"TORONTO 18" STUCK IN LEGAL LIMBO

(The following article is from the February 16-29, 2008 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St. Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3).

By Johan Boyden

A week ago, a man moved into the cell beneath Fahim Ahmad. "I hear him singing, you know, out loud," Fahim says. Fahim is talking to me on a poor-quality telephone line from the Don Valley Jail in Toronto. This twenty-minute conversation is Fahim's only connection with the outside world for the day.

     "The man sings like this, I'll sing it to you: `I'm going crazy, F*ing F*ing crazy, I'm going crazy, F*ing F*ing crazy, get me outta here, I'm going crazy...' He is banging and screaming and puts faeces on the walls. I hear him all the time now, and that is after only one week."

     One week in special solitary confinement must seem a very short time when you've been living in 24 hours isolation, in a 6 by 7 by 10 foot room, for over 600 days. But for Fahim and the other young men in their early twenties who have had their lives turned upside down after being accused of participating in a supposed terrorist cell, this is their daily existence.

     "These conditions are designed to make you go crazy," Fahim says.

     In June 2006, eighteen Muslim men and boys - all Canadian citizens, and all but one between 15 and 25 - were arrested in a highly publicized scoop. Within hours of their arrest the police had held a press conference. But at the same time, a publication ban on court proceedings silenced the defendants. As a result, the trial of the men who would become known as the Toronto 18 was done by the newspapers and networks, the young men guilty were found guilt as charged by the media.

     All this years before their trial, which has yet to occur. No date is currently set. "We've been told it is going to take a least a year for the trial to actually start," Saima Mohammad says.

     Saima Mohammad is one the family members of the Toronto 18 and active with the solidarity committee called the Presumption of Innocence Project. Their immediate goal is to get Fahim Ahmad, Zakaria Amara and Ali Dirie out of solitary and organize public events and bail solidarity. Four of the 18 have been granted bail with extreme limitations. The other thirteen remain in jail. "We do have hope," she adds.

     Shortly after the arrest of the Toronto 18, People's Voice wrote that the case seemed to amount to entrapment. Since then, the facts appear to have borne this out.

     The Toronto Star has said the allegations "are so bizarre as to be almost unbelievable." Two of the two star witnesses of the crown have turned out to be police informants - paid to the tune of four million dollars.

     One informer, who allegedly sold fertilizer to make explosives, has disappeared and his name cannot be printed. The other informer, Mubin Shaikh, has become a media star, repeatedly breaking the publication ban and doing interviews CBC, CTV, even the BBC.

     More shocking is Shaikh's own revelation that he is a drug addict, struggling with a cocaine habit. Less than three hours into his testimony in court at the preliminary hearings, and reportedly after successful attacks on his evidence by the defence, the crown took uncommon act of stopping proceedings through a Direct Indictment. This has further undermined the crown's case, according to the solidarity committee, and now the trial is in limbo.

     "I think there is a broader political agenda associated with this issue," says James Clark, a leader of the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War who has also been helping with the Presumption of Innocence Project. "Canada has 2,500 troops in Afghanistan and like other countries has clamped down on civil liberties, using scaremongering, Islamophobia, and anti-Arab racism."

     James points to the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War; "this will be a huge blot on our collective history" he says.

     "The only thing I can say on a personal level is that I knew Fahim, I went to school with some of the Toronto 18, and they were normal Canadian Muslims playing video games, going to school and doing normal things Canadians do," Saima says. "Now they are behind bars based on accusations. They have been made out to look like monsters, which of course is not true."

Found at: http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/articleprint12/05_TORONTO_18_STUCK_IN_LEGAL_LIMBO.html