Aaron Driver was boarding a taxi outside his sister’s home in the small Canadian town of Strathroy, Ontario, when armed law enforcement agents moved in to arrest him. Driver, 24, was known to local authorities as a prolific online supporter of the Islamic State. He had previously been placed under government surveillance due to his social media postings and had received a judicial order in February banning him from use of the internet.
Acting on a tip that Canadian authorities say came from the FBI, police on Wednesday descended on the home of Driver’s sister on suspicion that Driver was planning to carry out an imminent terrorist attack. In Driver’s possession were two explosive devices. As police approached, he detonated one device while sitting in the backseat of the taxi, before being shot. He died during the encounter, while his taxi driver escaped with minor injuries.
Driver’s death has made headlines as a case of homegrown terrorism, though initial reports suggest his ties to extremist groups had existed largely on the internet. He lived in a small rural suburb, having moved there a year earlier from the central Canadian city of Winnipeg. He came from a military family and had been raised as a Christian. But despite his physical and social isolation, over the past several years he had become thoroughly invested in the world of online Islamic State supporters.
“He was enormously active online since late 2014 at least. He was in direct contact with [now-deceased Islamic State hacker] Junaid Hussain, with a whole slew of ISIS fanboys and fangirls, as well as one of the Garland attackers, who he called a friend but also only knew online,” says Amarnath Amarasingam, a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, who had previously met Driver. “He always talked about the online community as ‘us.’ He was part of it, got a lot of social and emotional reinforcement from this involvement, and saw it as his role to defend it.”
An undated photo of Driver taken from Facebook.
In a press conference following Driver’s death, Canadian officials said that they had been monitoring him since December 2014, after receiving a public complaint about his online activity. Officials said he had been in the last stages of planning a real attack, and displayed a video Driver had made announcing his intentions.
In many ways, Driver was an atypical supporter of terrorism. He freely discussed his views with journalists and researchers who reached out to him. In February 2015, he gave an interview under his online pseudonym to a major Canadian newspaper, explaining why he supported terrorist attacks and the militant group Islamic State. He told reporters that he still maintained his relationships with his former friends, largely so that he could continue playing video games. “I have friends who game and I don’t want to lose my relationship with them,” he said.
Amarasingam said that Driver’s online activities seemed to fill an emotional void in his real life, which was troubled. “He had a tough upbringing, he lost his mother to brain cancer at age seven, and lost a baby while his girlfriend was delivering it,” Amarasingam said. “He didn’t really find much support from his father, moved around a lot, and didn’t have many friends. So, what he found online was deeply impactful for him socially.”
Driver had also apparently converted to Islam without meeting any Muslims outside of the internet, telling Amarasingam that his introduction to the religion came from watching YouTube videos. He also expressed his frustration that Muslim leaders and members of the community he had since met were “hypocrites” and “sell-outs.” Despite his admitted lack of real connections with the Muslim community, he said that he was happy that reporters had been reaching out to him for his perspective on political and religious issues.
In June 2015, Driver was placed under government restrictions that precluded him from going on the internet. Amarasingam speculates that this may have deepened his sense of psychological degeneration. “We stripped him of his social circle he had online and didn’t really provide an alternative anchor or replace it with anything,” Amarasingam said. “This could have left him open to embracing violence as an option.”
While many online supporters of terrorist groups also tend to have some real-world nexus with extremism, this presently seems unclear in Driver’s case. He lived in an isolated, racially homogenous small town, distant from major metropolitan centers, let alone from the conflict zones of Iraq and Syria. His embrace of extremist beliefs seemed to take the place of other anti-social behaviors he had once engaged in, including drug use and petty crime.
Adnan Rajeh, a member of a mosque in the small city of London, Ontario, roughly an hour away, said that Driver began showing up there nine months ago, and that the congregation there viewed him with trepidation after learning that he had been under government scrutiny. He said mosque officials had been in regular contact with local authorities about Driver for months. A statement the mosque gave to local media expressed “appreciation to law enforcement officials” for their efforts.
“We personally spoke to the police many times about him and had been in close contact with the authorities about monitoring him generally,” Rajeh said. “The government felt he was dangerous and seemed to be expecting us to deal with him, but we’re not a psychiatric facility and we don’t have the capacities to deal with people like this.”
Rajeh said that Driver periodically attended prayer congregations and had sometimes volunteered to help move boxes and complete other small tasks. But he expressed frustration that the government had let Driver visit their mosque while knowing he was dangerous. “The government knew he was a threat, they could’ve foreseen this, but they just let him kind of land amongst us nine months ago,” Rajeh said.
“It’s a very unfortunate event that he got killed, no one is happy about that,” he added. “We’re glad he didn’t harm anyone, but it never should’ve gotten this far. He needed psychiatric help or some other form of social assistance that could’ve prevented this from happening.”
