The terrorists in our midst: what timing
Uncanny, really. A few days after hitting a media homer at a slow pitch event (see two entries down, Terrorist threats in our midst indeed) Canada’s spooks announce that they’ve foiled a plot to blow things up.
And we, it seems, are all to be grateful, sign up for national identity cards, give CSIS more money and what not, while the Globe and Mail starts asking its readers if we think Muslims are being “tempted” by radical imams in their temples. Mosques have been vandalized and bigot bloggers are talking about banning immigration from Islamic countries. (This is particularly absurd given that all those arrested were born in Canada.
But hold on a second. A few inconvenient facts:
- They’ve known about these guys for two years
- The police photos shown on the Globe and Mail included a bag of fertilizer that the cops went out and added themselves (presumably to make a more convincing visual).
- The group was so infiltrated by CSIS and the RCMP that the ammonium nitrate fertilizer they’re alleged to have bought was phony – it had been switched by the spooks.
- Thomas Walkom points out the suspects knew they were being watched and yet they continued doing what the RCMP allege is bomb making.
Here’s my theory: remove the informants, the infiltrators, the spies and the agents provocateurs and you’d probably have a bunch of young men who were upset with the US, Britain and Canada’s attacks on Muslim nations, but they’d probably just be playing video games in their spare time, instead of acting all Timothy McVeigh.
June 7th, 2006 at 9:24 am
Check out the front page of today’s Ottawa Citizen : “If charges are true, these men are ‘misguided idiots,’ professor says. To call them terrorists only serves to romanticize their cause, he argues.”
(http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=614df8da-016a-4fc8-823d-3d1b6aa4a642)
It’s a relief to read something relatively sensible among all the crap. This was not the most sophisticated of plots. Beheading the Prime Minister? Taking over the Parliament Buildings and the CBC? Give me a break.