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Canadian Spy Agency Employs Terrorist Leader
From the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) Web Site: "CSIS
is a government agency dedicated to protecting the national security
interests of Canada and safeguarding its citizens. The main objective of the
Service is to investigate and report on threats to the security of Canada,
an objective that it pursues while respecting the law and protecting human
rights."
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National Post
http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary/columnists/story.html?f=/stories/2001
1215/877977.html
December 15, 2001
Is he a public servant or a public enemy?
Alleged CSIS link begs question: Just who is Mouammar?
Paul Wells
PARIS - A riddle: Why is it a greater crime to know Youssef Mouammar than it
is to be Youssef Mouammar?
The question is more than academic for Boualem Chibani, a 38-year-old
Algerian resident of France, who was sentenced on Nov. 30 to four years in
French prison for terrorist conspiracy. In its ruling, the Court found "the
essential element" of the prosecution's case "to be the accused's relations
with Gilles Breault, alias Youssef Mouammar."
Youssef Mouammar lives in Montreal. During the Paris trial, the prosecution
revealed more than a dozen vicious threats of terrorist attacks against
targets in Canada, France and the United States, all emanating from an
organization Mr. Mouammar used to run.
And here's the kicker. Even though Mr. Chibani has been sent up the river
for knowing Youssef Mouammar, Mr. Mouammar has faced no penalty whatsover
for being Youssef Mouammar.
Therein lies a tale.
Mr. Chibani is a father of three who owns a small construction business in
Sartrouville, a suburb of Paris. He had never been convicted of a crime,
though he had been expelled from France for a year in 1994 for his work in
that country to support the Front Islamique du Salut, the fundamentalist
opposition in Algeria's extraordinarily bloody civil war.
On his return to France he went back to running his construction business,
until the January day in 1997 when agents of the French equivalent of the
FBI raided his house. They had discovered that Mr. Chibani was using a
cellular telephone registered to another fellow they suspected was an
Algerian terrorist.
The raid turned up two address books full of Algerian and other
Islamic-sounding names; they also found pamphlets and newspaper clippings
related to Algerian fundamentalist activities, and several faxes from
something called the Front Islamique Mondiale, based in Montreal.
Four days after the raid, Mr. Chibani was placed in "preventive detention."
He would spend the next 29 months in jail without yet being convicted of any
crime.
At trial, the address books turned out to be only very modestly
incriminating. They revealed, for instance, that Mr. Chibani had the phone
number of a fellow named Fardji, who knew a fellow named Kheroubi, who knew
a fellow named Zyad, who had been convicted of terrorist attacks in
Marrakesh. Mr. Chibani also had the phone number of a guy who had a brother
who belonged to a terrorist group.
No wonder the judge's attention was more piqued by the 14 faxes carrying the
letterhead of the Front Islamique Mondiale. It was run by Mr. Mouammar,
whose Montreal phone number was also found in Mr. Chibani's possession.
Now, the French judicial system is hardly unfamiliar with Mr. Mouammar. Nor,
to say the very least, are the various police agencies operating in
Montreal. He is a most unusual person.
Born Gilles Breault, a Quebecer of French ancestry, in 1942, he converted to
Islam in the 1980s and by the early 1990s was the sort of readily available
"spokes-man" for Montreal's Islamic community who found his way into all
sorts of newspaper stories.
By the mid-1990s, though, Mr. Mouammar's activism had taken on a vicious
streak. In 1994, a communique from his organization called for "a war
without pity on the Zionists and on their allies until the flag of Islam
flies over Jerusalem." In an interview then, Mr. Mouammar agreed that he
supported terrorism with an eye toward wiping out Israel, but asserted the
communique had been altered by persons unknown to make him look like an
extremist. A subtle nuance.
More angry faxes. In July, 1996, the Washington bureau of France's AFP news
service received a fax from the FIM stating: "American and French civilian
populations must expect important actions, mainly in the USA and France, so
the men, women and children of those countries can also know the horror of
bombs and the pain of losing loved ones."
And in March of 1998, police and news outlets in France and Canada received
a chilling warning of an attack on the Montreal subway system. Each of three
subway lines would be rocked by bombs containing "a chemical product which
will spread through the tunnels .... This second element could cause more
than 1000 deaths per line within minutes." Similar attacks could be expected
in London, New York and Paris, the communique warned.
The Montreal Urban Community Police found a suspicious, but in the end
harmless, package on one of the Metro lines. They investigated the threats
vigorously. Yet even though the communique was traced to Mr. Mouammar's
organization -- and even though uttering death threats is a federal crime
punishable by up to five years' imprisonment -- he was never charged for
this or any other of dozens of menacing communiques issued over the years.
Why? In 1994 Gillian Lusk, a British journalist, says she received a death
threat from Mr. Mouammar after she published articles on Islamic
fundamentalism in Sudan.
She complained to the RCMP and CSIS; according to the Montreal newspaper La
Presse, CSIS told Ms. Lusk that Mr. Mouammar was "not as dangerous as he
appears."
And how did CSIS know, or claim to know, this? Because, according to several
reports by Radio-Canada, La Presse and the veteran Montreal police reporter
Michel Auger, (and Mr. Mouammar has never denied these reports), Mr.
Mouammar is a CSIS informer.
In an astonishing account in yesterday's La Presse, reporter AndrZ Noel
traces Mr. Mouammar's long years of service with CSIS.
In an interview with that newspaper, Mr. Mouammar said he had for a time
been paid $7,000 a month by CSIS; that the security agency had paid for his
stay in a motel when he was hiding from a powerful French investigating
judge who had come to Montreal to interrogate him; and that CSIS had
systematically blocked attempts by the RCMP and Montreal police to
investigate and prosecute Mr. Mouammar.
All of this activity took place while Mr. Mouammar was routinely faxing
threats of terrorist mayhem around the world.
Calls from the National Post to spokesmen for both the RCMP and CSIS were
met with refusals to comment on any aspect of the French court case or the
allegations of a CSIS link to Mr. Mouammar.
In an interview in Paris, Mr. Chibani's lawyer, Alain Delestre, said he knew
nothing of this during his client's trial. He said he is shocked by the
asymmetry of the situation: his client is serving the last two years of a
four-year term -- in what must count as slim consolation, Mr. Chibani's
preventative detention counts against the sentence that was handed down --
while the man he has been jailed for associating with stays free.
No wiretap allowed the court to establish the nature of the telephone
conversations between Mr. Mouammar and Mr. Chibani. The fact of those calls,
alone, was taken to be incriminating enough. The court further admitted that
as far as it could ascertain, none of the pamphlets and other propaganda Mr.
Mouammar faxed to Mr. Chibani had been passed along to anyone else by Mr.
Chibani.
Mr. Delestre plans to appeal the sentence against his client. "Four years in
prison for hallway gossip? I find that extreme."
Certainly, one of the two countries is guilty of excess. Either Mr. Mouammar
really was a public danger, in which case CSIS must explain why he is free
and credits their intervention; or he never was, in which case a man is in
jail for spending too much time on the telephone with a make-believe
terrorist.
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