AND NOW CANADA - AT 10:33 A.M. ET:  As readers know, we've been following the inordinate number of recent terror-related incidents in the United States, or involving American citizens abroad.  Now Canada is in the news.  It's a pattern we've seen here.  Five Somali men from Toronto have disappeared.  From the Toronto Star:

Their passports are missing and they haven't called home. The overwhelming fear is that – like at least 20 young Somali-American men in Minneapolis who have disappeared in the past two years, and others from Australia, Sweden and Britain – the young men are en route to Somalia to fight alongside al Shabaab, an Islamist youth militia aligned with Al Qaeda.

The Shabaab, which is fighting the government, is often called Somalia's Taliban. Its increasingly savvy online presence is being blamed as a possible reason for the disappearance of the five Canadians. And Somali community leaders fear other young people will be targeted as long as they feel alienated in this country, and embraced by another.

"These people can speak in their language and lure them from right under our nose," said Ahmed Hussen, the Ottawa-based president of the Canadian Somali Congress, adding people in the community have told him chat rooms were also used to lure the missing men. "We won't even know what's going on."

Yeah, we saw nothing.  We saw absolutely nothing.  There were just trains going by, heading east.  How many times have we heard this line?

And yet, I saw a CNN documentry on homegrown terrorism that reported that, in Canada, those convicted of planning terror incidents get comparatively light sentences.  And in the United States, we plan to try the mastermind of 9-11 in an ordinary civilian courtroom in New York, with all the uncertainties of a jury trial. 

It's time to get serious, both above and below the Canadian-American border.  There are too many warnings flying our way.

December 13,  2009