The biggest problem facing domestic police services is the severe lack of real terrorists to support bloated budgets and the overheated rhetoric deployed to justify them. Hence, the need for the mentally ill and socially ostracized to be entrapped as useful idiots. Certainly some are dangerous as they tend to be anti-social and misanthropic in their tendencies. The very first thing they need is help, the very last thing is police incitement to violence.
On another point, there was no “second bomb”. None has been produced by the police. The need to make the allegation is to justify what amounts to assassination if there was no immediate threat to life after the first firecracker exploded. Simply put, no arrest + no trial = murder.
Smells bad all around. The “explosive device” can’t have been much if the cabbie in the front seat wasn’t scratched. More like a police bullet hit the goof ball’s Bic lighter.
Not only is the NSA busy attempting to destroy the lives and reputations of innocent Americans .. but, the NSA is busy using its tentacled arms to do the same to people residing in other countries
This article is no different than the 50 other Intercept articles claiming this type of person is not a danger to society.
Law enforcement does not have the luxury of assuming you are right.
Likely fake- A blast from the past, images from the Boston “Bombing”, as real as a $3 bill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssRY4awZ3Mg
Ninja.
See, all islamic fighters/training camp attendees… they all look like “bad ninja” extras from the movie American Ninja
The RCMP, et al, playing the FBI ‘me too’ game.
The difference is the RCMP can’t lie as well as the FBI does.
Imagine, little old Strathroy, Ontario, a hotbed of ISIS machinations. All it was known for before was maize, tobacco and wheat!
When I was living in London, Ontario in the 1960’s, the Strathroy police chief, being the small town goof that he was, decided that his police were going to “look tough”, and carry their sidearms like yank wackjobs, instead of discretely in a holster closed by a full cover. Guess he watched lotsa ‘Murkan TV.
Are Fear Mongerers a reliable source of info? Reminds me of the “two minute hate” in 1984
“As police approached, he detonated one device while sitting in the backseat of the taxi, before being shot. He died in the encounter, while his taxi driver escaped with minor injuries.”
Looks like he was actually shot dead and did not blow himself up.
Seems obvious. His rights probably mattered less at that point.
Since you were obviously there, PLEASE tell us more…
That police news show in the picture above was no better than a Nuremberg rally.
Looks like the Apple 1984 ad. Did they go for the Orwellian look on purpose?
One kid. One fucked-up kid…and the Canadian police make like they stopped an army of 20,000.
I’m fuckin’ embarrassed.
Way too much fire power for a kid. He probably would have surrendered if they had let him. No danger of that overbearing approach or attitude changing any time soon.
“His embrace of extremist beliefs seemed to take the place of other anti-social behaviors he had once engaged in, including drug use and petty crime.”
I am not convinced that it is senseful to list drug use in the same list of anti-social behaviour as extermism and petty crime, since there is no direct correlation between drug use and effects on the well-being of others. For instance, if someone is going from smoking weed to murdering innocent civilians, you think it is reasonable to say that his murdering ways seemed to take the place “of other anti-social behaviors”?
This does not help in any way in explaining this phenomenon, but also may lead to further discrimination of drug users that never would harm anyone but themselves.
I am kind of puzzled by all the hoopla about American (and now Canadian) jihadis. Why this new phenomenon? Or is it not new? Were there Vietnamese-Americans (or other Americans) who sent “material support” to N. Vietnam? Were there Korean-Americans and others who tried to travel to N. Korea to join the N. Korean army? Were there German-Americans and others who supported Hitler? Did they get caught? Were these individuals constantly in the news? Something seems off.
Well they kinda did put all the Japanese in camps at one point, so I suppose just essentially creating plots out of thin air (most of the time) and locking up only individuals and not entire families is a step in the right direction?
If we hadn’t done that to the japanese they would have remained loyal to japan. Just look at brazil. They treated them nice and the japanese thought they were soft so they remained loyal to japan. Dealing with the japanese is kinda like dealing with kling-ons or nietzscheans. A warrior race and all that
No such thing as a warrior “race”
Nearly all of these Jihadis are part of the FBI contintelpro program, where undercover FBI and paid informants manufacturer ‘terrorism’, they have really nothing to do as such with armed militants in Iraq and Syria.
I imagine the RCMP is under pressure from their Yankee friends to have a similar program.
Just speculate, you are an agent at the FBI in counter intelligence, you access to Canadian records on potential terrorist suspects. Driver being on peace bond would be on such a list.
Now you want to pressure your Canadian counterparts to step up their own version of contintelpro (it is getting embarrassing how even though Canada has more Muslims per capita, it has far fewer ‘terrorism’ incidents), who are you going to propose Canada focus on?
Couple other questions:
Where is the evidence Driver had any plot?
Where is the evidence of Driver designing/building some sort of explosive device?
