The final picture flashed up yesterday on the screens at Mohammad Momin Khawaja's terror trial showed a young, bare-chested man standing before a patterned wardrobe in a room.
Prosecutor Bill Boutzouvis had already established that the wardrobe was in a bedroom in a flat in Lahore, Pakistan, used as a quasi safe house for various Western jihadi passing through the city in the spring and summer of 2003 and for the group's storage of weapons and the constituent parts of an improvised explosive device.
On the left-hand corner of the wardrobe was a small bag containing detonators, and the trial has also heard that at various times, in or on the wardrobe, there was a quantity of ammonium nitrate, packets of aluminum power and even castor beans, from which the lethal poison ricin can be made.
Now Mr. Boutzouvis was questioning Mohammed Junaid Babar, the terrorist-turned-star witness whose rented flat it was, about who was that man in the picture, peering into the wardrobe.
"Abdul Rahman," Mr. Babar replied in his quiet voice.
A few seconds passed, and then Ontario Superior Court Judge Douglas Rutherford said quizzically, "That's Ausman?"
"No," said Mr. Boutzouvis, "that's Abdul Rahman," before adding snappishly "Anthony Garcia."
Mr. Boutzouvis can be forgiven his flash of impatience, and the judge his confusion. After four years in the making, the prosecutor knows the evidence and its intricacies, while the judge comes to it as fresh as most regular Canadians. And to his ears, and most others, the case most resembles a sort of constant replay of the old Abbott and Costello "Who's on first?" skit.
In the growing cast of characters - some, including the aforementioned Ausman and Rahman-Garcia, are among the five convicted of terrorism offences in England and who are alleged to be Mr. Khawaja's co-conspirators; some are un-indicted alleged co-conspirators; some are fellows who were passing through, doing their little bit for jihad and then disappearing from view - whose names have been introduced in a mere two days of evidence, I have counted six Abduls, three Sheiks, an Adil, Atif and Asim, and three Alis, two of whom have it as a last name and the third as a first.
Add to this the rap/ghetto language used by Mr. Khawaja et al., Mr. Boutzouvis's halting approach, the frequent objections from Mr. Khawaja's lawyer, Lawrence Greenspon (who spent much of the past years challenging various aspects of the case in various courts, surely quite properly, yet who here has cast himself as the man in a hurry, on a veritable tear, to get the evidence heard), and you have the ingredients for a perfectly opaque Canadian trial.
As a metaphor for the general Canadian understanding of the global Islamic jihad, the confusion over names is probably pretty good. I fear that as summer settles in, the appetite for details of this case - both from media and public - will ebb. Who can be bothered to figure out those names, those groups? And besides, goes this reasoning, nothing actuallyhappened.
Lost in translation, alas, is that for police and security officials, making arrests before something happens is precisely the point. Although undoubtedly easier for prosecutors to prove murder when they have mangled bodies handy than when they don't, it is still preferable from a law-enforcement point of view to shut down plans before people die.
Ideally, they move in at the point that Jack Hooper, the former deputy director of CSIS, once called "sixty seconds to boom" - at the last possible moment - when there will be evidence a-plenty but no bodies.
The evidence against Mr. Khawaja, according to prosecutor David McKercher's lengthy opening statement, includes wiretapped conversations, retrieved e-mail correspondence between Mr. Khawaja and his alleged accomplices in England and Pakistan, the fruits of search warrants lawfully executed at Mr. Khawaja's desk at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in Ottawa and at his parents' home (including a fully-functional remote-control detonator and fixings, weapons, jihadi literature, and $10,000 in cash under a mattress), and of course, the testimony of Mr. Babar and others.
The alleged plan appears to have been percolating a while, approaching coagulation and reasonably sophisticated. As my colleague Colin Freeze says, if the so-called Toronto 18, one of whom is on trial in Brampton, were grade-school bumblers at jihad, albeit with plenty of murderous intent, Mr. Khawaja's friends had at least graduated from high school and some had a year or two of jihadi college under their belts.
Mr. Khawaja, for instance, had actually been to a real terrorist training camp in the tribal areas of mountainous Pakistan, or as he put it in an e-mail to a pal that was introduced into evidence yesterday, this written in late July of 2003 after he'd returned, "Just back from the fruitful trip with your boys. It was quite amazing."
There, he learned how to fire and handle a Rocket-Propelled Grenade launcher, a light machine gun and that old standby of mujahedeen everywhere, the AK-47. As Mr. Babar, who himself had volunteered for the suicide part of the alleged fertilizer bomb plot, put it in his ever-mild manner, "You know, he was excited and he enjoyed it" at the camp.
Mr. Babar attended the camp too, toward the end, where he and others (not Mr. Khawaja) had explosives training and then made themselves a little test IED, successfully detonating it on the second try.
Mr. Boutzouvis insisted, much to Mr. Greenspon's irritation, on reading aloud into the record Mr. Khawaja's e-mails and others.
Mr. Greenspon several times objected to this practice, saying that because he had admitted Mr. Khawaja wrote and sent them, and because they were displayed on the big screens in the courtroom, there was no need to also read them.
But Mr. Boutzouvis said he was doing so because there was "a public interest in having the evidence known to the public," some of whom might not be able to read the screens.
It is a useful practice, I think. The more often these names and nicknames and pseudonyms are read and heard, the better they will lodge into the public consciousness.
Mr. Khawaja, Mr. Babar and so many of the other young men behind the names are Western-raised, the proud products of Canada or England or America, so much so that when they went to Pakistan, Mr. Babar said, he had them dress Western, not like locals, because though they might "look local, they didn't sound local," didn't speak Urdu or Pashto, as he does.
Mr. Khawaja et al., in other words, know their sworn enemy - and whatever else, by Mr. Khawaja's own words heard here in just two days, he considered the West his enemy. The least his fellow Canadians can do is return the favour.