Faisal Shahzad, who pleaded guilty to trying to blow up a sport utility vehicle carrying a homemade bomb in May in Times Square, thick with Saturday visitors, was sentenced on Tuesday morning to spend the rest of his life in prison. Remaining defiant, and smirking as the sentence was read, he told the court: “Brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun.” He later continued: “The defeat of the U.S. is imminent and will happen in the near future.”
Presumably by people who don’t lock their house keys in the car they are attempting to blow up. Nevertheless, rather chilling to hear an American citizen speak about America in such terms. One of the reasons the trial was so swift was that Shahzad did not exercise his right to remain silent.
The outcome of the hearing was a foregone conclusion, since Mr. Shahzad’s no-deals guilty plea June 21, in which he spoke at length about his training with the Pakistani Taliban and his desire that day to “plead guilty 100 times over.”
This is a sticking point for some who believed Shahzad should have been stripped of some of his due process rights as a citizen of the United States after being arrested for committing a terrorist act. New York Rep. Peter King, a person who is frequently outspoken on these matters, told Ben Smith he thought there was some luck involved this time around.
“The case worked out well. I had questions about it. There was a bit of luck involved here…”If he was more sophisticated or more trained, or if he had not talked there could have been a follow-up attack, he could have been part of a larger conspiracy…It worked in this case, but to me it’s too much of a risk to take in every case.”
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