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"He became a radicalized Muslim while serving a prison sentence..."
A problem the US should view seriously.
A problem the US should view seriously.
Khawaja didn't target civilians in Britain: defence
Updated: Tue Aug. 19 2008 14:43:58
The Canadian Press
OTTAWA — Momin Khawaja undoubtedly wanted to fight for the Islamic cause in Afghanistan, but he never intended to bomb civilians in Britain, says his defence lawyer.
Lawrence Greenspon acknowledged Tuesday in Ontario Superior Court that there's "ample evidence" Khawaja took weapons training with a view to becoming a "frontline jihad soldier" in the battle against western forces in Afghanistan.
He also acknowledged that his client developed a remote-control device, dubbed the Hi-Fi Digimonster, that was capable of being used to set off explosives.
But he insisted the Digimonster, too, was designed for use against military targets in Afghanistan -- not for a homemade fertilizer bomb being constructed by others in Britain.
"There is no direct evidence that Momin Khawaja had any knowledge of the London fertilizer bomb plot," Greenspon told Justice Douglas Rutherford, who is hearing the case without a jury.
Greenspon maintained that the London plotters -- although they had frequent contact with Khawaja -- never let him in on their plans to mount attacks in Britain.
"They kept their information close and they didn't share it."
The comments came as Greenspon presented a motion demanding that Rutherford quash the terrorism charges facing his client on grounds that the prosecution has failed to produce enough evidence to substantiate the allegations.
Khawaja, an Ottawa software developer, faces seven charges under the Anti-Terrorism Act, including a key allegation that he built the so-called Digimonster.
He's also accused of financing and facilitating terrorism, participating in terrorist training and meetings, and making a house owned by his family in Pakistan available for terrorist use.
Five alleged co-conspirators were convicted last year in Britain of plotting to bomb targets that included a nightclub, shopping centre and gas and electrical facilities. But Khawaja has pleaded not guilty to all the charges facing him in Canada.
Greenspon has hinted, in previous cross-examination of Crown witnesses, that his defence would be to claim Khawaja had his eye on potential operations in Afghanistan, rather than in Britain.
But the session Tuesday was the first time the defence has laid out its theory in such detail.
Greenspon was vague in court about exactly who Khawaja wanted to fight against in Afghanistan, or who the targets could be for homemade bombs to be detonated there by the Digimonster.
He referred at one point to targeting Northern Alliance soldiers and also mentioned U.S. troops.
Pressed later by reporters outside the courtroom, Greenspon acknowledged the potential targets could have included Canadian troops, as well.
The targets would be any opponents of the Islamic insurgents fighting foreign forces, said the defence lawyer. "It does include Canadian and it also includes American soldiers."
It could conceivably be an offence under the Criminal Code to design explosives in Canada for use against Canadians and their military allies abroad, Greenspon conceded. But that's not the offence Khawaja is charged with, nor does it fit the legal definition of terrorism, he said.
The prosecution has yet to offer a reply to the latest assertions by the defence.
But in five weeks of testimony that concluded last month, prosecutors produced a wealth of evidence in an effort to justify the charges against Khawaja.
The prosecution's star witness, Mohammed Babar, a former al-Qaida operative turned police informer, testified that Khawaja attended a training camp in Pakistan in 2003.
He also claimed Khawaja acted as a courier to deliver money and supplies and discussed various potential operations.
Evidence gathered by the British security agency MI-5 indicated Khawaja visited people involved in the British bomb plot in 2004 and discussed remote-control technology with them.
The RCMP says it later found the Digimonster in a raid on the Khawaja family home in suburban Ottawa, and enough components to suggest Khawaja may have been planning to build more devices.
There has also been testimony that Khawaja used an Ottawa-area woman, Zenab Armandpisheh, as a go-between to funnel money to co-conspirators in Britain.
In email exchanges with Zeba Khan, his former fiancee, Khawaja boasted of his devotion to jihadi activities and indicated his support for the 9/11 attacks in the United States. But Khan said she considered it just talk and couldn't believe Khawaja was actually involved in terrorist activity.
When Lawrence Greenspon took Momin Khawaja's case, he knew the fight would be long and hard. As Chris Cobb reports, he spent his life preparing for it.
Chris Cobb, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Monday, August 18, 2008
OTTAWA - When seasoned defence lawyer Lawrence Greenspon met Momin Khawaja for the first time four years ago, he wasn't convinced he was the right person to represent the young, computer savvy Ottawa Muslim accused of helping plot international terror attacks.
"You need a lawyer who knows computers," Mr. Greenspon told him, "and that's not me. You need a lawyer who is familiar with Islam, and that's not me, and third, you need someone who is going to fight long and hard for you."
The Khawaja family had asked Mr. Greenspon to meet Momin, who seemed unconcerned that the lawyer, a Jew, had little knowledge of Islam and, back then, only passing acquaintance with personal computer technology. (He only read e-mails after his secretary presented them in printed form.)
Mr. Greenspon warned his new client not to expect a rapid resolution, but not even he expected four years of epic legal battles that would keep Mr. Khawaja in protracted limbo.
