From the New English Review:
Ottawa police on Project Samossa Counterterrorism raids
A tip of the hat to Canadian lawyer and intelligence expert David Harris in Ottawa for this latest episode of home grown terrorism north of the border.
In a series of sweeps in Canada’s capital of Ottawa on Wednesday, an RCMP national security investigation resulted in the arrests of three Muslim Canadian suspects. They are Hiva Alizadeh , Misbahuddin Ahmed and James Lara. They were allegedly involved in a plot to create improvised explosive devices for possible attacks on government offices and Canadian Coalition forces in Afghanistan. The RCMP uncovered evidence including sophisticated computer circuitry and materials for remote bomb making.
As a report in the Ottawa Citizen noted the individuals arrested harbored Jihadist hatred of Canadian values and were educated leaders in the Muslim community:
Two of the accused men are professionals — a doctor (and father of three) and an x-ray technician.
The third studied to be an electrical engineer. All are apparently intellectually mature individuals rooted in Canadian life. One even appeared on the reality program Canadian Idol. [See the Vlad Tepes blog Canadian Idol video of fourth suspect Dr. Khurram Sher, here]. While much is still to be learned about them, poverty, deprivation and social alienation do not appear to have been part their alleged descent to homicidal hatred.
“This group posed a real and serious threat to the citizens of National Capital Region and Canada’s national security,” said RCMP Chief Supt. Serge Therriault, head of criminal operations for the capital region, told an Ottawa news conference Thursday.
[Vlad Tepes blog has an edited English language video of RCMP Supt. Therriault’s news conference here].
He said an RCMP-led national security investigation employing about 100 joint-forces officers for the past year was forced to move on the suspects this week to prevent “financial support” going to international terrorists for weapons to attack western coalition forces.
Raids on two west Ottawa addresses Wednesday uncovered more than 50 circuit boards police believe were intended to remotely trigger detonators for improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Also seized was what police described as a “vast quantity” of schematics, videos, drawings, instruction books and electronic components for IEDs. Investigators believe the suspects are part of a domestic terrorist group with links to international terrorism. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service was the first to begin investigating the individuals, though no details have been released.
“There are certain individuals in Canada who have adopted an ideology inspired by international terrorist groups who promote heinous violence to achieve their goals,” CSIS Assistant Director Raymond Boisvert told the packed news conference. “This case reiterates the serious nature of this threat, which can result in tragic consequences if left unchecked.” The spy agency at some point alerted the Mounties, who assigned the “Project Samossa” file to the Ottawa-based Integrated National Security Enforcement Team, one of four across the country dedicated to combating threats to the country. RCMP in British Columbia, Manitoba, Quebec and other parts of Ontario assisted. The alleged plot was in its early planning stages and “months” away from being operationally viable, Therriault said. “There remained, throughout, a varied degree of imminence to the threat, whether they were going to conduct an attack or not and how it was going to be done,” he said.
David Harris, Canadian lawyer and intelligence expert, in a column , “This is our future” published in today’s Ottawa Citizen questions whether Canadians have heeded the latest episode in home grown terrorist warnings and the failure of federal authorities to address root causes. He noted:
This is your future. That was my wretched thought on behalf of Canadians as I watched Thursday’s Project Samossa news conference.
Samossa was the major national security investigation that erupted this week in counterterrorism raids and the arrest of four Muslim-Canadians. The government’s charges against three of them imply a wealth of evidence that will shock the conscience of Canadians.
These charges and limited revelations suggest that we could be front-row witnesses to the most vile of manifestations of the Islamist jihad in this country. The allegation is that people living among us and enjoying the immense privileges of Canadian citizenship, are siding with enemy forces aiming to kill and maim our boys and girls serving in Afghanistan — and maybe residents of Ottawa and other Canadian centres, too.
We shouldn’t be surprised.
The Toronto 18 showed us the savagery of the 7th-century war that is being imported into our 21st-century neighbourhoods. Defendants included those who should have been a credit to educated youth. From some we would have expected gratitude of immigrants who had been welcomed to a gentle and generous nation. Canadians’ reward was instead a conspiracy to rent Toronto with explosives, and blast our Parliament with invasion and a prime ministerial beheading.
Further hints — and only hints — of our growing predicament come from a series of recent convictions.
Think of Momin Khawaja, the handsome Department of Foreign Affairs software consultant and moonlighter in international bomb-making. Then there was Said Namouh, Quebec-based Moroccan bomb-plotter, and the Groupe Fatah Kamel, which drove a French counterterror magistrate to pin Canada as an international centre of North African Islamic extremism.
These threats were headed off by good luck and good security work, but are auguries of future violence, economy-defying instability and further pressure on civil liberties.
But why must this be our future? Because we refuse to heed warnings, learn basic lessons and act in a responsible way to preserve our well-being.
To understand this in the context of Islamic radicalism is to account properly for the main sources of Canada’s escalating extremism. These sources are immigration and refugee influxes, and the homegrown extremist phenomenon.
Liberal politicians long ago turned immigration and refugee streams into vote-importing mechanisms. Conservatives continue to do so at the expense of Canadians’ safety and tens of billions in net per annum immigration costs, plus attendant and overwhelming security costs. So pronounced is the pathology that not even a terrible recession could prevent Immigration Minister Jason Kenney from hiking immigration and refugee levels from what were already roughly the highest per capita in the world. These levels are too great to allow for reliable vetting in a world where war and ideological struggles rage, and we are a target.
Harris suggests that Canadian laissez faire attitudes towards the Middle East and politically correct community policing programs may have unwittingly abetted home grown Islamic terrorism as evidenced by this week’s Samossa Project disclosures:
As part of this, we must put a halt to Saudi funding and similar fundamentalist influence in Canada’s Islamic and other institutions. Most emphatically, Islamist front organizations and fellow-travelling “Islamic rights” groups should be barred from the legitimizing table of security outreach. [. . .] The useful tool of community policing periodically metastasizes into unhealthy outreach programs with Islamic front organizations, as officials seek to appease and humour the louder — and sometimes aggressive — influences.
Harris’ teaching points to fellow Canadians should not be lost on Americans whose attention has been diverted by the swirl of controversy over the Ground Zero mosque and similar projects across the US. Outreach by national and local law enforcement and homeland security agencies to Muslim Brotherhood fronts has not stopped home grown threats here. Nor has it revealed the sources of funding of mega mosques by foreign Islamic extremist groups and the funneling of Muslim charity funds to designated foreign terrorist organizations.
