Peace and Blessings Everyone
This is a must-watch-video about Toronto 18. Kindly view. It reveals a lot of important information including a compelling eye-witness account against RCMP. Please circulate widely.
April 7, 2008
For the families – fear and bewilderment
Just read this on The Star. Please go to Saad Gaya’s hearing at Brampton Court on April 14, to show support. Read this article for more details.
For the families – fear and bewilderment
Accused terrorist Saad Gaya, a rugby player at 16.
HOW IT ALL WENT DOWN
June 2, 2006: Twelve adults and five youths (one is later reclassified as an adult) are arrested in raids across the city in an alleged terrorist plot to bomb targets in southern Ontario. The men, 15 of whom are under 25, are said to be part of an Al Qaeda-inspired cell. They face charges including: participating in or contributing to the activity of a terrorist group, including training and recruitment; providing or making available property for terrorist purposes; and commission of indictable offences, including firearms and explosives offensives for the benefit of or in association with a terrorist group.
July 24, 2006: The youngest suspect, who was 15 when arrested, is granted bail. The conditions include a ban on communicating, directly or indirectly, with the other accused. Four more suspects are released on bail by Aug. 25.
Aug. 3, 2006: An 18th suspect, Ibrahim Alkhalel Aboud, is arrested.
Sept. 26, 2006: Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, eldest of the accused, is denied bail.
Jan. 15, 2007: A preliminary hearing begins for the four youths in a heavily guarded Brampton courtroom. A publication ban prevents reporting of details.
Feb. 23, 2007: Charges are stayed against the youngest of the 18 accused. The 16-year-old’s bail restrictions are also lifted. One youth remains in custody and two are out on bail.
May 7, 2007: Lawyers for several suspects being held in isolation challenge the “cruel” conditions their clients have been subject to in detention. These 10 accused are in solitary confinement at Maplehurst Correctional Complex in Milton and allowed out for only about 20 minutes each day, their lawyers say.
May 12, 2007: Superior Court Justice Fletcher Dawson denies an application by the Toronto Star to partially lift a publication ban that prevents reporting the conditions at Maplehurst.
June 4, 2007: A preliminary hearing begins for the 14 adult accused.
July 31, 2007: Charges against two more of the youths are stayed. Both youths sign the first peace bonds for terrorism-related offences in Canada.
Sept. 19, 2007: The Crown files a direct indictment halting the preliminary hearing for the 14 adults and pushing the case straight to trial. Because of the direct indictment, the original charges are stayed against the 14 men and new charges are laid, meaning those still behind bars can again apply for bail.
Nov. 5, 2007: Jamal, now 44, is granted bail after serving 17 months in jail.
March 25, 2008: The trial of the remaining youth opens. He pleads not guilty. Of the adults, 10 remain in jail and four are out on bail.
Compiled by Deborah Wingate/Star Library Source: Star Library
The arrest of an alleged Toronto terrorist ring on June 2, 2006, was initially hailed as an intelligence coup. Now the case seems far less clear-cut. Meanwhile, the family of one accused continues to wait – and suffer
April 06, 2008
Thomas Walkom
National Affairs ColumnistHistory will record June 2, 2006 as the day when police arrested members of what they claimed was Canada’s first homegrown Islamic terrorist conspiracy. But in a modest middle-class section of Oakville, Rukhsana Gaya – then a department store cosmetics manager – remembers that day as the moment her family’s life was shattered.
“The phone rang about 11 p.m. My husband answered. It was the RCMP. They said Saad (her son, then 18) had been arrested on terror-related charges. My husband told me and I said: `What do they mean, terrorism?’ Of course, I knew about 9/11. Everyone does. But not that it would affect my family. Not that it would have anything to do with me.”
In the lexicon of terror trials, Rukhsana Gaya is what is known as a family member. Her son was one of the 17 young Muslim Canadian men arrested that night in June (an 18th was picked up later) when police swooped in to forestall what they claimed was an Islamist plot to blow up buildings and behead the prime minister.
Today Saad remains jailed at the Maplehurst Correctional Complex in Milton awaiting trial on charges of terrorism and intending to cause an explosion. He declined to be interviewed for this story.