The trial enters its final phase tomorrow when Mr. Greenspon begins presenting his case before Ontario Superior Court Justice Douglas Rutherford.
The Orléans software developer, now 29, is the first Canadian charged under post-9/11 anti-terrorism legislation and faces seven charges of financing and facilitating terrorism, including the accusation that he built a remote detonating device to trigger explosions in Britain. Five of his alleged conspirators in the British plot, which was foiled by police, are now serving life sentences. If he is found guilty, Mr. Khawaja faces similar punishment.
It is the destiny of the players in the Khawaja trial to be forever joined in Canadian legal history and Mr. Greenspon doesn't deny that part of the attraction in taking the case was the precedent-setting challenge of fighting new legislation whose very existence he considered draconian and unnecessary.
"Canada does what it always does in cases of supposed insurrection," he says. "We pass a law. But 9/11 didn't happen because of a failure of law. It happened because of a failure of intelligence and a failure to recognize the impact of U.S. actions in various parts of the world."
Mr. Greenspon dislikes the inevitable characterization of a liberal Jewish lawyer defending a radical Muslim accused and says his motivation in defending Mr. Khawaja is the same as his motivation for defending anyone -- especially high-profile cases in which the accused has been publicly vilified ahead of trial.
"Momin, like anybody charged with a serious crime, deserves someone who will fight for him and give it their best," he says.
In October 2006, two years into the case, Mr. Greenspon scored a key victory when Judge Rutherford struck down the Anti-terrorism Act's motive clause on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. The clause, controversial from the moment it was introduced as draft legislation, defined a terrorist act as one committed "for a political, religious or ideological purpose, objective or cause."
"I was fortunate enough to be in the position where I could challenge it," says Mr. Greenspon. "It gave the right for police to investigate people on the basis of their religious, ideological or political beliefs, which we knew would be Muslim males aged 22 to 45.
"We've been down that road before in the name of security," he adds. "Let's target a particular group of people and put them in a camp -- the Italians, the Japanese Canadians -- or the FLQ and its sympathizers in the jails of Montreal. What we have now is a definition of terrorism that is a lot closer to the definitions in other western countries."
Mr. Greenspon has also lost a couple of key fights, notably in Federal Court against the government, which refused to allow him to see some "relevant evidence" against Mr. Khawaja either because of alleged national security concerns or because the evidence was given to Canada by foreign intelligence services on condition it remained secret.
It shocked Mr. Greenspon to lose that battle and it irks him still.
"It isn't right," he says. "Nobody before has ever tried to withhold relevant documents when somebody's liberty is at stake at a criminal trial in Canada."
Mr. Greenspon, born and raised in Montreal, was a civil libertarian before he became a lawyer.
"I learned a great deal," he says, "growing up with my stepfather, who is a survivor of (the Nazi concentration camp) Auschwitz. He became a second dad to my brother and me and taught us a healthy respect for the balance between state power and individual human rights."
Mr. Greenspon recalls marching with his stepfather each year with other survivors of Nazi oppression. He joined the national capital branch of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association when he moved to Ottawa to finish law school.
His mother and stepfather live in Florida, his father in Montreal.
"I was raised with three great parents who love me," he says. "It was one of those rare cases where the stepfather comes in and is great. I often find myself repeating things he said to me years ago. I tell him and he says 'I can't believe you remember that.' I say 'Dad, you only told me 50 times'."
Divorced, 54-year-old Mr. Greenspon has one daughter, 18-year-old Maja, and has lived for eight years with Ottawa artist Louise Carota.
The lawyer is heavily involved in Ottawa charities. In 1981, he co-founded the Resource Education Advocacy Centre for the Handicapped (REACH) to help disabled people with legal and education issues and, four years later, he was helping raise money for the Snowsuit Fund. He has also developed a reputation as an off-beat charity auctioneer and will preside over 20 or more auctions this fall and winter. In May, he was honoured as one of three United Way Community Builders of the Year. To unwind, he plays hockey several times each week, and old-timers soccer on Fridays.
"I love team sports," he says, "and it's terrific stress release. If I don't play sports for two or three days I feel it."
Mr. Greenspon is the public face of the Khawaja defence, but in wading through the complexities of the untested anti-terrorism legislation, he has informally consulted others.
"I've got friends -- people I talk to about the case from time to time," he says. "My close friends understand what I'm doing and why I'm doing defending Momin and I've heard from other lawyers -- acquaintances -- who have phoned or sent e-mails and said 'fight the good fight. What you're doing is in the best interests of our profession'."
Mr. Greenspon, who is being paid through legal aid, is guarded when he discusses Mr. Khawaja and says that despite their many meetings at the Ottawa-Carleton Regional Detention Centre, their conversations have been all business.
"He is a very serious, intelligent man," says Mr. Greenspon. "He has ideas, remembers things and gives me a lot of helpful information, but there have been mountains of evidence to go through and our time out there is precious. We talk about the evidence."
Mr. Greenspon is media friendly, to the point of holding scrums with reporters during the trial. It is, he says, deliberate.
