Posted by Squiggles on June 8, 2006, at 8:12:22
In reply to recent news? (nm), posted by Dinah on June 8, 2006, at 8:02:16
I'm referring to this story:
Theories surface about what led to Ontario arrests
Last Updated Sun, 04 Jun 2006 23:39:11 EDT
CBC NewsPolice aren't saying what led them to arrest 17 people in the largest anti-terrorism operation ever undertaken in Canada.
Police search a man as he enters a court hearing for suspects arrested under the Anti-terrorism Act. (Nathan Denette/Canadian Press)There have been plenty of leaks from sources after 12 men and five youth were arrested in southern Ontario over the weekend and charged under the Anti-terrorism Act. But not many of the leaks have been publicly confirmed at this point.
Some sources say Canadian anti-terrorist forces eavesdropped on extremist internet sites as a massive bomb attack was planned.
Others say farm supply salesmen became suspicious when unlikely looking farmers kept wandering into their store buying up bags of fertilizer. They called police, who organized a massive sting operation that nabbed the suspects with three tonnes of explosive fertilizer and a cellphone hooked to a sophisticated detonator.
U.S. sources say they became aware of the Ontario suspects after arresting two men on terrorism-related charges in Georgia.
FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko said U.S. authorities have been co-operating with Canadian police since they discovered that the two Georgia students travelled to Toronto in March 2005 and met at least three of the Canadians who were arrested.
In an affidavit obtained by Canadian Press, the FBI claims the men "discussed strategic locations in the United States suitable for a terrorist strike, to include oil refineries and military bases. They also plotted how to disable the global positioning system in an effort to disrupt military and commercial communications and traffic."
The FBI said security forces apparently kept a close eye on the two Georgia students and the people they met with in Canada, leading to a long investigation and the arrests.
The Toronto Star, however, wrote that cyber-snoops "unravelled a sinister plan to detonate three tonnes of explosive material on unsuspecting civilians."
"It was in 2004 that tech-savvy spies noticed some teens spending more and more time reading and posting to extremist websites," the Star wrote Sunday.
The cyber-spies tipped off the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which eventually uncovered an attack plan.
The country's top investigators co-ordinated their efforts through an Integrated National Security Enforcement Team, or INSET, comprised of RCMP, CSIS, federal agencies and provincial and municipal police, according to the Star.
They put more than 400 investigators onto a case that culminated in arrests after three tonnes of ammonium nitrate fertilizer was purchased from undercover officers.
Targets not known
Police are still not saying what the suspects were apparently targeting. The Toronto Transit Commission's subway lines were definitely not a target, police say.
The CN Tower was also unlikely because it is made of reinforced concrete, a substance that is noticeably hard to blow up, said John Thompson of the Mackenzie Institute, a Toronto-based think-tank.
"For example, [consider] the Hiroshima attack in 1945. The reinforced concrete buildings at the Hiroshima memorial were right underground ground zero, and they're still there," Thompson told Canadian Press.
The House of Commons was also unlikely, if only because the suspected terrorists were in southern Ontario.
With those targets eliminated, anyone willing to create havoc would look at an office building, or a collection of office buildings, Thompson said.
It took only one tonne of ammonium nitrate to kill 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995, and even less to kill six people and injure more than 1,000 at New York's World Trade Center in 1993, Thompson said.
Thompson said the quantity of fertilizer that was seized by authorities would have been perfect for an al-Qaeda-style attack, with multiple bombs set off within minutes of each other.
"They could saturate the hospitals with mass casualties, cause more confusion and panic, and get the police looking in a dozen directions at once."
A truck bomb downtown, he said, "would shatter all the windows in the four bank towers and basically clean off the sidewalk [within] about 100 metres, killing everyone in the open and then killing, wounding and blinding dozens of other people up in the bank towers.
"Such an attack could result in the deaths of more than 1,000 people."
Squiggles
poster:Squiggles
thread:654381
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20060604/msgs/654393.html