But 22 months after his arrest, the case of the Toronto 18 – which at the time was lauded by politicians as a spectacular intelligence coup – appears far less clear-cut. Three of the 18 have had their charges stayed (in effect, dropped) and been quietly released
A preliminary hearing to determine if there was enough evidence to bring the 14 adults to trial was abruptly short-circuited by the Crown last fall, midway through the testimony of key witness Mubin Shaikh – a paid RCMP informant who has had his own brushes with the law.
The defence cried foul, and some suggested that the government was merely trying to avoid the embarrassment of having a judge throw out some charges for lack of evidence.
Indeed, a 44-year-old Mississauga man, who at the time of his arrest was portrayed as the radical firebrand of the alleged plot, has already had his charges reduced and is out on bail.
And in a document filed in court last month, a lawyer for one of the defendants claimed that it was informant Shaikh who provided the 9-mm ammunition used for target practice at an alleged terrorist training camp.
The first trial, of the only youth still facing charges, has just started. The trial of Saad and the 13 other adults may not begin for another year
For the Gaya family, all of these developments are cold comfort. They are baffled that anyone could believe that Saad, an easygoing (and, confesses his mother, somewhat lazy) first-year student at McMaster University would be involved in anything as hateful and complicated as a terrorist plot.
They are saddened that Canada, a land the Pakistani parents chose and the country in which all three of their children were born, would countenance actions that they find blatantly unfair.
Unnerved at being the centre of media attention, they agonized for months before agreeing to have their story published in the Toronto Star; they still don’t want their pictures in the newspaper.
They keep referring to themselves as “normal.” But they are struggling to keep afloat in a world in which normal has been turned upside down.
All have dealt with it differently. Saad’s father, who asked not be identified by name and who chose not to be interviewed for this article, simply doesn’t speak of what happened. An engineer, he goes to work each morning and returns home each evening to pray.
“He doesn’t want to deal with the outside world,” says Saad’s 24-year-old sister. “He doesn’t think there is any point. He wouldn’t go to the preliminary hearing; he didn’t want to see his son in that environment. Who wants to hear your son called a terrorist? He just talks to Saad when he phones.”
She, too, feels her life has been derailed. Before June 2, 2006, she was a highly motivated chartered-accountancy trainee working long hours at the downtown Toronto firm KPMG as she prepared for her final exams.
If she thought about terrorism at all, she says now, she saw herself as a potential victim.
“After 9/11, I thought, `If Al Qaeda strikes here, they’ll hit me,’” she says. “I mean, I work in one of the tallest buildings in the city; I take the Lakeshore GO train. I hate Al Qaeda more than anyone.”
She is Muslim. But in the days before her brother’s arrest, this fact did not greatly affect her. She doesn’t wear any of the clothing so often associated with Islam, such as the headscarf, burqa or veil; her friends are from all backgrounds. She takes her religion seriously, but it neither dominates nor uniquely defines her life.
She sees herself as Canadian rather than Pakistani-Canadian. And why not? She was born in Montreal, raised in Oakville, educated at McMaster University in Hamilton. Who could be more Canadian?
On the day before Saad’s arrest, she and her youngest brother (now 15) were helping their father widen their driveway. Saad, she says laughing, offered to pitch in. “But he’s so skinny, he couldn’t shovel without standing on it.”
Then came the arrest, the publicity and the subsequent media circus at the Brampton courthouse, as Muslim family members tried to make their way past the gauntlet of journalists while police officers armed with submachine guns looked on.
To someone who had always viewed herself as a normal Canadian, the experience came as a shock. She might have thought she was like everyone else; the world, it seemed, disagreed.
“Suddenly you are portrayed as the other,” she says. “One minute you are scared of terrorists; the next minute you are the enemy.”
And so the family members kept their heads down. She took a leave of absence from KPMG to focus on her brother’s court hearings. Rukhsana, even more devastated, was sure she’d have to leave her job.
“I was scared at the beginning to tell anyone,” she says. “But I didn’t want to lie to my co-workers. They were all so supportive; they were wonderful.”
She offered to quit. But her manager persuaded her to stay on, saying she could shift to part-time work if she wanted to devote more time to Saad’s case.
Still, the effect has been paralyzing. The normally gregarious 43-year-old no longer goes out to see friends and relatives. She has been twice hospitalized since her son’s arrest. During conversation, her voice will suddenly break. Sometimes, she says, she cries uncontrollably.
