Senior U.S. officials hailed Canada's anti-terrorism efforts yesterday, but critics warned that Islamic extremists lurking north of a porous border would inevitably strike American targets.
"Canadians have had a very great success in their counterterrorism efforts," U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday, adding "we don't know of any indication that there is a U.S. part to this."
But some U.S. politicians, fearing that lax security and the presence of a large Muslim population in Canada makes the country a natural staging ground for terrorist strikes, pointed to the arrests as a grim harbinger of future attacks.
"Americans should be very concerned," said Peter King, a Republican congressman from New York. "There's a large al-Qaeda presence in Canada . . . because of their very liberal immigration laws, because of how political asylum is granted so easily."
Mr. King, who chairs the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, blamed the former Liberal government, saying it was soft on terrorism.
Although only one known al-Qaeda terrorist attack was launched from Canada at a U.S. target -- the thwarted 1999 attempt by Ahmed Ressam to bomb the Los Angeles airport -- many Americans still believe some of the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackers infiltrated from Canada.
Canadian diplomats in Washington fight a constant, uphill battle to persuade skeptical U.S. lawmakers that Canada is not a terrorist haven.
The arrest, six weeks ago, of two Atlanta-area men who visited Toronto, allegedly to talk targets and tactics with fellow Islamic extremists, fuelled that assumption.
Yesterday, Michael Wilson, Canada's ambassador to the United States, was on U.S. television touting the arrests as evidence that Canada is a vigilant and reliable ally in what U.S. President George Bush calls the global war on terrorism.
"We take very seriously these issues of terrorism, as demonstrated by this very successful exercise that was completed on Friday night, Saturday morning," Mr. Wilson told CNN.
Some terrorism experts believe operational al-Qaeda cells are biding their time in Canada.
"There are bound to be others that we haven't uncovered," said Neil Livingstone, chief executive officer of GlobalOptions Inc., a security firm in Washington and New York. "They are going to continue to plot and to organize and to acquire explosives. And, ultimately, they are going to cross the border and carry out some sort of attack here," he told NBC News.
Even among leading U.S. politicians who believe Canada has belatedly cracked down on Islamic extremists, there are demands for much tighter security along the border.
"These questions were raised long before these arrests," said Michigan Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat. "We've got a longer border with Canada than we do with Mexico. We have thousands of trucks that come in every day, many of them -- most of them -- not inspected. And particularly, by the way, garbage trucks from Ontario which cannot be inspected represent a real significant security threat."
The Bush administration says it has few worries about northern border security.
"We've improved border security immensely through technology and also through co-operation," Ms. Rice said yesterday. "So we are very comfortable with the counterterrorism co-operation with Canada and the border security co-operation."
Nevertheless, the arrests in Canada will almost certainly roil the already-contentious immigration debate due to resurface this week in Washington.
Although Federal Bureau of Investigation spokesman Richard Kolko confirmed that the Canadian terror-cell plans posed "no current outstanding threat to any targets on U.S. soil," he also said "it does appear that there were contacts between certain suspects in Canada and two individuals recently charged in the United States emanating from this case."
The two men, Syed Haris Ahmed, 21, and Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, 19, took a Greyhound bus to Toronto in March, 2005, where, according to their indictments, they met "like-minded Islamic extremists" to plot terrorist strikes. Yesterday, Mr. Wilson suggested the initial contact between the Atlanta and Toronto men may have been indirect, through al-Qaeda-inspired Internet sites.
They spent nearly a week in Toronto where, in a series of meetings with unidentified co-conspirators, the two "discussed strategic locations in the United States suitable for a terrorist strike, to include oil refineries and military bases," according to court documents.
After their Toronto visit, the two -- according to prosecutors who appeared at Mr. Sadequee's bail hearing in Brooklyn, N.Y. -- made another trip to the Washington area, where they made videotapes of potential bombing sites, including the domed U.S. Capitol, the World Bank and a fuel storage facility.
"We call them 'casing videos,' " said Colleen Cavanaugh, an assistant district attorney.
It appears U.S. anti-terrorism authorities were unaware of the Toronto trip at the time. The indictment against Mr. Ahmed suggests it was much later -- perhaps after being tipped off by Canadian counterterrorism units that had some of those arrested Friday under surveillance for the past two years -- that U.S. agents picked up the trail.
Mr. Ahmed subsequently went to Pakistan in an effort to get terrorist training, according to the FBI. His family says he was just visiting relatives and studying Islam. He is reported to be co-operating with police.
Meanwhile, Mr. Sadequee, who went to high school in Toronto and has relatives there, including an aunt, went to Bangladesh where he married. He was arrested there in April, several weeks after Mr. Ahmed was picked up in Atlanta. Mr. Sadequee, a U.S. citizen of Bangladeshi origin, was loaded on an airliner and arrested in Alaska by U.S. police awaiting him at the refuelling stop en route to New York.
It remains uncertain whether substantial links connect the alleged Toronto plotters to the two Atlanta-area men or to al-Qaeda. It is also unclear whether those involved were zealous amateurs talking about staging major attacks, or serious terrorists with the funding, expertise and weapons capable of carrying out a strike.