Following would-be Times Square Bomber Faisal Shahzad receiving a sentence of life imprisonment, Ben Smith asked Rep. Peter King, an opponent of using civilian trials to prosecute terror suspects, what he thought:
"The case worked out well. I had questions about it. There was a bit of luck involved here," he said. "He was advised of his rights and kept talking. If he had not, I don't know what would have happened."
"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," he said, adding that Shahzad himself would have been convicted on the evidence whether or not he cooperated. "It worked in this case, but to me it's too much of a risk to take in every case."
Look, 403 people convicted on terrorism-related charges since 2001 isn't luck. It's a system that works. Four convictions in eight years of military commissions looks more like an approach based on "luck."
Whether or not someone is tried in a civilian court has little bearing on whether or not a follow-up attack was in the works; it's not like a follow-up would have been premised on whether or not Shahzad was put in the civilian system. As for whether or not Shahzad should have been taken into military custody, the two examples we have of domestic arrests being transferred to military custody resulted in interrogators getting absolutely nothing in the way of usable intelligence. The Obama administration's reliance on the disappointing hybrid legal system for trying terror suspects -- including the default use of civilian courts for domestic arrests -- reflects consistency with, not a departure from, the past eight years during which King had no objections.
