The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have stopped a number of attacks from occurring in Canada, sometimes by disrupting networks when arrests could not be made, the Globe & Mail reports this morning. This semi-covert action rarely gets acknowledged but has kept the nation safe from terrorist attack and demonstrates again that the professionals have kept their eye on the ball:

The RCMP has quietly broken up at least a dozen terrorist groups in the past two years, according to documents obtained by The Globe and Mail.

"We have completed 12 disruptions of national-level terrorist groups across the country," the Mounties say in briefing notes prepared for Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day.

Disruptive tactics -- sometimes as simple as letting targets know they are under close surveillance -- are used to prevent a terrorist attack when the police do not have enough evidence to lay criminal charges, the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service say. ...

Disruptive tactics can take many forms, including interdiction of persons or matériel at border points, denial of charitable status to front groups, deportation of non-citizens on security grounds, or "defensive actions as a result of threat assessment," CSIS spokeswoman Barbara Campion said. CSIS, the RCMP and other agencies "have a duty to prevent and disrupt terrorist acts . . . before these individuals have the opportunity to carry out their terrorist plans."

After 9/11, George Bush told Americans that this war would be fought on many fronts in many different ways. The Canadians obviously heard what he had to say. One could question whether simply spooking terrorists really stop attacks, or merely postpone them,. Since so much of their strategy involves secrecy and deception, a blown cover means that they and their entire network would have to be replaced before an attack could occur -- an expensive proposition for a movement already working on the cheap.

We like to argue that the lack of any terrorist attacks in the US since 9/11 shows that we have defended ourselves well against the terrorist threat. That same argument can be made for the Canadians, who perhaps did not realize the scope of their danger until this past week.

UPDATE: OK, so Newsbeat1 knew.

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