Editorial, The Gazette, Friday, December 07

Mahmoud Jaballah is a suspected Al-Qa'ida sympathizer, but not convicted of anything - and the distinction is critical, not semantic.

In fact, he has never been charged with any crime, and so has never even gone to trial. But he did spend eight years in a special jail in Kingston, Ont., - built for suspected terrorists - based on circumstantial evidence about his involvement in the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 before being released to severe house arrest in Toronto last spring. ((Correction - he spent most of his prison time in Toronto, was only moved to Guantanamo north (the special Kingston prison) when it opened in spring 2006 - CJAC))

There are no charges pending, but Jaballah is far from free. His family's every move is watched by CSIS and police, who have set up heavy monitoring outside his home.

But in August that surveillance took on more ominous tones. Intelligence and police officials are proposing to install 14 closed-circuit video cameras inside and outside the house to record his every movement - and that of anyone else who happens to be in the house.

This abuse of state power reeks of the hamfisted secret-police monitoring of refuseniks in the former Soviet Union. A judge is weighing a proposal for a scaled-down plan of video surveillance, but the whole notion needs to be scrapped.

If Jaballah is suspected of a crime, let him be investigated, charged, tried and sentenced. Otherwise, the state has no business punishing or harrassing him this way.

He has been in jail several times in his native Egypt, but he was not convicted there, either. Jaballah, like every one of us, is innocent until proven guilty.