toronto terror plot

This is from the Globe & Mail, September 3, 2009:

During subsequent meetings over Chinese-food buffets and in coffee shops, Mr. Elsohemy says he helped the two key conspirators work out the finer points of spectacular plan. He claimed to know people who operated a chemical plant, and suggested he could get bomb ingredients.

It was Mr. Elsohemy who told police the targets of the alleged plot were the Canadian Security Intelligence Service headquarters in Toronto, the Toronto Stock Exchange, and a unspecified military base along Highway 401. He jotted down alleged remarks the conspirators made about the bombings they hoped would force Canadian troops from Afghanistan.

Through all this, the agent was trying to leverage the confidences into something concrete. According to sources close to the case, he asked his RCMP handlers for as much as $15-million to put himself and his immediate family into hiding, before settling on a package worth closer to $4-million.

It's not clear who or what he was afraid of, precisely. But a car for his brothers, dentist bills for his wife, and a place for his parents were all under negotiation – a remarkable turnaround for a family occasionally mired in bankruptcy proceedings.

What do we have here? A police informant with a spectacularly obvious desire for big money. The informant advises the alleged plotters as to where and how to get bomb materials, and then proceeds to actually procure the bomb materials for them. He even helps to unload (the fake materials, from the RCMP) for them.

This is rather like a police woman enticing a man into her apartment for sex, undressing, rubbing up against him, taking his wallet out of his pants pocket, and then arresting him for soliciting for the purposes of prostitution. It's called "entrapment".

The alleged plotters might have been guilty of something-- but I was astonished when one of them pled guilty, without an opportunity to put Mr. Elsohemy on the stand. I can only conclude he didn't get good legal advice. Equally likely, he didn't have the money for good legal advice. Maybe he just isn't very smart, which would be consistent with the earlier reports on this case that talked about a ragtag, disorganized group of blowhards conducting a paint-ball tournament up north. Maybe was intimidated and frightened by the bully tactics of the police and prosecution.

Either way, a guilty plea is a dream come true for the RCMP which can now trumpet this conviction as "proof" that there really, really, really was a terror plot and Dudley Dooright saved the day.

If the RCMP had taken a similar approach to some domestic right wing survivalist groups, I have no doubt they might have obtained the same results. Young men of all cultures are highly susceptible to the macho excitement of potential violence.

Rant of the Week

The RCMP Create a Crime