From Chat Room to Major Terror Plot Bust

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,