Saturday, April 17, 2004
Toronto Globe & Mail April 17, 2004: Nelson Thall -- a talk-show host, media analyst and former Torstar Corp. director -- was surprised to find members of the Toronto police force prowling around his Forest Hill home. Then, they arrested him. . . .
64 charges were subsequently laid, largely weapons-related: unlawful possession, inappropriate storage. Mr. Thall, a serious gun collector -- he says he has never fired them -- insists that every weapon was stored behind triple locks, in cabinets containing full registration papers and documents of purchase. Two drug-related charges were also laid; Mr. Thall says he has a doctor's prescription for marijuana. . .
Thall, 51, was carried off to jail, booked and strip-searched. Opposing his bail application on grounds that he was a threat to society, the police kept him locked up for two days. That Mr. Thall, scion of a prominent Toronto family -- the Thalls are one of the five families that own the Toronto Star -- should have been accorded such treatment is considered unusual. Or, as Mr. Greenspan puts it: "There's a strong subtext here that I don't understand."
Mr. Thall himself believes that the affair has nothing to with his gun collection or marijuana, but with free speech. In democratic societies, he says, "free speech has a glass ceiling. You don't see it until you actually hit it. I hit it."
If Mr. Thall is right, he hit the ceiling with Cloak and Dagger, his late-night conspiracy talk-radio show. . . In February, it was axed. At the time, station managers blamed poor ratings, but the rationale made no sense: Among MOJO's target audience, Cloak and Dagger was the highest-rated program in its weekly time slot from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. . . .
On Cloak and Dagger, for example, you would hear that U.S. President George W. Bush and what the show called "the Bush crime family" knew about the events of 9/11 long before they occurred; that Canada's still-unelected prime minister, Paul Martin, used his personal fortune to help finance them; that no airplanes actually struck the World Trade Center on that day -- what witnesses saw was simply a high-tech hologram; that the buildings were brought down by explosives, prewired inside; that top-secret departments of the U.S. government manufactured the AIDS, SARS and other viruses as part of biological warfare research; and that a de facto civil war has broken out among those who control America's political oligarchy.
Fantastical though such material may seem, the show on occasion may have struck a nerve. Not long after it claimed that the Toronto police force was riddled with corruption, the force itself arrested a number of its drug-squad officers. And a few months before a Toronto-bound El Al plane was diverted to Hamilton after detecting a security threat, Cloak and Dagger reported that al-Qaeda agents had smuggled shoulder-fired missiles into Ontario intending to shoot one down. Mr. Thall believes that one such missile was actually fired at the Israeli jet. . . .
Mr. Thall has a BA Honours degree in arts from the University of Toronto, worked as an archivist for Marshall McLuhan, and was president of the Marshall McLuhan Centre on Global Communications, a private consulting firm. For a period in the 1970s, he also flew planes for the Ontario Provincial Police -- he owns a commercial pilot's licence -- and occasionally for the Metro Toronto undercover squad. . . . .....---
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