[quote:0cf6a]So many possibilities . . . for courts
Jun. 5, 2006. 10:32 AM
THOMAS WALKOM
NATIONAL COLUMNIST
Suppose, just suppose, that one or more of the 17 charged yesterday with terrorism is innocent.
This is not the common assumption. I suspect most Canadians assume that Ontario was in great danger from terrorists, that police nipped this danger in the bud and that all of the 12 adults and five young people they arrested are guilty.
All of which may be true. Terrorists do exist. There is the terror we don't think about, committed by nation states under the rubric of security sweeps or targeted reprisals. And there is the terror we do think about, the terrorism of misguided individuals, loons, right-wing militias or Al Qaeda and its Islamist acolytes.
Militant Islamists have committed outrages in the United States, Indonesia, Spain and Britain to counter what they see as the crimes of these countries against Muslims. There is no obvious reason to assume that similar criminals won't try the same thing here.
All of which is to say that the Mounties may be absolutely correct when they say they stopped the 17 from using homemade detonators and three tonnes of fertilizer to blow up as yet unspecified targets in southern Ontario.
There may indeed have been a terrorist conspiracy that involved what the RCMP assistant commissioner Mike McDonell yesterday referred to as "training areas," where militants tramped about in big boots, cooked on outdoor barbecues, built bombs and used a wooden door for target practice.
That's the implication from the evidence shown to reporters yesterday: five pairs of boots in camouflage drab, six flashlights, one set of walkie-talkies, one voltmeter, one knife, eight D-cell batteries, a cellphone, a circuit board, a computer hard drive, one barbecue grill, one set of tongs suitable for turning hot dogs, a wooden door with 21 marks on it and a 9-mm handgun.
Or it is possible that the only thing that these bits of evidence prove is that a group of young men went somewhere where they tramped around in big boots, cooked on barbecues, played soldier and generally acted like jerks — which young men are occasionally wont to do.
The three tonnes of ammonium nitrate allegedly purchased was, as McDonell said, three times the amount used in the Oklahoma terror bombing of 1995.
But, as he also said, farmers routinely buy three tonnes of ammonium nitrate "every day." They use it for fertilizer, not bombs.
In short, we don't know much yet about what these men and boys were trying to do. We don't know if this series of arrests, called Operation O-Sage by the Mounties, pre-empted the kind of actions that in the United Kingdom led to last year's bombing of the London subway by otherwise unremarkable young Britons.
That's one possibility. It's certainly the explanation favoured by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who yesterday praised the police.
Another is that this is a reprise of the infamous 2003 Project Thread fiasco, in which RCMP and immigration officials accused 23 Muslims of terrorism only to acknowledge later that at most the men were guilty of minor immigration fraud.
Still another possibility is that this may turn out to be Canada's version of the 2004 Virginia "paintball" trial, in which one man was sentenced to life and another got 85 years.
In that controversial case (even the presiding judge complained the outcome was unfair), nine Muslim men were convicted of participating in terrorist training — the main evidence being that they had played paintball in the woods outside Washington.
What we do know about Operation O-Sage is that the RCMP, as well as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, have been tracking the suspects since 2004. We also know that at least some of their neighbours knew police were watching them. Presumably, some of the suspects did, too.
If the alleged conspirators knew they were under surveillance, it seems odd that they continued along merrily with plans to make explosives.
But perhaps they are not bright terrorists. Or perhaps they are not terrorists at all.
With luck, we will get these answers at trial. This time at least, Canada has chosen to deal with alleged terrorists in the proper way, by charging them with criminal offences and allowing the case to come to court — in Canada.
For too long, the government's preferred option was to let others handle our problems. In 2002, CSIS agents escorted alleged Canadian terrorist Mohamed Mansour Jabarah across the border so he could be arrested by the FBI and convicted in a secret trial. Later that year, the RCMP co-operated with the Americans to have them arrest Canadian suspect Maher Arar in New York (he was later transferred to Syria to be tortured).
Five other alleged terrorists are simply being detained without charge under Canada's very elastic immigration act until they can be deported.
So, in this context, the 2004 decision to charge Canadian Mohammad Momin Khawaja for terrorism and yesterday's unrelated decision to charge the 17 are welcome. At least the accused aren't being sent to Syria.
During the next few days, much will be written and broadcast on the 17. Their lives will be re-examined through the prism of the arrests as reporters try to retrace the steps that allegedly led them to violent jihad. Unnamed security sources will leak details designed to bolster the police case. Families and friends will proclaim the innocence of those charged.
Take it all with a grain of salt. We know that police arrested people. We know they seized some materials — all legal — that can be used to make explosives. So far, we don't know much else.[/quote:0cf6a]
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Conten ... rorArrests
06-05-2006, 11:45 AM
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