Three Counts Each

Understated Acuity

Three counts each: Placing an explosive in or against a place of public use, a government or public facility, with intent to cause death or serious bodily injury; knowingly facilitating a terrorist activity; and making or having in their possession an explosive substance with intent to endanger life or cause serious damage to property, or to enable another person to do so.
RCMP charges

Canadian-born, "self-radicalized". "Inspired by al-Qaeda ideology." What more need to be said? A home-grown threat, yet another one surfacing. How many more will there be? These two, John Nuttall and Amanda Korody, don't appear to be diabolical characters, diehard fanatics with ice in their veins and deep-seated malice in their brains. They seem, like so many others who have self-radicalized, been inspired by al-Qaeda ideology, to be pathetic specimens.

But yes, obviously they were serious enough about what they intended, what they planned, and what they undertook to achieve. The British Columbia legislature grounds in Victoria was their chosen venue, and presumably as many Canada Day festive celebrants as possible, to be captured in the brutal spray of the rusty-nail-fed explosive device they had fashioned from pressure cookers, inspired by easily-approachable instructions on the Internet.

Rest assured, said the RCMP, they were under close surveillance. The public was at no time under real threat. A repeat of the arrests of the two Muslim Islamists who had planned to plant explosive devices on Canadian trains, hoping the destructive impact would destroy as many lives as possible there, too. In the British Columbia instance, a surprise unveiling for Canada Day, the two involved were Muslim converts.

Who took their Islamist beliefs seriously. Their landlady has already been interviewed and described hearing them listening to radical Islamist tapes. Attending sermons at a local mosque, she clad in a burqa. Recovering drug addicts, both. Shanti Thaman allowed as how she was completely shocked. "We never suspected this. Someone is using them." Using them? "If you saw them, they looked like they are not 100 percent OK. Someone must be brainwashing them."

So much for cold, calculated, evanescent hatred for the infidel. The archly, aptly-named Nuttall has a previous criminal record. He pleaded guilty to a charge of robbery after having been in a hallucinogenic cocaine-fed daze which led him to hit a Victoria businessman with a rock on the head and dash off with his briefcase. His record includes convictions for robbery, kidnapping, aggravated assault. He was convicted as well in 2010 on a weapons charge.

Good to know that communications between the RCMP and CSIS are now in full throttle. The Mounties clued in first about the couple's activities, and alerted the Canadian Security Intelligence Services. They launched an investigation using undercover officers. The accused might have felt they were working in tandem with others committed as they were to murder and mayhem.

Their arrest represented the climax of a five-month, multi-agency investigation into terrorism. "What I know is that they placed the bombs around the parliament buildings. They appear to have been powerful devices and my strong suspicion is they hoped to damage the buildings and the people around it", explained B.C. premier Christy Clark in a brilliant display of creatively intellectual reasoning.