Quebec man convicted of planning bombings
By The Globle and Mail
Canada’s spy service may not be able to get alleged terrorists deported, but the country’s police are finding ways to get them convicted: Said Namouh, an al-Qaeda-inspired Internet propagandist who never fired a bullet or built a bomb, was found guilty yesterday of four offences in a Montreal court.
Mr. Namouh, a 36-year-old immigrant from Morocco, was convicted of conspiring with an Austrian to orchestrate suicide bomb attacks in Europe. He was arrested in 2007 in central Quebec as he prepared to travel to the Middle East to meet with conspirators. The conviction is the latest in a string of victories for a robust criminal-terrorism law.
It’s “a demonstration that the system works, that the police with their counterparts in other countries can stop people before it’s too late,” prosecutor Dominique Dudemaine said.
“The minister of justice at the time [of the law's passage] said, ‘If terrorists get on the plane, it’s too late, we’ve failed.’ ”
The victory for police comes even as Canadian intelligence officials are struggling to get people they suspect of terrorism onto planes out of the country for good. Cases involving security certificates – a Cold-War-era power the federal government uses in its bids to deport foreigners suspected of dangerous activities – are going nowhere as judges and the public grow wary of their spy-world tactics and their secret evidence.
The newest tool in Canada’s counterterrorism arsenal is a police power, the 2001 Anti-Terrorism Act, which created a range of new criminal offences and requires authorities to prove their charges beyond a reasonable doubt in open court.
That approach appears to be paying dividends. The case against Mr. Namouh is the third prosecuted under the ATA, after the 2008 conviction of a bomb-builder, Ottawa’s Momin Khawaja, along with four young extremists convicted so far in the ongoing, so-called Toronto 18 terrorism conspiracy case.
Each case involved Canada-based extremists inspired by al-Qaeda.
Mr. Namouh is the first Quebecker caught under these laws, and also the first terrorist for whom the “smoking gun” was his Internet activity. After prosecutors aired his e-mails and chats, he was also found guilty of extortion and of two counts of assisting a terrorist group.
That group, the Global Islamic Media Front, exists only online. It doesn’t run training camps and its members don’t generally perpetrate attacks, but they play a key role in distributing propaganda that fuels Islamist extremism and terrorist recruitment.
While living in Maskinongé, Que., much of Mr. Namouh’s energies were spent editing and distributing propaganda and instructional videos. “The accused was an important participant in the activities of the GIMF,” Quebec Court Judge Claude Lebond wrote in his ruling, noting that these activities included distributing ransom demands from Palestinian terrorists after the 2007 kidnapping of a BBC journalist.
Prosecutors are considering seeking a life sentence for Mr. Namouh, while the defence will argue that the two years he spent in jail awaiting trial is sufficient. The case against Mr. Namouh was remarkably efficient, especially compared to the security certificate system, which is mired in court challenges.
As Canada’s police find that they can clear the high bar of proof in criminal terrorism cases, spies are getting tripped up over their much lower standard of “reasonable suspicion” in their system. This may be because the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act – passed in 1984 – is becoming somewhat antiquated in a world of growing transparency.
Accustomed to shadows and unaccustomed to courts, CSIS finds itself somewhat adrift in a world where judges hold spies to standards similar to those police must meet. For example, after years of multimillion-dollar litigation, government lawyers scuttled one of the CSIS-initiated security certificate cases on Wednesday because the Crown said it would rather let a Moroccan Montrealer, Adil Charkaoui, go free than comply with a judge’s order to reveal spy secrets.
Four other security-certificate deportation cases, some dating back to 1999, hang unresolved. The ascendancy of the ATA and the ongoing trend to bringing intelligence cases into the public courts mean police are likely to become the face of Canadian counterterrorism, while CSIS will likely retreat into the shadows – if it still can.