What was his device?
How does someone with no internet access post a video accessible to the FBI?
Why can the normal internet user not find the original online source of this video?
If Driver was prolific on social media with ISIS recruiters, can someone in the media show me is username, or even a single social media post related to Driver and his recruitment?
Why does the Intercept seem to be repeating the same propaganda available elsewhere, rather than trying to answer any of these questions?
“He freely discussed his views with journalists and researchers who reached out to him. ” ??? What journalists or researchers do that?
Maybe the FBI or Canadian equivalent do that in order to cultivate their terrorist patsies. Which appears to be exactly what Driver was being set up for.
I am sure whomever ran any of the more vocal Anon forums years ago, back during the time of the PayPal raids would have answers to that? No,I am not saying Anon is terroristic (I would hope that went without saying. A bit misguided at times, sure, though who isn’t?) — but rather when something is in the news, the media tends to seek out comments from people they consider palatable. Case in point, too many people to count have died in drone strikes but most Anons probably knew only TriCK. That is because he got news.
As far as researchers are concerned, sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists reach out to groups all the time for data. Paul Taylor gave the world a very honest portrayal of the bbs scene in theb80s/early 90s. That could never have happened without reaching out.
Yes, I am not really tossing out many “terror examples” but this case was still thoroughly western. The media can be corrupt occasionally but they do still look for bigger truths. Sure, the FBI, RCMP, whomever else pretext. But suggesting all journalism is pretext sounds like bait for puppets to use — and I think you are above that.
Gee, censorship doesn’t work — who knew???
I mean seriously, you’d think that some of us “civil libertarians” would have gotten people to grasp something like the sheer stupidity of trying to have a government keeping people from reading stuff. I mean, in part it’s because the alternative to talking is… what? And in part because when people don’t know what they’re doing, it’s easier to do it quickly. But mostly it’s because of our Anti-Islamic Secret Weapon, the sacred radioactive doomsday device of the jihadoskeptic movement, which is to say… the sheer stupidity and awfulness of Islamic source documents, whether we’re speaking of Dabiq or Inspire or Hadith or Muhammad’s original crummy double-the-threats-and-bluster ripoff of the Torah itself. All we need to do to cure these Muslim wannabees is to keep them reading this crap day and night until they finally notice whatever it takes to convince them to become Muslim oh-no-I-don’t-wannabees. There’s a reason why they have to threaten apostates and blasphemers and proselytizers with death over there … it’s because given half a chance people would drop this turd straight back in the bowl!
But censorship fucks all that up. There is no cause so despicable that it cannot be ennobled by an ill-considered program of state censorship – not Communists, not Nazis, not even freaking ISIS. And believe me, we the civil libertarians have told those idiots all that many many times. And still, every time they want to offer “bail” it turns out as a wishlist of idiotic not-a-laws to impose on people simply for being accused of something, and every time it’s “probation” it’s worse, and when it’s “parole”, just forget about it, it’s a miracle anybody doesn’t get violated.
Someday, either the state will realize this, or they will have to learn to do without taxis after the drivers get excessively frustrated by people doing unreasonable things in their cars.
No no, by all means, keep censoring, maple commies.
Unfortunately this is not just a Canadian thing – many Americans are being victimized by extraordinary “bail conditions” in the same way.
Makes no sense to me.
strange case.
He was brought up in a good Christian home. Alberta, Canada’s hard-right bible-thumpin’ province, generates more home-grown terrorists than any other.
If the U.S. coalition hadn’t tried to hijack the Arab Spring pro-democracy protests in Syria and replace them with radical Islamic Salafist groups bent on using military-scale violence to overthrow Assad, ISIS would not be an issue today.
The fallout from that effort, initiated in late 2011, has similarities to the rise in Irish Republican Army recruitment after the Bloody Sunday killings in 1972, for example:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jun/15/legacy-bloody-sunday-killings
Now, thanks to these idiotic regime change games pursued by Obama (as well as to the invasion of Iraq conducted by Bush and Cheney), we have ISIS operating internationally, hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding into Europe, and the prospect of endless war in the Middle East and North Africa.
Oh, but this is good for defense contractor profit margins. . .
Yes, why wasn’t he put under psychiatric observation?
Why? I am sick of this country confusing trauma and loss with mental illness. The former usually only needs friends, a good support system and a solution-based approach to ameliorating the loss, and time to reorient his life after he lost his primary anchors. I tend to think this is what has been causing a lot of violence in this country: alienation. We need to fix our communities and quit rewarding a lack of compassion (or saying compassion requires some sort of disability; it doesnt.)
Point well taken, but the social infrastructure needed to deal with one is a natural extension of that needed to deal with the other. The problem, in the US at least, is that during the presidency of Ronald Reagan we dismantled much of our public infrastructure for dealing with mental illness and its preconditions. Mentally ill people, and people under severe psychological stress, are left on their own, or to their families, to deal with it. When as in the case of Driver there is no family, it comes down to the individual, who is often incapable of self management.