“Even still, at 3 a.m., I will wake up with my heart breaking.”
To Saad’s family, his description of life in jail was terrifying. At first, he was permitted neither a mattress nor his glasses, he later told his sister. (A corrections ministry spokesperson, while declining to comment on Saad’s case specifically, says that mattresses are sometimes removed from the cells of “special management inmates” considered to be security risks and that their spectacles may be confiscated for the same reason.)
Each time Saad was removed from his cell, shackled, to attend court or use the shower during those first few days at Maplehurst, he was hustled along by a four-member crisis intervention team in full riot gear.
Because he had initially been deemed a young offender, Saad and four other youths were soon moved to a less rigorous juvenile detention centre. That didn’t last. Three months later, the Crown decided Saad had committed his alleged offences the day he turned 18. He was reclassified as an adult and moved back to Maplehurst. For the next 12 months, Saad, like the other adult detainees, was kept in solitary confinement 23 1/2 hours a day.
Today, three of the accused adults are still in solitary confinement at the Don Jail. At Maplehurst, where Saad remains, conditions have eased significantly. Now the seven still imprisoned there (four others are out on bail) are allowed to associate with one another in a common wing.
But to Rukhsana, it remains inconceivable that her child, who has still not been convicted of any crime, could be locked up for so long. Saad celebrated his 19th and 20th birthdays in jail. Unless he gets bail, he will almost certainly turn 21 there – and this before he stands trial. Her once bubbly son, she says, has become quieter, more introverted.
“They have taken away his smile,” she says.
Now, her life and that of her family revolve around the criminal justice system. The centrepiece of each day is Saad’s phone call from jail. The highlight of the week is the regular visit to Maplehurst, where Rukhsana can talk to her son through a Plexiglas barrier.
At first, she says, the Gayas received virtually no help from the Muslim community, or indeed from anyone.
“Other Muslims were scared to help,” she says. “We know a lot of people, but when we tried to raise money (in an unsuccessful bid to have Saad released on bail), so many of them wouldn’t help. They were afraid that if they did, they’d be accused of aiding terrorism.”
One long-time family friend, she says, cut off all contact with the family.
She then approached Amnesty International. They said such cases did not fall under their ambit. She contacted local MPs. Those who agreed to see her said they could do nothing while the matter was before the courts. One (she doesn’t want his name used for fear of causing offence) told her frankly that politicians did not want to put themselves on the line lest they be thought soft on terrorism. Today, she says, Muslims are less wary about speaking up on behalf of Saad and the others. But in the bleak early days, the only support the family received was from their Italian and Lebanese neighbours and a group of Toronto anti-violence activists called Homes Not Bombs.
Throughout, she has borne most of the burden of dealing with the outside world. For months, she attended the on-again, off-again preliminary hearing.
She and Rukhsana became such regulars at the Brampton courthouse that some began to assume they worked there.
Even now, she is the one who deals with Saad’s lawyer, Paul Slansky. As well, she is trying to arrange a correspondence course for her brother. When the world comes knocking, it is she who runs interference for the family.
She is also torn about acting publicly. On the one hand, she is horrified by what she sees as the unfairness of a process in which the government appears to hold all the cards. She devotes whatever time remains from her work and court duties to a website supporting the Toronto 18. She has spoken up for the detainees at university rallies.
Yet at the same time, she is hesitant about being identified in the daily press. She is not sure she trusts what she calls the mainstream media. She fears that employers will see her as a liability rather than an asset. “I’m starting a career,” she says. “I don’t want it destroyed.”
In interviews over several months with her, and more recently with Rukhsana, the conversation keeps coming back to their sense of bewilderment.
How could this happen? They are law-abiding (Rukhsana says she has never had a parking ticket); they are patriotic Canadians; they are unfailingly polite.
When police were searching her home for evidence to use against her son (they took clothing and most of the family photographs), Rukhsana offered them tea and coffee.
Nor can the two women believe Saad was involved in anything sinister.
“How could he do what they accuse him of?” asks Rukhsana. “His friends are from all over, not just Muslims: Christians, Jews, Chinese. He was part of the interfaith dialogue at McMaster … Everyone loves him.”
Saad’s sister says that even if her brother were inclined to violence (which, she insists, he is not), he could not have managed to involve himself in anything as complex as a terror plot without awakening the suspicions of the ever-vigilant women in his family.
