Message sent about reach of Canadian justice
OTTAWA — Time and distance are no longer a shield from Canadian justice for foreign terrorists and other international adversaries.
That’s the message from the RCMP’s groundbreaking arrest in Ottawa of Somali Ali Omar Ader for the 2008 kidnapping of Canadian journalist Amanda Lindhout in Somalia.
The RCMP announced the arrest Friday morning, describing Ader as “one of the main negotiators” for the Islamist group that seized Lindhout and Australian photographer Nigel Brennan in August of 2008. Ader, 37, came to Canada a few days ago and was arrested Thursday.
Lindhout and Brennan were released from more than a year of captivity in November 2009 after their families paid a ransom. The RCMP had been working on a criminal investigation since Lindhout was kidnapped, involving undercover operations, wiretaps and other surveillance, much of it taking place in Somalia.
While a direct link to terrorism is so far tangential — Somali Islamic extremists were allegedly behind it, but Ader is charged with the non-terrorist offence of hostage-taking — the point is all about terrorism: Canada now appears capable and serious about defending its citizens and national security through non-military action, no matter how far-flung in space and time.
Consider the enormous operational difficulties and presumed dangers investigators and undercover agents would have faced in discovering and collecting hard evidence against Ader amid the chaos and anarchy of the Islamist insurgency and warlords in Mogadishu and southern Somalia before the installation of a new federal government there in 2012.
It’s a measure of just how far Canada has come since Sept. 11, 2001, when the country woke up to the realization it had few defences against such ruthless threats and raced to catch up. Now, it seems, Canadian laws and institutions have evolved to a level where the Mounties and supporting agencies have taken a page from alQaida’s strategy and adjusted their methods by going after transnational targets.
(Section 7.3 (1) of the Criminal Code gives police extraterritorial jurisdiction for crimes against aviation, maritime shipping, cultural property, internationally protected persons and the kidnapping of Canadians.)
Terrorists monitor nations’ capabilities to counter threats and will take notice of the intelligence-gathering, police work and the extraterritorial reach of the Criminal Code behind the investigation, called Project Slype. It is unlikely to stop the committed, hard-core extremists of the Islamic State, but may cause overseas recruiters and other operatives and supporters to think twice.
That the Mounties grabbed Ader in Ottawa is another success, though how and why the Somali national arrived in capital a few days ago is a mystery.
The city has a large Somali diaspora. Was he visiting family and friends or somehow lured here by a police sting operation? Or was Ader here on business or some mission — several Somali-Canadians have been linked to the terror group al-Shabab — and under police watch?
The complexities of Project Slype raise the question of whether Canada’s two chief spy agencies played supporting roles gathering intelligence and conducting human and electronic surveillance.
Representatives from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service did not speak at Friday’s RCMP news conference. The Communications Security Establishment never attends such public displays, but can be a key player when it comes to intercepting the foreign communications of suspected terrorists.
Which leads to another nagging issue in the counterterrorism conundrum: In the clandestine world of security intelligence, keeping secrets is vital. Assuming Ader eventually goes on trial, the RCMP will have to protect what must be highly sensitive operational methods and human assets from public disclosure.
Do certain cases of government secrecy outweigh Canada’s open-court principle and an accused person’s right to a fair trial, including the ability to challenge all the evidence against them? And is this one of them?