FJAG said:
The laws here are severely hampered by the need to recover sufficient evidence from a chaotic war zone to lead to a successful prosecution.
:cheers:
Yup, this. There is definitely no lack of thirst to investigate or prosecute this at any level, whether within the investigative teams, the police/intelligence services as a whole, the crown prosecutors' offices, or within the government / cabinet / PMO. Frnakly I'm sure our government would love nothing better right now than a couple of slam dunk prosecutions of Daesh returnees, because they quite rightly fear the impact this issue will have on the election.
We are, in the end, a nation ruled by law, however. I as a police officer am constrained in my job by our system of laws and our Charter of Rights and Freedoms - and quite rightly so! It's correct and appropriate than in a free society I, as an agent of the state possessed of considerable coercive powers, should have to justify my actions. If I want to investigate someone - just like any of you - who may be driving drunk, or accused of assault, dealing drugs, or making threats or committing a fraud or what have you - there are things that might make my job potentially easier but that the law doesn't allow me to do because they would trample your rights. I cannot make you confess to a crime, I generally can't force my way into your home and arbitrarily look for evidence, I can't just take your phone off you and have it searched for evidence without a warrant granted by a judge based on my grounds outlining a reasonable suspicion of an offense. I cannot arbitrarily listen in on your phone calls or seize and analyze your computer. We have mechanisms to do all these things but we have the judiciary as an oversight. I cannot burn certain investigative techniques in court proceedings. I cannot disclose the identity of confidential informants whose lives may be at risk from retribution by criminals. And these are all extraordinary simplistic comparisons in the realm of straight criminal investigations. Add international intelligence gathering and sharing arrangements into the picture, and holy hell does it get tough to use information. There is a whole sector within our national security infrastructure that wrestles with taking security intelligence (e.g., from CSIS, CSE, or foreign allied agencies) and handing off clean tidbits to the RCMP to say 'we can't tell you why, but look at this guy' and to try to build prosecutable criminal cases from there.
On the face of it it's easy to say 'Well OK, but drunk driver versus ISIS terrorist Come on, be reasonable". Yup. We can always pick two examples far removed from each other for comparison. Where it gets much harder is trying to discern the truth when someone purportedly travels overseas to a contested area to visit family, or to engage in humanitarian work, or what have you, and then on the flip side is accused of acts of terrorism. Are they giving money to Daesh, or to a legitimate charity? Might they be blissfully unaware of the difference? Where do we draw the line between combatants that are on the 'good guy' side and those that are not in such a conflict?
All that said- I'm by no means coming to the defense of these Daeshbags. I think among the first steps in effective solutions include better joint targeting and intelligence sharing, precision munitions, and where applicable sound application of the principles of marksmanship. We don't need to worry about prosecuting those dead as combatants on the battlefield. But one way or another we have to face the facts that some will return, and that the waters in many cases will be extremely muddied. It's very easy indeed to say all these people should be investigated, charged, convicted, and thrown in jail. I'm absolutely with everyone else on that part of the principle of this thing, for sure. But the rule of law matters, it's what keeps us the good guys and protects all of you from the dumb crap I could otherwise do in the course of efforts to enforce the law, and whether we like it or not those same protections do not end at some arbitrary line in the sand. I wish things were easier than this, but they're not.
