The Toronto Star’s lonely sane columnist, Rosie DiManno, looks at the proceedings in the courtroom of the Canadian jihad case: Many ironies as case unfolds. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)

Guantanamo! Torture! Suicide!

The exclamatory buzzwords were all over the place in, of all places, a Brampton courtroom yesterday.

Aliens alighting from another planet — knowing nothing of Canada’s civilized temperament — might think this the most brutal and bludgeoning of police states, to hear lawyers for 17 alleged terrorists tell it.

How their clients — a dozen adults and five minors (though not so minor that they’ve been unable to summon healthy beards out of their androgens) — are being unspeakably mistreated by thuggish guards, subjected to oppressive and inhumane conditions, in the various custodial institutions where they currently reside as guests of Her Majesty.

“Torture! They push us!” shouted one of the adult accused, in an outburst that drew only the most mild admonishment from the bench.

The rhetoric was fast and furious and fulminous, with obligatory referencing of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and living circumstances purportedly so hideous that, well, the prospect of suicide born of despair shouldn’t be ruled out.

They have been in custody now, these 17 males who were allegedly plotting to blow up stuff in Southern Ontario, for all of 11 days.