She repeatedly interrupted the defendant, Faisal Shahzad, to spar with him over his interpretation of the Koran, his invocation of a Muslim warrior in the Crusades and, above all, the relevance of any of it to the life sentence that hung over him like the dozen United States deputy marshals who guarded the prisoner in court.
And after the judge formally sentenced Mr. Shahzad to life in prison, she left him a parting shot: “I do hope that you will spend some of the time in prison thinking carefully about whether the Koran wants you to kill lots of people.”
The six or eight minutes or so of back and forth brought a bit of drama to the endgame of a case that, as nerve-rattling as it was at its inception, with the discovery of a potentially lethal bomb in Times Square on May 1, had drawn to a close with the sentencing on Tuesday.
The hearing was a part-sentencing and part-scolding, and the latter started before the former. Judge Cedarbaum looked at Mr. Shahzad, seated between lawyers, his beard thick and his hair long under his white skullcap, and said, “I think you should get up.”
Mr. Shahzad, 31, rose. He seemed to have aged in the last five months from the boyish man who was arrested aboard a jet that had been cleared for takeoff at Kennedy Airport.
He asked the judge for 5 or 10 minutes, then launched into a soliloquy that was at times rambling, at times threatening and delivered with the crinkly-eyed grin of a man who acted as if he could not be happier than where he was at that moment.
“This is but one life,” he said. “If I am given a thousand lives, I will sacrifice them all for the sake of Allah, fighting this cause, defending our lands, making the word of Allah supreme over any religion or system.”
He made his one and only reference to his arrest by claiming, for the first time, that his rights had been denied. Law enforcement officials have said that immediately following his arrest, on May 3, Mr. Shahzad cooperated, but he said otherwise on Tuesday.
“On the second day of my arrest, I asked for the Miranda,” he said, referring to the required notification of his right to counsel. “And the F.B.I. denied it to me for two weeks” and threatened his wife and children, he said. The judge, prosecutors and defense lawyers stayed silent as Mr. Shahzad, who has mounted no substantive defense in his case and who pleaded guilty to all charges against him on June 21, continued to speak. His lawyer, Philip L. Weinstein, had no comment on the statements after the hearing.
Mr. Shahzad attacked the American military forces “who have occupied the Muslim lands,” and said that attacks like his attempted bombing would continue.
“Brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun,” he said. “Consider me only a first droplet of the flood that will follow me.”
He went on about the war and about the “fragile economy” that he said would soon prove unable to sustain the troops, when Judge Cedarbaum interrupted and asked, “Do you want to comment in any way in connection with sentence?” He said he was getting to that, his motivations, when the judge asked, “Didn't you swear allegiance to this country when you became an American citizen?”
He smiled like a boy caught in a fib, and said as much: “I did swear, but I did not mean it.”
“You took a false oath?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. Is there anything else you want to tell me?”
“Sure,” he began, and went on to say, “Blessed be” Osama bin Laden, “who will be known as no less than Saladin of the 21st-century crusade, and blessed be those who give him asylum.”
The judge stopped him again. “How much do you know about Saladin, as you called him?”
He is known in the Middle East as Salahuddin al-Ayubi, but commonly known in the West as Saladin, the Muslim leader who took Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187. He is remembered in biographies as being a lover of peace who waged war reluctantly.
“He didn't want to kill people,” the judge told the defendant.
“He liberated — ” Mr. Shahzad continued.
“He was a very moderate man,” Judge Cedarbaum said. Mr. Shahzad spoke more about the war in Iraq and said, “If you call us terrorists, then we are proud terrorists, and we will keep on terrorizing until you leave our land and people at peace.”
He finished, and it was time for the sentencing by Judge Cedarbaum. “Although happily, the training you sought in making bombs was unsuccessful and you were unsuccessful in your effort to kill many Americans,” she said, the facts of the case “require that you be incarcerated for life.”
She began going through the 10 separate sentences he faced: “I sentence you to life in prison,” she said.
“Allahu akbar,” he replied. (“God is great.”)
“I understand that you welcome that,” the judge said.
Mr. Shahzad was handcuffed and led away.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
EDITOR'S NOTE: Here's a related article .. an EDITORIAL from the New York Times:
EDITORIAL
Civil Justice, Military Injustice
Supporters of the tribunals at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who insist military justice, not the federal courts, is the best way to deal with terrorists, should pay close attention to Tuesday's events in a United States District Court in Manhattan. Faisal Shahzad was sentenced to life imprisonment, five months and four days after he tried to blow up his car in Times Square.
When Mr. Shahzad was arrested, and later given a Miranda warning, the “tough on terrorists” crowd screamed about coddling and endangering the country's security. They didn't stop complaining, even after Mr. Shahzad cooperated with investigators and entered a guilty plea with a mandatory life sentence. All of this happened without the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department breaking laws or violating Constitutional protections.
Now let's check in on Guantánamo Bay, where President George W. Bush opened an illegal detention camp, authorized torture and abuse, and then set up military tribunals engineered to produce guilty verdicts no matter how thin or tainted the evidence. When the courts declared the system illegal, Congress made it slightly better. President Obama improved it a bit more. But it is still not up to American standards, or to its task.
There are more than 170 inmates left in Guantánamo. Only 36 have been referred for prosecution, some very dangerous men. Forty-eight are in a long-term detention that is certainly illegal. Almost all the rest are in limbo while the Obama team tries to figure out what to do. The chances are dimming every day that prisoners like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, will ever be brought to justice.
The only inmate on trial in Guantánamo is Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was accused at age 15 of killing an American soldier in Afghanistan. He has been held in extralegal detention for more than eight years, and the military has been attempting to try him since 2005. The thin evidence against him is tainted by his credible allegations of abuse.
The Pentagon has further shamed American justice during the trial by imposing censorship that included temporarily banning four reporters from the courtroom because they published the name of a witness who had been identified in news reports and public documents.
This is the choice: Justice in long-established federal courts that Americans can be proud of and the rest of the world can respect. Or illegal detentions and unending, legally dubious military tribunals. It is an easy one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/opinion/06wed3.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print |
|
