The 2014 shooting at Ottawa’s Parliament: Strangely Familiar

by Rory O’Connor 

One effect of the treadmill of “unspectacular” terrorist attacks in the developed world during this decade is disorientation. Snappy common sense asks: so you’re saying this attack looks like it was engineered by state or para-state actors? And I guess you think they’re all like that?

The slow, perhaps unsatisfying, response is: they could all be, though equally probably they aren’t. To be able to tell in the case of any given attack, you need to do the work of investigation. A slowdown in the terror schedule would help. Full legal powers of discovery would help too!

A Necessary Work

Graeme MacQueen, who was the founding director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University and is a former editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies, has done the work of investigation in the case of the October 2014 Ottawa attack, and reasonably found that elements of the Canadian state have a case to answer. The results are contained in his report, The October 22, 2014 Ottawa Shootings: Why Canadians Need a Public Inquiry.

It is particularly valuable, seeing as Ottawa was part of the extraordinary spate of attacks around that time: the Lindt Café siege in Sydney and the Charlie Hebdo attack were others. And these were linked in the public mind with the ISIS panic, at its very height then.

The most basic story involves two men, who didn’t know each other, both by origin French-Canadian Catholics, and both converts to Islam: Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the Ottawa attacker, and Martin Couture-Rouleau, who attacked in Quebec two days previously.

Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, of partial Libyan extraction, shot three times and killed Cpl Nathan Cirillo, who was on honour guard at the National War Memorial in Ottawa on the morning of Wednesday, October 22, 2014. After unsuccessfully attempting to kill another soldier, Zehaf-Bibeau drove his car to Parliament Hill, three minutes away.

Running Through Parliament with No Bullets

Because the Parliamentary precinct was protected by bollards, he hijacked a car by forcing its driver out, and drove to Parliament’s Centre Block, which he entered.

Having already discharged six bullets of the possible eight loaded in his old-fashioned Winchester rifle, he emptied the other two on entering Centre Block, while fighting off security. He then ran deeper into the building, in which many politicians were present, for purposes not specifically known.

From a hiding place, he was able to discharge one more shot, meaning he had reloaded at least one bullet there, before succumbing to the thirty-one bullets that hit him, the most fatal of them from point blank range.

He died less than two minutes after entering the building. Kevin Vickers, the House of Commons sergeant-at-arms, was hailed a hero for being one of the officers who stopped Zehaf-Bibeau killing again. Vickers subsequently become Ambassador to Ireland.

The Other Convert

All this happened two days after an attack in Quebec, in which the other man I mentioned, Martin Couture-Rouleau, a convert who had been tagged as a security risk, ran into two soldiers in a shopping centre car park, killing one of them, Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent.

There was a car chase by police on the scene, during which he rang 911 to say the killing was in the name of Allah. His car rolled into a ditch, and he emerged from it. There are contradictory reports on whether he was charging toward a police officer with a knife, as police allege. At any rate he was shot, and died in hospital.

(A knife was photographed sticking up from the ground, which is not how you would expect a knife to land, if it had fallen or even been thrown, unless very emphatically, and this has not been alleged.)

Muslims and Stings

In his 90-page report, published in 2015, MacQueen puts this bald story in context, citing possibilities other than the Ottawa event being a simple jihadist attack. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police do have a nice line in entrapping Muslim targets, after all.

As an example only, in the case of the “Toronto 18” in 2006 the only handgun in their possession was supplied by a police mole, and access to a bomb-manufacturing chemical was facilitated by another mole, paid $4 million for his work, according to RCMP documents reported on by Michael Friscolanti in Maclean’s. Yes, four million Canadian dollars.

There is the cautiously encouraging case of John Nuttall and Amanda Korody. They were arrested in 2013, after planting Boston-style pressure-cooker bombs at the British Columbia Legislature, of all places. But Justine Catherine Bruce, of the B.C. Supreme Court, issued a stay of proceedings on the Crown’s case, since the RCMP mole had suggested the type of bomb, supplied the explosive, and helped build them.

Of prime relevance to the Ottawa attack, the mole also suggested where to put the bombs: a provincial parliament, on that occasion.

To hear Christy Clark, then-Premier of B.C., say at the time of Nuttall and Korody’s arrest, “What they want to do is the same thing terrorists want to do around the world, and that is rob us of our sense of security, to rob us of our sense that this place belongs to us,” is to hear a finely ironic rendition of the Pavlovian reaction the word terrorism causes in politicians. The Crown is currently appealing the stay in proceedings.

Given the lockdown the RCMP have on the Ottawa case, there is no positive evidence of an entrapment operation involving Zehaf-Bibeau. However, the police have been unforthcoming and inconsistent about what evidence they have, and claim not to know many things.

At His Aunt’s House?

For example, where Zehaf-Bibeau got his rifle. With a criminal record, he could not easily have bought one in Canada. He spent the night before the shooting at his aunt’s rural house, ninety minutes away from Ottawa. It was the first time in ten years that he had visited her. Is this a place where you store and are certain of finding a gun again?

