The defendant in the failed Times Square bombing pleaded guilty on Monday, an abrupt and expedited end to a terrorism case that extended to Pakistan and an Islamic militant group there. ...
"I want to plead guilty 100 times over," said Mr. Shahzad, who faces life in prison.
Mr. Shahzad described his training in Pakistan, where he said he went to learn from the Pakistani Taliban how to build a bomb that he planned to detonate in the United States. NY Times
This after (per ThinkProgess) Andrew McCarthy complained on behalf of the RWNM that Obama's Justice Department wouldn't get it done:
[W]hen you bring a war criminal into the civilian criminal-justice system while the war is ongoing, you empower him — with lawyers, with investigators, with discovery rights, with subpoena power, and with the complex dynamics of plea negotiations.
McCarthy, as usual, had it all wrong:
Filing an information suggests that there’s significant cooperation. An indictment, on the other hand, is the throwdown moment in a criminal case, the opening bell for the first round of a prize fight. It signals that the parties have been unable to work out an agreement and are in an antagonistic posture. ...
Shahzad’s relationship with the government is on the rocks. We don’t know exactly why this is so, but we can hazard an educated guess: Despite Holder’s protestations to the contrary, immediately bringing a person into the civilian criminal-justice system, with its rigorous due-process rules, is fraught with complications that make it very difficult for the government to gather intelligence without interruption.
(PS: I just noticed that McCarthy wrote this at 10:30 this morning EDT, about 6 hours before Shahzad entered his guilty plea. Still time for him to pull the article, maybe?)
But, according to the Times:
[Shahzad's] Shahzad’s relationship with the government is on the rocks. We don’t know exactly why this is so, but we can hazard an educated guess: Despite Holder’s protestations to the contrary, immediately bringing a person into the civilian criminal-justice system, with its rigorous due-process rules, is fraught with complications that make it very difficult for the government to gather intelligence without interruption.
And furthermore:
[L]egal experts say that absent any sort of written agreement — and there may be none since he cooperated for so long without a lawyer — the government is under no obligation to push for leniency for Mr. Shahzad, who faces a mandatory life sentence on two counts.
So, the Obama administration and the Justice Department, following the law - or,as McCarthy put it:
Rife with lawyers who spent the last several years volunteering their services to terrorists and deriding the Bush/Cheney law-of-war approach to counterterrorism, the Obama administration chose to empower Faisal Shahzad. Top officials at the White House, the Justice Department, the intelligence community, and the military evidently convinced themselves that doing so would be cost-free. They may soon learn the hard way that it is not.
was able to get a guilty plea AND get cooperation without promising a thing. Didn't even have to twist Shahzad's arm, much less waterboard him. Want to bet the Right Wing Noise Machine doesn't learn anything from this, the hard way or otherwise?
(So far, no reaction from conservatives denouncing Obama and Holder for shaking down Shahzad, but I am monitoring and will update as necessary.)
AP note: Some of the charges Shahzad pled guilty to (AP doesn't say which ones) carry a mandatory life sentence.