failure to detect and halt the attacks by insisting, in part, that “democratic governments” are blocking spy agencies and police from sharing vital intelligence with each other. (Yes, if we could only do away with the ballot box, the spooks and cops could finally talk to one another and stop the mayhem. Astonishing.)

Leuprecht then compounds this bit of lunacy by suggesting Canadian cops and spies are reluctant to share such information because of … Canadian torture survivor Maher Arar. “Since the Maher Arar case,” Leuprecht writes, “Canadian agencies are loath to share intelligence with other departments, let alone countries.”

Apparently, Leuprecht has conveniently forgotten the key findings of Justice Dennis O’Connor’s voluminous report on how the Canadian engineer, husband and father was illegally jailed, deported and repeatedly tortured by Syrian intelligence officers in a coffin-like cell.

In Leuprecht’s cockeyed calculus … our ‘simplistic libertarianism’ — whatever that means — denies spy services the tools to fight and win the war on terror. In Leuprecht’s cockeyed calculus … our ‘simplistic libertarianism’ — whatever that means — denies spy services the tools to fight and win the war on terror.

Justice O’Connor found that incompetent CSIS and RCMP officers eagerly trafficked in misinformation and lies — not “intelligence” — about Arar’s phantom ties to terrorism and that they shared their crap about who and what Arar was with their U.S. colleagues, who knew — long before they shipped him to Syria via Jordan to be tortured — that he was, in fact, an innocent man.

Leuprecht also seems blissfully indifferent to the long-standing, deep-seated enmity that still exists between the Mounties and CSIS when it comes to intelligence-sharing. The turf wars between Canada’s cops and spies are as legendary as they have been disastrous. Exhibits A to Z: Air India Flight 182. Little has changed in that notoriously frayed relationship since that catastrophic intelligence debacle in June, 1985. (Not surprisingly, Leuprecht believes Bill C-51 will unshackle Canada’s spies once and for all.)

Not done, Leuprecht claims that the alphabet soup of intelligence services watching the planet don’t share information because they don’t “trust” one another. And why don’t they trust each other? It’s got nothing to do with turf wars, or the fact that the spooks routinely can’t find other terrorists operating in “plain sight” (the 19 9/11 co-conspirators and the Boston Marathon bombing Tsarnaev brothers also spring immediately to mind).

Instead, Leuprecht plays the neocons’ handy blame-Russia card. Putin’s spies, he claims — without offering a shred of evidence — have “infiltrated” most Central and Eastern European intelligence services, thus making them “unreliable.”

Beyond their inability to trust one another, Leuprecht also whines that Western spy services are overworked and understaffed. His predictable solution: Give them more money and people, even though the knee-jerk tendency of governments of all political stripes to write fat cheques for insatiable espiocrats hasn’t exactly delivered results to date.

Leuprecht saves his most asinine assertion for last. “Intelligence services in constitutional democracies,” he writes, “are bound by the rule of law.”

What parallel universe does Leuprecht inhabit? A visit to a local library is all it takes to be convinced that Western intelligence services have — historically, repeatedly and unashamedly — treated the rule of law (domestic or international) with contempt. If Leuprecht doesn’t want to read my own book, he should have a glance at former Times’ reporter Tim Weiner’s exhaustive expose of the CIA’s rampant illegality and incompetence, Legacy of Ashes, for starters.

He probably won’t because, in Leuprecht’s cockeyed calculus, Weiner and I are members of a lily-livered cabal (along with those naïve civil rights lawyers) intent on “systematically disinforming” the public about the threats to our liberties and way of life posed by terrorists. Worse, he says our “simplistic libertarianism” — whatever that means — denies spy services the tools to fight and win the war on terror.

In the absence of a coherent, compelling argument, Leuprecht takes up prime space on the Globe’s editorial pages to needle people who try to hold vast, immensely powerful and largely unaccountable security intelligence services to account for the costly failures in Paris and elsewhere. Stick and stones, Prof. Leuprecht.

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.