"The combination of law and media can move mountains," he says. "It's important that the public knows what we're doing behind closed doors where obviously there are no cameras and no recording devices. So when I do scrums part of it is public education and also often I get good questions from the media that make me think. So it's a good sounding board."
Mr. Greenspon, significantly better versed in Islam and computer technology than he was four years ago, will open his defence tomorrow by asking Judge Rutherford to dismiss the charges against Mr. Khawaja.
He met with Mr. Khawaja on Saturday and they will meet again today to review final details of their strategy. With the end of the trial close, Mr. Greenspon says his client is calm and focused.
"He is in a situation he never anticipated being in and is managing to cope," says the lawyer. "It's been a long wait."
© The Ottawa Citizen 2008
Tim Shufelt, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Tuesday, August 19, 2008
OTTAWA - Momin Khawaja may have wanted to wage violent jihad in Afghanistan, but he had no knowledge that the detonator he is accused of building was to be used in the foiled London fertilizer bomb plot, defence lawyer Lawrence Greenspon said as Mr. Khawaja's terrorism trial resumed Tuesday.
On that basis, Mr. Khawaja does not fit the criminal definition of a terrorist, Mr. Greenspon said.
"There is more than sufficient evidence of Momin Khawaja's intention to fight, to be a soldier," he said. "The fact that he didn't get to fight in Afghanistan doesn't really matter."
The trial of Mr. Khawaja, an Orléans computer programmer formerly under contract to Foreign Affairs, resumed with Mr. Greenspon asking for all seven terrorism charges to be quashed.
The Crown already argued that Mr. Khawaja built a remote detonator, dubbed the "hifidigimonster," for a British terror cell that wanted to blow up a number of potential targets, including a night club in central London, the largest shopping centre in Europe or the country's utilities grids.
Just before the trial adjourned for three weeks, however, the Crown broadened the allegations beyond the bomb plot to include violent jihad, Mr. Greenspon said. He called it an "unjust, unprecedented expansion."
In all of the tens of thousands of documents filed in the trial, the defence argued, "nowhere will there be any mention, any mention, of using the hifidigimonster in London, in the UK, or in any other western target," he said. "Faced with this evidence, the Crown has opted to expand its case to include 'violent jihad.'"
But the intention to provide support to a military combat situation is not even a crime, Mr. Greenspon added.
"Nowhere has any court been prepared to criminalize the desire to be a front-line soldier in another country."
The trial continues.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2008
Tim Shufelt, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Wednesday, August 20, 2008
OTTAWA - Members of a British terror cell deliberately withheld information from Momin Khawaja regarding their true intentions for the detonator he is accused of designing, according to the defence.
On Wednesday, defence lawyer Lawrence Greenspon pored through transcripts of conversations recorded by British Secret Service for evidence that Mr. Khawaja was kept in the dark by those convicted of plotting to detonate a massive fertilizer bomb in central London.
"There are subjects of conversation that take place when Mr. Khawaja is present and very different conversations taking place when he's not there," Mr. Greenspon said.
While Mr. Khawaja was in London in 2004, they discussed training camps in Pakistan, acquiring military equipment, night vision goggles and the best types of outdoor gear, Mr. Greenspon said.
After he left, however, the conversations turned to "physical jihad" and "operations" on British soil, he added.
"The best thing you can do is put terror in their hearts," said Jawad Akbar, one of the British men convicted of the bomb plot.
They discussed potential targets, including night clubs and utilities. And they considered conducting a test explosion of a small-scale bomb.
"We don't want to mix too many things together," Omar Khyam was recorded as saying. "One cell goes down it does not affect the other cell."
Mr. Greenspon also noted that the type of detonator designed by Mr. Khawaja, rather than the more conventional cellphone-based technology, was best suited for a place like Afghanistan that has spotty reception.
"The types of activities he did participate in were the types of activities that line up exactly with his intent, that is, to be a frontline jihadi soldier," Mr. Greenspon said.
The only piece of evidence submitted by the Crown, in fact, that indicates Mr. Khawaja might be sympathetic to striking at civilian targets, is an e-mail he wrote to his ex-fiancée Zeba Khan describing 9/11-scale attacks as "the most effective and honourable way" of defeating the West.
"It's troublesome," Mr. Greenspon said. "It's an e-mail which can be characterized as rhetoric from an angry man. It's out of character, according to Zeba Khan, and not indicative of his true intentions."
© The Ottawa Citizen 2008
Ian MacLeod, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Tuesday, August 26, 2008
OTTAWA - Momin Khawaja's defence that he planned to fight with insurgents in Afghanistan - not participate in an Islamist plot to bomb London - is still a terrorist crime under Canadian law, a federal Crown told the Khawaja trial today.
Further, an exception under the Anti-terrorism Act of 2001 that excludes acts that otherwise would be considered terrorism if they are committed during an "armed conflict" does not apply to Mr. Khawaja, Crown prosecutor David McKercher told the court.
"In order to qualify, at the very least, Mr. Khawaja would have to be in Afghanistan, ideally a member of a properly constituted army.
" In this case, Mr. Khawaja was not (there) during the commission of his acts."