Toronto 18 Canadian Terror Trial.

This whole case strikes me as completely bizarre. The only competent person as far as I can judge is the mole. The so-called leader seems to have lost contact with reality. It is as if he had been playing some jihadist video game and now doesn't know the difference between it and mounting a real attack. This is from the Globe and Mail.


TORONTO 18: CANADIAN TERROR TRIAL
In testimony, RCMP mole paints a hell of a picture

CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
cblatchford@globeandmail.com

June 12, 2008
BRAMPTON, ONT. -- In the sprawling Canadian terror case whose kunya, or nickname, is the Toronto 18, Mubin Shaikh is the painter, proving with every stroke that one of the greatest writers in the English language, Charles Dickens, was quite wrong when he said of portraiture that there are only two styles, "the serious and the smirk."
Mr. Shaikh is an RCMP mole and the Crown's central witness at the first trial stemming from that probe, and his descriptions of the alleged terror leaders, their alleged tender and malleable recruits, and the division among local Muslims about these young men who were hidden in plain sight in their very midst are nuanced and important.
The accused here is a young fellow, now 20, who is charged with participating in a terrorist organization and with taking terrorism training.
He appears to have been a peripheral player, albeit one Mr. Shaikh said was considered the top rookie, "the best youth, the most fit," and so keen a convert to Islam that he brought to a training camp held near Orillia, Ont., a picture of Hindu deities (he was raised in that faith) and cheerfully participated in its destruction, laughing when an alleged co-conspirator first set a corner of the picture on fire and then affixed it to a tree and used it for target practice.
Fortunately, I don't believe that the young man's parents, who come often to court, usually bearing food for him in Tupperware-style containers, were in the room yesterday when that particular tidbit emerged. Tough enough that they sometimes have to bear, as my young Globe colleague Daskhana Bascaramurty alertly noticed one lunch hour last week, having their food returned to them by a rueful security officer, apologizing that their son was "fasting" and had refused it.
In a nutshell, what Mr. Justice John Sproat of the Ontario Superior Court has learned thus far from Mr. Shaikh, who has completed two days in the witness box and returns tomorrow, is that the serious and the smirk giddily co-existed in this group.
Its members met regularly at a half-dozen or more Islamic centres and masjids, or mosques, in the Greater Toronto Area, and at one in Scarborough a leader bragged that he regularly handed out jihadi CDs to the disaffected Muslim youth who were, Mr. Shaikh said, his express targets.
The videos were part of what this leader - he headed the group that wanted to behead Canadian politicians and launch other assaults - called his "reality series," a video collage of the "various places where Muslims are being attacked," Mr. Shaikh said.
"Dismemberments, decapitations. It was really, really horrific stuff ... very, very disturbing material." Mr. Shaikh, in his work as an informant for CSIS and later as an agent for the RCMP, has seen much of this stuff, and even still, it clearly sickens him.
In March of 2006, at a restaurant on Danforth Avenue in the centre of Toronto, with a big picture window open to the busy street, he watched as the beheading-group leader gathered young men around him and showed about 15 minutes of the video - material that Mr. Shaikh said "blows your senses, calls up all your emotions, from nausea to horror to fear"- and used it as a recruitment tool.
"You gotta really buckle up before you watch that stuff," he said.
Mr. Shaikh was dismissive of the first training camp, held near Orillia, Ont. - he called it "potty training" - and noted wryly that the rules about no cellphone use lasted all of a day or two, when the recruits began calling "their mums and daddies."
Ohhh, they were hopelessly inept, hiding in the car one night when they heard coyotes howling, waking up to a package of haplessly buried meat broken open by a "canine animal" of some sort, who was only feet away. An area Tim Hortons, Mr. Shaikh said with a grin, served as a "secondary location," and the group often went there wearing their camo fatigues. "We were real low-key." And when they packed up the camp, he said, they threw away some things and kept others, among them "the cooking pots" one leader had brought from his mother's kitchen.
But mixed in with all of that were military-style training exercises, simulated combat, a modicum of the infantryman's self-imposed suffering to build bonds, and endless exposure to the leaders' well of hatred.
For instance, the bosses made a video of the weapons training that Mr. Shaikh, the only genuine competent among them, conducted at the camp. The footage is real - you can see the recoil of the 9 mm handgun the recruits used - but superimposed later was a banner, the logo of a mounted horseman and a soundtrack called nasheed, Islamic folk music that at its purest is merely religious.
The horseman figure provided Mr. Shaikh's best line of the day.
"Ever seen that before?" prosecutor John Neander asked him.
"The RCMP Musical Ride?" Mr. Shaikh replied.
But more than that, the popular modern version of nasheed, to Mr. Shaikh's evident regret, features jihadi exhortations, all in "the context of fighting and killing. This is not righteous.
"It's basically a call to arms," he said flatly. "The voice is beautiful, the melody sweet, but the message is poisonous."
A little altered, it appears that description also fits the camp itself and the group: The voices are young, the melody harmless, but the intentions are ruinous.
One day, some of the group members were talking about a house they were considering renting in Northern Ontario, near Timmins. Those who had scouted it, for the man accused of being the bomb plot leader, were concerned about the neighbours on either side; it was, Mr. Shaikh said, a preposterous choice - "It's on Government Road," he said with disbelief. "Facing Government Road. Not ideal."
But the bomb plot leader was unconcerned, Mr. Shaikh said. " 'Mmmm. Kill the neighbours.' Coolly. Casually. He doesn't care at all."
Another time, the alleged beheading-group leader was talking about a local mufti, an Islamic jurist and "a proper Islamic scholar," Mr. Shaikh said. Mufti Waheedullah was "trying to upset [the leader's] plans to recruit youth in the area, he was pulling people away. [The leader] just hated him, he issued his own fatwa; said, 'You can kill him.' "
The notion of this Koran-illiterate moron - the leader knew only the few verses of the holy book that refer to jihad - daring to invoke a fatwa against a gentle, scholarly man of peace clearly pained Mr. Shaikh, but that is what Islam in the modern world has come to, a place where the serious and the smirk fight for traction.