From Chat Room to Major Terror Plot Bust ~ On the Toronto Bust and connections to the NSA

lawhawk.blogspot.com ^ | 6/05/2006 03:15:00 PM | lawhawk

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The Canadian terrorist plot began in a chat room. It developed into a full-blown plot to acquire the means and methods to carry out a terrorist attack, the targets of which are not being revealed by law enforcement. AJ Strata notes that the plot in Canada quickly grew into an international investigation because of links to the US. The NSA can monitor the Canadians without worrying about invoking constitutional issues. However, once they began picking up US links, we cross over into the world of FISA, constitutional protections, and transnational legal issues.

This is the exact scenarion I have been espousing in the NSA-FISA debate, where the NSA’s monitoring of overseas activities ensares Americans who contact the terrorists. Now, previously to 9-11 this information on US based terrorists would NOT be shared with anyone inside the US. That was custom - not law - and can be traced back to the Church committee in 1976 and the origins of FISA. And this is pure suicide. After 9-11 the NSA would pass the leads to the FBI to follow up (see this post for evidence this is the case). And when the FBI determined that the lead was of value, that is when they took the case to FISA. Which balked because the judges felt the custom of not using NSA generated leads was somehow enshrined in the law - when it wasn’t. That is why the judge who resigned claimed the NSA ‘tainted’ (read polluted) the FISA process.

AJ believes that FISA was invoked in this case, and that the dots were being connected. Thankfully, the RCMP was up to the task of taking down the Canadian cell as they were in the process of acquiring the ammonium nitrate, which is a key component of a fuel oil bomb.

The US portion of the investigation resulted in the arrests of two people several months back, and even then noted the Canadian connection.

The local Toronta imam wants people to believe that the arrested individuals weren't interested in violence. They have an interesting way of showing that, considering the weapons recovered, along with the intention to obtain and use ammonium nitrate as part of a bomb.

Meanwhile, more arrests are expected. We're also learning a few more details about the sting operation used to arrest the 17 individuals. Undercover Mounties were going to provide the three tons of ammonium nitrate to the group.

The arrests were made Friday and Saturday after the group acquired three tons of ammonium nitrate from undercover Mounties in a sting operation, the Toronto Star has reported. The fertilizer can be mixed with fuel oil or other ingredients to make a bomb.

That is three times the amount of fertilizer used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, McDonell said. The bombing of the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, killed 168 people and injured more than 800.

"For various reasons, they appeared to have become adherents of a violent ideology inspired by al-Qaida," Luc Portelance, the assistant director of operations with CSIS — Canada's spy agency, said Saturday.

Officials said the operation involved some 400 intelligence and law-enforcement officers and was the largest counterterrorism operation in Canada since the nation's Anti-Terrorism Act was adopted after the Sept. 11 attacks. The Star reported that the investigation began in 2004 with the monitoring of Internet chat rooms.

"We've been investigating them for some while and it got to the point where we could no longer control the risk," McDonell told NPR on Monday.

A prayer leader at a storefront mosque west of Toronto said several suspects prayed daily there but never spoke of hurting others.

"I will say that they were steadfast, religious people. There's no doubt about it. But here we always preach peace and moderation," Qamrul Khanson, an imam at the one-room Al-Rahman Islamic Center for Islamic Education, said Sunday.

The 40-50 Muslim families who worship at the mosque were astonished, he said, to learn that police had arrested 12 adults, ages 19 to 43, and five suspects younger than 18 on Friday and Saturday, charging them with plotting an attack in southern Ontario. Two Americans who met with the suspects also are in custody.

One reason that terrorist cells are able to conduct attacks is because they don't let others know what their true intentions are. They will infiltrate a community and act normally or otherwise try to blend in. They aren't going to say that they intend to blow stuff up or openly declare jihad. So, the statements that the group didn't make comments relating to hurting others rings hollow.

After all, its not like people suspected that a clown, a nurse, yuppie, church leader, or law student would turn out to be a serial killer (John Wayne Gacy, Charles Cullen, Denis Rader, or Ted Bundy respectively). The deadly nature of these threats is their ability to not attract attention to themselves.

Others blogging: Cassandra at Villainous Company, Cold Fury, Don Surber (on the Left's reaction to the arrests), and Blue Crab Boulevard.

UPDATE:
Western Resistance notes that the mosque had been warned before about the militant Islamist beliefs expounded by one of the arrested individuals:

The Globe & Mail reported that the oldest man to be arrested, 43-year old Qayyum Abdul Jamal, had used a small mosque in a strip mall in Mississauga, Toronto, to recruit young and impressionable Muslims into his brand of extremism. This mosque was the Al-Rahman Islamic Centre for Islamic Education.

