By guest blogger Alison@Creekside
Remember this? Sure you do.
It was back in June 2006, coincidentally two weeks before the vote on whether or not to let the Canadian Anti-Terror Act expire, that the RCMP sold a load of fertilizer to two CSIS moles embedded in a Muslim outdoor club, had it delivered to a warehouse rented by the RCMP a block from the RCMP Regional HQ, and the Toronto 18 were born!
The outdoor camp had been under fruitless investigation by the RCMP for the three years previous, but following the RCMP to CSIS fertilizer sale, it metamorphosed into a jihadi terrorist training camp whose members were going to storm Parliament, although they weren’t sure where that was exactly, and cut off the head of Prime Minister Martin, having apparently failed to register that there had been a change in government.
Oh and they were also going to blow up the CBC, the CBC breathlessly reported.
On Friday the taped testimony of one of the 18 from the day after the big bust was played in court. Reported The Star:
“‘Basically we were just chilling, reading the Qu’ran,’ the teenager recalled of the activities at the 12-day camp that took place in December 2005 near the town of Washago, Ont. ‘Some guys are lazy, y’know, they’re gaining weight. For two weeks we just kind of worked out.’
“The workouts, he said, included playing around in the snow, chopping down trees, playing with paintball guns, and jogging. He also admitted to shooting a gun, which he said was primarily handled by someone whom the officer reveals to be an informant.”
Which prompted The Star to ask: “So was it simply a fat camp?”
Clearly the kid was not exactly an Al Qaeda insider and was released. No matter — the Toronto 18, now the Toronto 11, saved the anti-terror act, albeit with restrictions placed on it by the Libs, Bloc, and NDP.
But now those restrictions might be coming off, says Thomas Walkom:
“Last year, Stéphane Dion’s Liberals enthusiastically helped to kill two controversial elements of Canada’s 2001 anti-terror laws. Now they are quietly allowing them to be brought back. One, dealing with preventive detention, would allow police to arrest without charge and judges to penalize without trial, people who the authorities fear might commit future terrorist offences. The second would let judges compel testimony at so-called investigative hearings from those the authorities think might know something about terrorism. The Harper government has passed in the Senate and introduced into the Commons a new bill to reimplement slightly amended versions of both measures. Now, the Liberals say they will support them. In fact, the Liberals now use the same arguments once employed against them.
“‘We recognize that this is necessary,’ public safety critic Ujjal Dosanjh said.”
Let’s have that again: “. . . Would allow police to arrest without charge and judges to penalize without trial people who the authorities fear might commit future terrorist offences.”
Say, didn’t we used to have something called habeas corpus back in the good old pre-fertilizer days?
Seems that load of RCMP fertilizer has turned out to be pretty dangerous after all.
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