Real Men Fighting Terror

By now we know about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police capture of 17 Canadian jihadists, charged with plotting to carry out terrorist attacks on targets in southern Ontario. This is a relief, and also an interesting turn of events for several reasons. First of all this appears to be the result of a dedicated, years-long law enforcement action of the stripe that John Kerry was derided for in the 2004 election. This involved a coordinated joint effort between Canadian intelligence (the CSIS) and the Mounties.

Last night's dramatic police raid and arrest of as many as a dozen men — with more to come — marks the culmination of Canada's largest ever terrorism investigation into an alleged homegrown cell.

The chain of events began two years ago, sparked by local teenagers roving through Internet sites, reading and espousing anti-Western sentiments and vowing to attack at home, in the name of oppressed Muslims here and abroad.

Their words were sometimes encrypted, the Internet sites where they communicated allegedly restricted by passwords, but Canadian spies back in 2004 were reading them. And as the youths' words turned into actions, they began watching them.
According to sources close to the investigation, the suspects are teenagers and men in their 20s who had a relatively typical Canadian upbringing, but — allegedly spurred on by images of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan and angered by what they saw as the mistreatment of Muslims at home — became increasingly violent.

There is simply no substitute for the kind of solid police work which is central to homeland security. I trust the NYPD in this country about a thousand times more than I do the federal government in this arena. (Heck, the NYPD probably gets better overseas intelligence.) The Canadian investigation, further detailed in the Washington Post, seems to be devoid of the kind of federal bureaucratic mishaps that are all too routine here:

The investigators' interest was heightened after the visit to Toronto in March 2005 of two men from Georgia, Syed Ahmed, 21, and Ehsanul Sadequee, 19, who were later charged under anti-terrorism laws. The men allegedly met with at least three Canadians to discuss potential bombing targets, the FBI has said. The charges revealed Monday said the terrorism activity in Canada began on March 1, 2005.

According to those charges, 10 of the men gathered in a vacant wooded area north of Toronto for what authorities call "terrorism-related training." Residents of the rural area say they heard the sounds of automatic weapons and saw men in camouflage uniforms in the woods near Washago, about 90 miles north of Toronto, several times last year.

Police swept the area for evidence after the men had left, according to reports here.

This is simply good solid detective work. Patterns emerged, leads were tracked, suspects were monitored, and arrests were made. I don't see any evidence that this involved the warrantless tapping of phones, surveillence of citizens tangential to the investigation, torturing of suspects, or indefinite detentions and renditions. The Mounties acted on tips.

Another thing that strikes me is that all the talk of the immigration debate in this country focuses on our porous southern border. Anti-immigrant factions use the spectre of terrorism to say that "in this day and age, our borders need to be protected." But it's always focused at Mexico, despite the fact that the only known terrorists to cross into this country over borders were from Canada, including on 9/11 (My apologies, the idea that 9/11 hijackers crossed the border from Canada appears to be untrue. Certainly Ahmed Ressam attempted to cross the border to bomb LAX during the Millennium celebration, but the 9/11 hijackers crossings look to be a myth). In fact, this raid included two men who crossed from here into there:

The charged men, all of them said by authorities to be Canadian citizens or longtime residents, are from areas around Toronto and Kingston, Ontario. Two of those charged, Yasim Abdi Mohamed, 24, and Mohammed Dirie, 22, both of whom moved from Somalia to Kingston, are already in jail, having been caught at the U.S. border last August attempting to bring handguns into Canada.

It begs the question of "Which border is really the porous one?" and "What's really driving the relentless focus on the Mexican border to the exclusion of the Canadian one?"

Finally, this item from the Washington Post shows that the law enforcement apparatus in Canada not only has their act together in fighting terror, they understand the difference between what's important and what's irrelevant:

It promises to be a grand June wedding, two scarlet-coated officers of the famed Royal Canadian Mounted Police standing before a justice of the peace with an escort of similarly spiffy Mounties observing the nuptials on the eve of Canada Day, a national holiday.

When the two constables become the first male Mounties to marry each other, the grumpiest witness-from-afar might well be Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The planned union of Jason Tree and David Connors in Nova Scotia on June 30 has cast a spotlight on Harper's pledge to his conservative backers to try to roll back same-sex marriage laws.

Harper has not spoken publicly about the upcoming wedding and has ordered his party members to shut up about the matter, an attempt to silence lawmakers that has served to draw more attention to the issue while sparking complaints about the prime minister's heavy-handedness.

"I think it's great if we change the public perception," said Tree, 27, who patrols a stretch of rural fishing communities along the Bay of Fundy. "If the public sees the RCMP as representing the diversity of the community, that is good."

About 25 miles away, Connors, 28, helps to police Yarmouth, a town of 8,000. The two men met in college eight years ago and have been partners since.

It's not that these two Mounties (who always get their man... OK, the joke was just sitting there, I had to go for it) had anything to do with stopping the terror cell, or that Canada is truly and completely progressive (witness Prime Minister Harper's anger at the issue, and his pledge to re-open the approval of same-sex marriage). But the difference between the relative nonchalance to two Mounties marrying in that country, and over here, where Arabic translators are fired by the Army because they are gay, is stark. Two servicemen were married in Canada last year at an Air Force base. The RCMP see these impending nuptials as a non-issue. Would that everybody understood the real problems facing the world as well as these two:

Tree said he had been open about their relationship since he joined the force six years ago, and "from the outset, I have never had a single problem." The force has assigned the two men close together, as it does with other couples, and fellow officers "have all been great," Tree said from their home in Meteghan, southwest of Halifax.

"There does exist that social stereotype of a kind of straight, masculine image of police," he added. "We say you can be in the force and be gay."

Maybe, as Canada has been focused on actual threats rather than incidental, made-up threats to traditional marriage, they were more attuned to finding and bringing terrorists to justice. Just a theory.