She and Saad used the same computer with the same password. Rukhsana, meanwhile, kept constant watch on her eldest son.
She cooked all of his meals, sending him off to McMaster each week with 18 individually prepared and packaged breakfasts, lunches and dinners.
She did his laundry each weekend when he came home. She phoned him every day at university and routinely eavesdropped on his telephone conversations at home.
“Until he marries, I am his mother,” she shrugs. “This is my job.”
Ironically, given the government’s assertion that Saad was involved in a religiously motivated conspiracy, his arrest has caused her to draw closer to Islam. The only thing that makes sense of this madness, she says, is the Qur’an, with its message that people must struggle against adversity.
She says she now looks forward to the day when she will have enough courage to brave popular prejudice and don an Islamic headscarf.
“I call myself a Muslim and I call myself a Canadian,” she says. “What is my country? Canada is my country, even though it is treating me like a second-class citizen. I’m not Pakistani. I’m Canadian. I plan to stay here and work here and marry here and raise kids here.
“I take pride in being a Canadian. What’s going to happen if this (the treatment of the 18) becomes the norm?”
Rukhsana’s hopes are simpler. She just wants her life and her son back.
“I have nothing to hide,” she says. “My son did nothing wrong. We are an average Canadian family. We are normal.”
Thomas Walkom’s national affairs column runs Wednesdays and Saturdays.
CeaseFire At Basra Reached by Iranians
They are never going to talk about this in mainstream media. So, everyone, just read it here and spread it around like fire.
The Terrorists Are In Fact Peacemakers
Iran is sufficiently powerful to broker a ceasefire deal
By Pepe Escobar
Transcript
VOICE OF ZAA NKWETA, PRESENTER: After a week of heavy clashes, fighting in Basra has calmed down, Muqtada al-Sadr has pulled his Mahdi Army fighters off the streets, and Nouri al-Maliki declared the military operation to clear Basra of Shiite militia violence a success. But who won the battle of Basra? To answer this question, we go to Real News analyst Pepe Escobar.
PEPE ESCOBAR, THE REAL NEWS ANALYST: George W. Bush said that the battle of Basra was a defining moment in Iraq. Well, defining it was, but maybe not the way he intended. There was a ceasefire. Do you know the man who brokered a ceasefire? His name is Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani. He is the head of the Quds Force of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps. As everybody knows, the Iranian Government Guard Corps was declared as a terrorist organization by the US last year. So this man in Qom, religious capital of Iran, brokered a ceasefire between Muqtada al-Sadr’s envoys who came from Iraq and Hadi al-Amri, which is the number two of the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq. He is the head of the Badr Organization. He’s part of the Baghdad government. So Muqtada’s people come from Baghdad. Al-Hakim’s people, Badr Organization, Supreme Islamic Council come from Baghdad. They go to Iran, in Qom. And the head of the Quds Force brokers a ceasefire, and the battle of Basra ends. So who are the winners and who are the losers? Okay. The winners are Iran and Muqtada al-Sadr; the losers are al-Maliki government in Baghdad and George W. “defining moment” Bush. This doesn’t mean that Muqtada al-Sadr is in the pockets of Iran. What it means is Iran is sufficiently powerful to get the two most important religious parties in Iraq, the Sadrists and al-Hakim’s Supreme Islamic Council, to Iran to broker a ceasefire organized by Iran. This means that the terrorists aren’t exactly terrorists—the terrorists are in fact peacemakers.
Based in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Pepe Escobar writes The Roving Eye for Asia Times Online. He has reported from Iraq, Iran, Central Asia, US and China. He is the author of the recently published Red Zone Blues. Pepe is a regular analyst for The Real News Network.
McClatchy Washington Bureau | 03/31/2008 | Iranian who brokered Iraqi peace is on U.S. terrorist watch list
Babylon & Beyond : Los Angeles Times : IRAQ: Sadr’s statement calling for end to violence
McClatchy Washington Bureau | Iranian general played key role in Iraq cease-fire
Petraeus Testimony Next Week will Signal Iran Attack
Just got this in an email from Information Clearing House. Make sure to check out the Comments at the end of this article.
