Just Imagine How Long We Could Have Put Him Away For Had He Actually Come Up With The Idea On His Own

The NYPD’s vaunted anti-terror arm justifies its existence with a collar’s thirty-year sentence:

Yesterday, the courtroom was crowded, largely with news reporters and law enforcement officials. Mr. [Shahawar Matin] Siraj’s parents, appearing stunned when the sentence was dispensed, were also in the courtroom, and his uncle sat in the last row. His mother, Shahina Parveen, dressed in a patterned light blue tunic and pants, and a white head scarf, clutched a string of pale green prayer beads that she had carried during the trial.

After the proceeding, she began to cry as she sat on a bench outside the courtroom and talked to one of her son’s lawyers, Khurrum B. Wahid, slipping a tissue behind her glasses. Later, she spoke briefly to reporters, maintaining her son’s innocence and saying he would appeal.

“The N.Y.P.D., through a paid informant, tricked my son and got him stuck in this,” Ms. Parveen said, as Mr. Wahid translated from the Urdu. “He didn’t do anything. I didn’t get any justice. It was not a fair sentence.”

But the Police Department, which investigated the case, the first in which a terrorism inquiry by its Intelligence Division led to a prosecution in federal court, hailed the sentence, calling it “a milestone in the safeguarding of New York City.”

“It says that those who conspire against New York will pay a severe price,” Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in a statement, praising the Intelligence Division, saying it “uncovered a murderous plot in its infancy and stopped it before lives were lost.”

Actually, that last quote should probably read “devised and uncovered a murderous plot in its infancy and stopped it before lives were lost.”

Earlier: Spies Like Us!