In the community where I live – Loudoun County, VA – there have been two instances in the past three years of police killing mentally ill people. The most recent one, last week, involved a deputy sheriff responding to a 911 call from a woman who was being threatened by a mentally ill family member in her care. She had locked herself in a room, and when the deputy arrived the man brandished a knife, so was shot. The police are not trained to distinguish between the sane and deranged, and so treat all threatening situations in the same way. This is tragic additionally because nobody in law enforcement even considers the possibility of another approach. But it is even more tragic because the citizens have saddled law enforcement with a function that should not even be theirs. In the case I described, what should have happened was a response by a team of psychiatric trained professionals, rather than a policeman.
It is legitimate to wonder whether less money would have been spent, with a better outcome, had Driver been given the kind of social services needed to save him from a violent end. Saving money. That should appeal even to Islamophobes.
Thanks for the reply. :) I wrote you a long response and clicked Submit before checking to make sure I filled in the name/email, and thusly wound up losing it all (which kind of sucks because it was so long. Carpal-tunnel is acting up, so hope it is okay if I try to reformulate my response later.
Why weren’t the Bush43 admin clowns put under psychiatric observation? They are(‘cuz most are still alive) psychopaths and sociopaths.
As shown in this article, there are several reasons why young Muslim men choose to become jihadists:
http://viableopposition.blogspot.ca/2016/03/the-cause-of-jihadist-terrorism-and-how.html
Unfortunately, there is almost nothing that the West can do to discourage them from joining.
Final Post
One of the most effective ways to distort a religion is by taking its sacred terms and twisting their original spiritual meanings.
Lord knows segments of Muslims have been corrupting Islam this way for 1400 years.
The biggest term that has been distorted over the past 1400 years is Jihad. And now we’re seeing Anglicized versions of it more and more, which further distort its original import.
Although I’m getting tired of addressing this method of distorting Islam — and it sure is a losing battle — and have referred to this article often, here it is anyway:
“The Spiritual Significance of Jihad”, at https://www.al-islam.org/al-serat/vol-9-no-1/spiritual-significance-jihad-seyyed-hossein-nasr/spiritual-significance-jihad
A true Jihadist is a person who strives to groom her self so that it reflects the higher, whose qualities include selflessness, generosity, humility, forgiveness, love, peace, lack of desire for power and control, not doing unto others what one doesn’t want done unto one, etc., etc., the qualities I have often listed.
Those who turn to violence, especially against the innocent, are NOT Jihadists!
They are terrorists and commit evil!
Some of them appear to be mentally ill.
Yes, western muslims seem to be worlds apart theologically from their middle eastern namesakes. From what I can tell, they are nearly separate religions. I am only familiar with a few basics, but it seems that violent jihad is a more primitive form but does indeed find its roots in the history of Islam.
Hello, Sufi. Your posts have always seemed insightful to me. I have long held the belief that what causes a Westerner to call themselves a jihadi is quite different from what tends to prompt a non-Westerner to.
As a result I have tended to see this as two (well, more than two) sets of problems requiring differing solutions. In the former case I tend to see a lot of these joiners as seeking some sort of place in the world combined with a decaying society and set of influences (recent videogames are far more violent now as are TV and movies) that are pretty much pervasive. Youth has a tendency to want to rebel as well and we tend to applaud those who stand out in our society (or now say everyone does, which is impossible and furthers a culture of oneupsmanship).
On the other hand it seems to me that a lot of non-Westerners join up with (usually) different reasons and causes (and while also pretty much woefully misguided, at least tend to sound more personal and specific to me, or directly manipulated, or more particularly “religious”. Too, I think a lot of them have had their land invaded or family members or friends killed, or what-have-you.
It seems to me the solutions need to start here in the US in both cases. Ie we need to stop invading/droning/torturing/bombing/etc people to help deal with the latter (though I would expect blowback for how many years of hegemony?) and to start fixing our idea of family/friendship/community here at home. When our youth want to get brainwashed by violent religious beliefs instead of guided by peaceful ethical and moral tenets, we are definitely neglecting our humanity.
Do you really think that the Military Industrial Complex cares about this alienation to the america’s hegemonic authority??? We’re recruiting these people to increase profit$. Hillary will have a love affair with the Military Industrial Complex, and as long as americans don’t see body bags coming home. life is about consumption. We have lost our american soul…… or maybe we never had one.
I think at least some of our forebears did, though not all of them. We are definitely a long way down a dangerous path for society, and it seems to only be getting worse. But then, even our local media is no longer local in most places. Soul starts at home.
So…who in The West would you point out to some frustrated kid as an example of goodness and honesty right now?