While politicians insist Canada's security forces are being vigilant in response to a new Taliban threat to take the fight here, some security experts aren't taking it very seriously.

"People should not be too petrified of a few dozen wannabe suicide bombers sitting in the Kandahar desert, professing their desire to become a martyr," Scott Taylor, publisher of the military magazine Esprit de Corps, told CTV Newsnet on Tuesday.

On Monday, ABC News broadcast footage, reportedly shot by a Pakistani journalist, of a Taliban training camp graduation ceremony.

The militants are supposed to be dispatched to Canada, Germany, Britain and the United States.

"We should perform suicide attacks and God willing, destroy their establishments in their own country," Dadullah Mansoor, a top Taliban commander, says on the tape.

"I think unfortunately this is propaganda in the campaign of terror that has been going on for quite a while," said Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former CSIS intelligence officer now with the Northgate Group, a security firm.

Such videos are intended to both frighten Canadians and raise the morale of the Taliban's own supporters, he said, adding they allowed a journalist to film it to boost the video's validation.

He doesn't see an immediate threat to Canada.

"It's one thing to train people ... but to sneak them out of Afghanistan, put them on international flights, bring them incognito into Canada and start from scratch building up an attack?" That's quite a task, he said.
 
Canada's security services are quite vigilant in monitoring for possible terror threats, Juneau-Katsuya said. A bigger threat are the possible home-grown terror threats, "which are difficult to investigate and difficult to find."

Sajjan Gohal of the Asia Pacific Foundation said: "What's probably going to happen is that these individuals will be used as suicide bombers against Canadian and British troops in the southern parts of Afghanistan."

Some of the militants looked to be teenage boys, if not younger.

"From that perspective, it leads me to believe that this is largely propaganda," said Ned Moran of the Terrorism Resource Centre in Washington.

Official reaction

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day cast the threat as a public relations tactic by an enemy that's losing on the ground in Afghanistan.

"Their purpose is to strike terror, put fear in people's hearts," Day told reporters.

"I think the Taliban are aware that our troops cannot be intimidated, our troops prevail on the field of battle in Afghanistan. And so they're trying through public relations means to worry the hearts of Canadians at home."

Day said that based on the intelligence available to Canada its allies, he doubts the Taliban could mount attacks in North America.

Bev Busson, the RCMP's acting commissioner, said people shouldn't see the threat as an escalation of the security threat to Canada by terrorists.

This latest threat comes as the chief of the RCMP's anti-terrorism squad admits he's dangerously short of officers.

"We are very short of personnel. I'm requiring to bring people in from other sections all the time," said Mike McDonnell, assistant commissioner of the Criminal Intelligence Directorate.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service would only say that it takes the video seriously.

CSIS officials have said as recently as April that they don't believe the presence of Canadian troops has increased the risk of a terror attack here.

Martin Rudner, a terrorism expert at Carleton University in Ottawa, thinks the Taliban and its ally, al Qaeda, could indeed mount overseas attacks to weaken resolve to keep troops in Afghanistan.

"The logic of it is, yes, it's to be taken seriously," he told The Canadian Press. "From their point of view we, the infidels, have assaulted the world of Islam with a military presence. It's therefore religiously sanctioned that they counter-attack to expel us and impose a defeat on us."

Security officials told CTV News that while these new Taliban militants probably pose a greater danger to Canadian forces in Afghanistan, one or two slipping through to Canada could cause a great deal of damage here.

Robert Fife, CTV's Ottawa bureau chief, said one scenario that worries security officials is if any potential bombers got into Europe.

"They could hide among the Arab population, obtain false EU passports, then hopscotch across the ocean and get into Canada. Then we would have a very serious and dangerous situation," he said.

Newsweek magazine reported in late December that al Qaeda may have developed an "underground railroad" to smuggle operatives into Europe undetected.

With a report from CTV's Robert Fife and files from The Canadian Press