Bashing a Mosquito with a Mallet

"I find that the RCMP knowingly facilitated a terrorist activity by providing money and other services to the defendants that helped and made easier the terrorist activities."
"The spectre of the defendants serving a life sentence for a crime that the police manufactured by exploiting their vulnerabilities, by instilling fear that they would be killed if they backed out ... is offensive to our concept of fundamental justice."
"Simply put, the world has enough terrorists. We do not need the police to create more out of marginalized people who have neither the capacity nor sufficient motivation to do it [plan and carry out successful jihadist attacks] themselves."
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Catherine Bruce

"This guy really is a nut. Not sure there's anything here."
"My impression is, he has no plan and just sort of makes stuff up."
Martha Devlin, B.C. Crown prosecutor

John Nuttall and Amanda Korody walk away after being released from the Main St. Provincial courthouse, Vancouver, July 29 2016. Gerry Kahrmann / PNG

"Mr. Nuttall will always be a risk as far as I’m concerned given his background, his history and his reaction to stresses which based on his life history is to use violence."
"That doesn’t mean he is necessarily a terrorist threat but he has a proven propensity to use violence. He is a radicalized individual."
Crown prosecutor Peter Eccles

This pair of sub-par intelligence, living on the edges of society, drug-addicted and without means to sustain themselves with human dignity found their salvation in Islam. They found purpose and meaning in their afflicted lives by becoming Muslim adherents. And it appears that at some time during this process they self-radicalized. They both turned the venom of their sensibilities against the society into which they were born and raised, preferring the superiority of the Islamist message that jihad is the ultimate purpose of the faithful.

What followed was a seemingly farcical theatrical production when Canada's premier intelligence agency CSIS, (Canadian Security and Intelligence Service) informed the RCMP that John Nuttall and Amanda Korody were on the cusp of committing themselves to Islamist terrorism. Evidently the man sank his own ship with his loose lips. It seems he made constant and casual comments about how prepared he was to commit to violently radical Islamism, complete with terrorist attacks.

He attended a local mosque, and undoubtedly spoke those sentiments on occasion to other mosque attendees. The mosque officials reputedly repudiated his sentiments and attempted to dissuade him from further mosque attendance. And someone from within that establishment undoubtedly reported his behaviour to authorities, which is where CSIS may have entered the picture, and in turn washed their hands of the matter by passing it on to the RCMP.

How should authorities respond when people of low intelligence take on the challenge of threatening their society by violent means? It could be argued that jihadists may all be of low intelligence guided by their psychopathic tendencies. On the other hand, many other Canadians who are/were Muslim, or converts to Islam, have been university students, so it is not necessarily their intelligence that was on a low par per se, but their choice of options to advance their direction in life.

What to do, then, with people who, given the opportunity and the inspiration and sympathetic assistance to aid them in fulfilling their aspirations, will take that opportunity and turn it to completing what they verbally set as a goal? It might be argued that if it was not the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that entered the picture at this juncture, Muslim radicals might have undertaken to take this vulnerable pair in hand to achieve their own like-minded purpose.

Still, what psychopathic religious bigots of violent inspiration seek to achieve is one thing; what law-and-order professionals tasked by their nation to serve and protect might conceive as a plan to entrap and criminalize and finally imprison a pair of sad dolts with no conceivable purpose in life other than a lethargic commitment to uphold the tenets of a theistic psychic malady constitutes an assault against reasonable deterrence.

On the other hand, the very fact that even in the face of observing how pathetic the two culprits are in spirit and deed, a jury reached the conclusion that John Nuttall and Amanda Korody were guilty as charged. That they had conspired to commit murder, had produced what they felt were explosive devices with a deadly purpose in mind, and took the requisite steps to install the (fake) bombs they thought were real, to achieve the purpose they had in mind.