So the Times Square fizzlebomber has been sentenced -- prosecuted by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, with the able assistance of the head of the FBI's New York office, Janice K. Fedarcyk, and finally sent away, with the usual solemn admonitions to reflection and penitence, by U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, who appears to be an educator manqué. Ah, the gorgeous mosaic.
Maybe he'll he get the Underpants Bomber as a cellmate. Wouldn't those conversations be interesting to overhear?
Full disclosure: I hoped the Times Square exploit might at least clear the wretched tourists out of that godforsaken patch of ground. It doesn't seem to have worked. The tourists appear unimpressed with the deadly terr'rist peril. Not for want of trying by the cops:
Prosecutors introduced a dramatic videotape of an FBI-staged explosion in a Pennsylvania field that they said demonstrated how deadly Shahzad's bomb could have been.Your tax dollars at work!The FBI's car bomb — a 1993 Pathfinder fitted with 250 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and diesel fuel, three 25-pound propane tanks and two five-gallon gasoline canisters — blew up with a force that ripped the sport utility vehicle in half.
The explosion caused a giant fireball that overturned and shredded four other cars parked nearby, obliterated about a dozen dummies and shot fiery debris hundreds of feet in all directions.
Comments (6)
I just realized that the first casualties listed were the cars. You can't make this stuff up.
Posted by MJS | October 5, 2010 8:12 PM
Posted on October 5, 2010 20:12
Also, I'm hoping somebody else will do justice to the theme of "obliterating dummies." I don't trust myself.
Posted by MJS | October 5, 2010 9:18 PM
Posted on October 5, 2010 21:18
Hahahaha, I just had the lovely experience of starting to watch the video, thinking I had paused it to let it load a bit more, going to another tab, and then coming back to find it several minutes in right in the middle of an explosion. Very nice.
Not sure I have any good material on the dummies, but I am sad to see they didn't blow up any toy ponies this time.
Posted by ethan | October 5, 2010 9:45 PM
Posted on October 5, 2010 21:45
Oh, the ponies were there. But that video is classified.
Posted by MJS | October 6, 2010 12:05 AM
Posted on October 6, 2010 00:05
Why waste time hitting every ballpark in the land when you can watch the feds blow stuff up? A tourism goldmine is just waiting to be tapped.
Posted by Randal Graves | October 6, 2010 10:57 AM
Posted on October 6, 2010 10:57
I dunno, MJS. Of all the uses of one's tax dollars, destroying an SUV seems like one of the more worthy causes. Of course, if the police had been private citizens doing the same thing, they would be on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list and the subject of a Congressional investigation into "ecoterrorism" by now.
Posted by Nullifidian | October 7, 2010 9:38 AM
Posted on October 7, 2010 09:38