Source:
Crown's case alive and well in homegrown terror trial
CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD, globeandmail.com, June 20, 2008
Quote:
"The charge is participation in terrorist activities - not participation in terrorist activities on an epic scale."
Context:
Since the mass arrests in June of 2006 and continuing even until yesterday - when a Toronto columnist baldly claimed "the government has delivered a devastating blow to its entire case" - the probe has been repeatedly described as exaggerated, receiving a series of "stunning" punches or utterly collapsing.But to borrow from Mark Twain, the reports of the death of the Crown's case are premature.
And no one has said this better or from a position of more unassailable neutrality than the presiding trial judge himself, Ontario Superior Court Justice John Sproat. Earlier this month, in a ruling that has been overlooked in the media, Judge Sproat issued a 41-page decision on a defence application to have the Crown's key witness prohibited from testifying about what he heard the alleged conspirators say at the now much-ridiculed terrorist training camp near Orillia, Ont., in December of 2005.
In a nutshell, the defence had argued that CSIS informant-turned-RCMP agent Mubin Shaikh and the group leader about whom Mr. Shaikh would be testifying at length were respectively unreliable and a grandiose dreamer incapable of posing a real threat to Canada.
But Judge Sproat noted that at the time of the training camp, the leader had a 9 mm handgun and had played a role in the importation of three other loaded guns into the country a few months earlier.
"History," he wrote, "is replete with examples of how dangerous even a lone gunman, particularly with a misguided sense of mission or importance, can be."
More significantly to the future prospects of the broader case, Judge Sproat dryly concluded, "The fact that the group's realistic capability with a few handguns might have been to kill a relatively small number of political leaders, police or members of the public, as opposed to take over Parliament Hill, does not to my mind detract significantly from the reliability of the evidence in terms of proving the existence of a terrorist group.
"Put differently," he said, "The charge is participation in terrorist activities - not participation in terrorist activities on an epic scale."
Internet connection: Members of the Toronto 18 were active on a number of high-quality jihadi sites, and were part of the broader "Irhabi007 Network."
Posted on 21 June 2008 @ 15:54