The director of the Mississauga Muslim Community Centre, Fahim Bukhari, said that Jamal was only a volunteer there, who did cleaning and occasionally ran errands. Bukhari said that various individuals had warned the management of the mosque about Jamal's views. One of these was the local Liberal MP, who often prayed at the mosque because his uncle had founded the establishment.

The probe is being expanded to seven countries.

Meanwhile, there are folks like Lew Rockwell who think that this is a simple case of entrapment of some boobs who were lured into a plot to buy ammonium nitrate because the Mounties used a sting. Yeah. I'll buy that one. Considering that among those arrested were a computer programmers and health sciences graduate, a firebrand imam about whom the local mosque was warned of his pontificating, and that the adults were fully predisposed to carrying out terrorist attacks, the fact that this group would find themselves entrapped is dubious at best.

Glenn Penner has a personal connection to the group arrested:

This particular arrest struck close to my home in that at least four of them had gone to school with my children and one of the older suspects lived not far from my home. This fact, while shocking, is really not that surprising though. One of the young men, my oldest son told me, had been nicknamed "The Terrorist" by some of his classmates back in high school. Another had written in his graduation yearbook last year, "La ilaha illallah... do you really believe in it? You do? Then prove it... Before us there were many... after us there will be none... we are the ones... Allahu Akbar..."

And yet again, Muslim leaders in the Greater Toronto Area are going out of their way to try to convince the populace (and maybe themselves) that violence is not Islamic and that these men, if guilty, are not really Muslims.

How tiresome to hear to say the same old, well-worn excuses and rhetoric being bandied about that we have been hearing since 9/11.

Others noting the ongoing investigation, media coverage, and the wildly divergent take on the Canadian bust: Two Minute Offense, Dr. Sanity, California Conservative, Jeff Goldstein,

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

This blog seems to have pulled some details together.

Hattip to powerline News and Whizbang Po;itics....

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Related item:

Racial Profiling MSM-Style: Terrorists Represent A “Broad Strata”

*************************AN EXCERPT ************************************

June 3, 2006

Racial Profiling MSM-Style: Terrorists Represent A “Broad Strata”

Filed Under: Terrorism, Immigration, Religion, Media, Homeland Security

Making headline news today is the apprehension of 17 significant terrorist suspects in Canada.

No sooner does the media take a second breath, they start spinning the description to put a “politically-correct” slant on the story.

At the press briefing held by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police today, the suspects who appeared in court–all sporting traditional Muslim male beards and requesting Korans — were described as coming from a “broad strata“ of society.

Who’s fooling who? And why?

The roster:
1. Fahim Ahmad, 21, Toronto;
2. Zakaria Amara, 20, Mississauga, Ont.;
3. Asad Ansari, 21, Mississauga;
4. Shareef Abdelhaleen, 30, Mississauga;
5. Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, Mississauga;
6. Mohammed Dirie, 22, Kingston, Ont.;
7. Yasim Abdi Mohamed, 24, Kingston;
8. Jahmaal James, 23, Toronto;
9. Amin Mohamed Durrani, 19, Toronto;
10. Steven Vikash Chand alias Abdul Shakur, 25, Toronto;
11. Ahmad Mustafa Ghany, 21, Mississauga;
12. Saad Khalid, 19, of Eclipse Avenue, Mississauga.

Michelle Malkin quips: “Such a diverse lot! A veritable Benetton ad. Can’t think of a similarity among them!”

Indeed, no need for profiling here. And what’s the big deal, anyway? The devil is in the details.

The AP reports:

“Canadian police foiled a homegrown terrorist attack by arresting 17 suspects, apparently inspired by al-Qaida, who obtained three times the amount of an explosive ingredient used in the Oklahoma City bombing, officials said Saturday.

The FBI said the Canadian suspects may have had “limited contact” with two men recently arrested on terrorism charges in Georgia. About 400 regional police and federal agents participated in the arrests Friday and early Saturday.

“These individuals were allegedly intent on committing acts of terrorism against their own country and their own people,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a statement. “As we have said on many occasions, Canada is not immune to the threat of terrorism.”

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested 12 adult suspects, ages 43 to 19, and five suspects younger than 18 on terrorism charges including plotting attacks with explosives on Canadian targets. The suspects were either citizens or residents of Canada and had trained together, police said.

The group acquired three tons of ammonium nitrate — three times the amount used to blow up the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injured more than 800, said assistant Royal Canadian Mounted Police commissioner Mike McDonell.

The fertilizer can be mixed with fuel oil or other ingredients to make a bomb.

“This group posed a real and serious threat,” McDonell said. “It had the capacity and intent to carry out these attacks.”

Two words: Evil doers. And so the war on terror continues.

