Toronto Star Eclipses Canadian Press on Terror Arrests

The New York Times has a piece on how The Toronto Star actually assigned a full-time reporter named Michelle Shepherd to national security affairs. Those who know how Canada recognize how this is very unlike the smug, sleepy p-c broadsheet Globe & Mail, whose reporting eschews actual Realpolitik to focus on fuzzy feel-good Oprahfication projects around the planet, like the current bogus global warming hoax.

Michelle had several thousand words on the bust of the 17 terrorists, including a long background on how CSIS sleuths tracked the plotters on the internet in chat rooms when their terrorist cells were just beginning to take seed.

The Star does a follow-up on the hand-holding the Toronto CoP Bill Blair does with Muslim leaders that segues into a hilarious list of Muslim and defense attorney complaints on how the "timing" of the arrests is "suspicious."

You see, the Supreme Court of Canada is due sometime soon to rule on the constitutionality of locking up national security suspects:

hearings on the constitutionality of security certificates, which allow the authorities to indefinitely detain, without charge, anyone considered a threat to national security.

What a concept! The CSIS should have waited until the hearings on this issue were over before locking up suspects who were in the advanced stages of a plot to blow up the CSIS HQ with three times the force used in Oklahoma City! How thoughtless to prejudice the hearings by immediate arrests of the plotters!

This kind of brainless fecklessness is not new to Canada, long regarded as a collection of complacent sleepy-head second-raters by their English-speaking brethren to the South.

I was a reporter in Saudi Arabia during the First Gulf War and can attest that, except for the equally clueless Boston Globe, the Globe & Mail has the least competent reportorial crew when it comes to actual real-world events. These two papers had certain prisms embedded in their scribblers that prevented the reporters on the scene from any appreciation of what was actually happening---unless it was explained to the G & M/Boston Globe pair in a context that our invasion of Kuwait was an extension of Vietnam, with quagmire and body-count stats the prevailing leit motifs of their context.

To give the she-devil her due, Judy Miller was there in Saudi in '90-91 for the NYT and actually pursued the story rather than the leftist tilt.

Thank goodness the Star had the foresight to put Michelle, a police reporter, on the national security beat.

And thank you, NYT, for implying that your Doppelganger in the Great White North, the Toronto Globe & Mail, is a second-rate asleep-at-the-wheel collection of head-in-the-sand ostriches.