The police claimed he was seen in the morning placing a rifle in his car boot, but there is no telling who these witnesses are, or if they saw him do this at his aunt’s house. Or are we supposed to think rifles are pilfered without report in the country?

Despite all these potential leads, the RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson merely said, “We have not been able to confirm the origins of the gun”. There ought to have been forensic evidence of gun cleaning, reasonably easy to ferret out given how quickly the shooter was identified. As MacQueen points out, another possibility is that Zehaf-Bibeau was supplied with the gun as he drove back to Ottawa on the morning of the attack.

There are evidential problems relating to the car he used in the attack, purchased the day before. He is said to have bought it using funds built up working in the Alberta oil patch. The RCMP ought to put their contentions about his work history on the public record. It ought also to say why it discounts reports that he got help to buy the car from people at an Ottawa homeless mission.

Most bizarrely, Commissioner Paulson said Zehaf-Bibeau had intentions for the car, but “what those are, we aren’t sharing”. It is reasonable to assume this means something more than driving it, and given the context of Couture-Rouleau and more recently the Melbourne, Westminster and Barcelona attacks, means a plan to run people down. But how does Paulson know anything about this?

Drills and Warnings

Probably the most troubling evidence of state complicity in the Ottawa event is the exercise the Canadian security state held shortly before the two attacks, and the so-called intelligence warnings distributed through October.

The exercise was reported on the day of the Ottawa attack. The CBC journalist Adrienne Arsenault explained that Canadian security agencies had run an exercise on maintaining command in their scripted scenario of an attack in Quebec, followed by an attack “in another city”, ending in an event involving fighters returned from Syria.

This last didn’t happen, but Couture-Rouleau and Zehaf-Bibeau were readily linked by the media to events in Syria.

It was fair enough for the CBC’s Arsenault to say about the security agencies, “This precise scenario has been keeping them up at night for a while”.

Incidentally, Zehaf-Bibeau was not a “copycat”, since he had been planning his attack throughout October, and nor was he personally connected with Couture-Rouleau.

As far as we know, the “intelligence warnings” began as early as October 8^, when NBC publicly reported that would-be terrorists were discussing knife-and-gun attacks in Canada. (Note: Zehaf-Bibeau was carrying an unused knife.) The Privy Council Office issued a rare general warning on 17 October.

On the very day of the Ottawa shootings, after the news had filtered through, Craig James, the B.C. Legislature’s clerk, said in a press conference that he and a number of politicians in that province, including the Attorney General and Finance Minister, had received a warning, not specific to B.C., of the possibility of trouble.

Who Knew What?

And Gary Lenz, the B.C. sergeant-at-arms, said the threat warnings were shared among those in charge of security at Canadian parliaments. So what did politicians in Ottawa know? Was Kevin Vickers, who has been presented simply as a quick-acting hero who killed Zehaf-Bibeau, anticipating trouble? He was the House of Commons sergeant-at-arms after all. If not, why not? Is it bursting too big a bubble to ask the question?

Those who look into synthetic terror events will not have a problem in saying the exercise and the “intelligence warnings” count as evidence.

But equally, we should not lose sight of the fact that citizens don’t find it hard to dismiss these patterns as random, because of the missing links. That majority needs to be advised that any investigator worth his salt would have raised questions about these coincidences.

The first questions, very simply, are: Was there a relationship between the exercise and the October events? And, what was the relation between the prior intelligence warnings and the October events?

Wouldn’t You Know It, a Bill Is Tabled

The upshot of the attacks was that the passage of two laws strengthening the security state was made easier. C-51, the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2015, was an omnibus law, which among other provisions allowed government bodies to keep and pass among themselves citizens’ data, right down to travel and tax affairs, and made provisions for the no-fly list.

Another bill, C-44, which gave more powers to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, was tabled a week after the attack.

I double-checked the media reports Graeme MacQueen refers to in the course of his report, and he is scrupulous in his handling of their information. He also refers extensively to the four police reports on the attack. And he delves into many more areas than I have been able to summarize here.

He is consistently a responsible researcher. His book The 2001 Anthrax Deception earned the praise of Denis Halliday, the United Nations Assistant Secretary-General who resigned in 1998 in protest at the Iraqi sanctions regime, who said, “This deeply troubling book should be read by all thinking Americans”.

Published three years ago with the aim of provoking a public inquiry, MacQueen’s report on the Ottawa attack is sadly still an essential resource: questions asked in it have been ignored. So we are left with the certainty that the Canadian government is hiding things in this case, and the racing certainty that it’s up to its neck in it.

The October 22, 2014, Ottawa Shootings: Why Canadians Need a Public Inquiry, by Graeme MacQueen, is available as a free PDF. It is also available inexpensively on Amazon Kindle.

My interview with Graeme MacQueen about the Ottawa shootings is available on iTunes at The Rory O’Connor Podcast, and also on YouTube.

— Rory O’Connor is a journalist in Ireland