UPDATE: (6/5)
Jeff Jarvis: Journalism omitting the first W
HotAir: Canadian pols say more arrests on the way

Others blogging:
HotAir: Here and Here
Riehl World View

Technorati Tags: Canada, Terrorism, Muslims, Media Spin, Politically Correct

Posted @ 9:27 pm | Permalink |

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

More on how the Media is treating or hiding the real story:

From the BuzzMachine:

The first W

**********************************************AN EXCERPT *************************

Read More: journalism, Terrorism

When a big story breaks — like, say, a major arrest foiling a frightening terrorist plot in peaceful Canada — the first question anyone wants to know is “who?”. Who did it? That is, after all, the first of journalism’s five Ws: who, what, when, where, why (and how).

But The New York Times on my doorstep this morning didn’t bother answering the who question in its story today until a spare mention of “Islamic” in the 22nd paragraph and “Muslim” in the 31st and even those were not terribly informative. In the fifth paragraph, the suspects were merely “mainly of South Asian descent.” India? Burma? Thailand? Indian? Southeast? Southwest? French-speaking terrorists from Vietnam coming to join their Quebecois confrères, perhaps? Who’s to know?

The Times wasn’t the only one. I heard the report on radio and they didn’t answer the first W, either. This is not journalism. Journalism answers the most basic questions, especially the tough ones.

A later story in The Times used the word “mosque” in the lead. Well, that helps.

Various stories also fell over themselves to say there was no known connection to al Qaeda. So? Is that the exclusive franchiser of islamofascist terrorism? And one of the Canadian stories I read said that a man with ties to al Qaeda came to the courthouse. Sounds like a link to me.

In World War II, we called the enemies Krauts and Japs and far worse.

Maybe we need a nickname for terrorists to get around the new PC effort not to offend anyone esxcept Americans. Islamofascistmurderingnutjobs, perhaps?

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 4th, 2006 at 7:23 pm and is filed under Tagged. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response below.

15 Responses to “The first W”

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See the link for more commentary......

[Marine_Uncle]

Sure would be nice if all cooperating intel/law enforcement services on both sides of the border can quickly round up the extended lists. This people should not be given an opportunity to sneak away.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

And:

A Little Sanity

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Don Surber

Proud member of the MSM

Sunday, June 04, 2006

A Little Sanity

Pat Santy hosts the weekly Carnival of the Insanity.

But she also has a good post on political fallout from the Toronto terrorism arrests.

The left thinks it is unseemly that the right is "whooping it up" because a group of terrorists is caught in Canada before they could act on their terror plans. Meanwhile, the right kind of thinks it is unseemly that the left is overjoyed because Marines might have killed innocent civilians in Iraq.

My question: Why should we not celebrate what seems to be the prevention of a Terrible Tuesday in Toronto?

posted by DonSurber | 6/04/2006 01:28:00 PM   

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Thanks for dropping by,....I was wondering if anyone would see this .....

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Good lead to this:

Shining a psychological spotlight on a few of the insanities of life

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Sunday, June 04, 2006

 
IN DENIAL, Part XXIV

Ace has the roundup of lefty reaction to the massive terror roundup in Canada.

Why is anyone surprised that they have nothing to say?

Just the other day, I dissected out the incredible denial of one of those moonbat hangouts when they flatly stated that the whole point of the war on terror was to "sieze power and steal money"; and that the Bushies were "whipping up national fear and paranoia to a constant boil."

Further, this ass went on boldly to exclaim, "Take your terror and shove it!"

Now, wouldn't you like to have someone like that--a card-carrying member of the "reality-based" community--in charge of your homeland security?

When the people of the reality-biased community get back in control of things,we can all rest assured that Al Qaeda will finally be able to sleep peacefully in their caves at night.

UPDATE: Here's a fundamental difference between the left and the right position on the war on terror:
The left thinks it is unseemly that the right is "whooping it up" because a group of terrorists is caught in Canada before they could act on their terror plans. Meanwhile, the right kind of thinks it is unseemly that the left is overjoyed because Marines might have killed innocent civilians in Iraq.

I'll leave it for you to decide which of these positions is morally repulsive.

- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 9:53 AM   

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[Marine_Uncle]

Since I started at the Home Depot, been a bit shot. But I do scan the threads as best a possible, and when up to it, shall comment. HD requires a lot of rotating shift work. It can wear one down if not in good shape and able to handle say 6AM thru 11PM shifts in an nine day schedule. So I am in a fog sometimes. Would be nice to hit the hundred trillion dollor lottery tax free of course ha ha.
At any rate. Sure looks like this investigation is expanding. Hopefully more will be grabbed before they sneak into some hole to hide. Have a good evening E. I'm logging off after posting to you.

[fanfan]

Thanks for the ping.

Canada ping!

Please FReepmail me to get on or off this ping list.

[backhoe]

Crosslinked:

Terror Strike Toronto ( Aborted! )

[fanfan]

Thanks Backhoe.

:-)

[backhoe]

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Thanks.

[backhoe]