Petraeus Testimony Next Week will Signal Iran Attack
By Paul Craig Roberts
06/04/08 “ICH’ — – April 5, 2008. Today the London Telegraph reported that “British officials gave warning yesterday that America’s commander in Iraq will declare that Iran is waging war against the US-backed Baghdad government. A strong statement from General David Petraeus about Iran’s intervention in Iraq could set the stage for a US attack on Iranian militiary facilities, according to a Whitehall assessment.”
The neocon lacky Petraeus has had his script written for him by Cheney, and Petraeus together with neocon warmonger Ryan Crocker, the US governor of the Green Zone in Baghdad, will present Congress next Tuesday and Wednesday with the lies, for which the road has been well paved by neocon propagandists such as Kimberly Kagan, that “the US must recognize that Iran is engaged in a full-up proxy war against it in Iraq.”
Don’t expect Congress to do anything except to egg on the attack. On April 3 the International Herald Tribune reported that senators and representatives have made millions of dollars from their investments in defense companies totaling $196 million. Rep. Ike Skelton, the Democrat chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is already on board with the attack on Iran. The London Telegraph quotes Skelton: “Iran is the bull in the china shop. In all of this, they seem to have links to all of the Shi’ite groups, whether they be political or military.”
All Skelton knows is what the war criminal Bush regime tells him. If Iran really does have all these connections, then it behooves Washington to cease threatening Iran and to make nice with Iran in order to stabilize Iraq and extract the US from the nightmare.
Reporting from Tehran on April 4, Reuters quotes Mohsen Hakim, whose father, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, an ally of the Maliki US puppetgovernment in Iraq: “Tehran, by using its positive influence on the Iraqi nation, paved the way for the return of peace to Iraq and the new situation is the result of Iran’s efforts.”
Instead of thanking Iran and working with Iran diplomatically to restore stability to Iraq, the Bush regime intends to expand the nightmare with a military attack on Iran. Ryan Crocker was quick to dispute Hakim’s report that Iran had used its influence to end the fighting in Basra. Crocker alleged that Iran had started the fighting. The absurdity of Crocker’s claim is obvious as even the neocon US media reported that the fighting in Basra was started by the US and Maliki in an effort to clear out the Shi’ite al-Sadr militias. Most experts saw the attack on al-Sadr for what it was: an effort to remove a potential threat to the US supply line from Kuwait in the event of a US attack on Iran.
Crocker alleges that the rockets dropping on the Green Zone during the Basra fighting were made in 2007 in Iran. As should be obvious even to disengaged Americans, if Iran were to arm the Iraqi insurgency, the insurgents would have modern weapons to counter US helicopter gunships and heavy tanks. The insurgents have no such weapons. The neocon lie that Iran is the cause of the Iraqi insurgency is just another Bush regime lie like the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and connections to al Qaeda and the lie that the Taliban in Afghanistan attacked the US.
The Bush regime will tell any lie and orchestrate any event in order to “finish the job” in the Middle East.
“Finishing the job” means to destroy the ability of Iraq, Iran, and Syria to provide support for the Palestinians and for Hezbollah in southern Lebanon against Israeli aggression. With Iraq and Iran in turmoil, Syria might simply give up and become another American client state. With Iraq and Iran in turmoil, Israel can steal the rest of the West Bank along with the water resources in southern Lebanon. That is what “the war on terror” is really about.
The entire world knows this. Consequently, the US and Israel are essentially isolated. The US can only count on the support that it can bribe and pay for.
At the NATO-Russian summit in Bucharest, Romania, on April 4, Russian President Putin said: “No one can seriously think that Iran would dare attack the U.S. Instead of pushing Iran into a corner, it would be far more sensible to think together how to help Iran become more predictable and transparent.”
Of course it would, but that is not what the warmonger Bush regime wants.
Perhaps the British government has derailed the plot to attack Iran by leaking in advance to the London Telegraph the disinformation Cheney has prepared for Petraeus and Crocker to deliver to the complicit US Congress next Tuesday and Wednesday. On the other hand, the US puppet media is likely to bury the real story and to trumpet Petraeus claims that Iran has, in effect, already declared war on the US by sending weapons to kill US troops in Iraq.
By next Thursday we will know from how the Petraeus-Crocker dog and pony show plays in the US Congress and media whether the Bush Regime will commit yet another war crime by attacking Iran.
Paul Craig Roberts a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, is forthcoming from Random House in March, 2008.
