10A038 Times Square by Jim Davies, 10/7/2010 He pled guilty, so it wasn't hard to convict Faisal Shahzad of trying to kill passers-by in Times Square last May by exploding a car bomb. On Tuesday a sentence was handed down, which will lock him up until he dies. He took the opportunity to make a speech, and it was quite clear he had no regrets at all except that his bomb had not gone off. He said "crusading U.S. and NATO forces... have occupied the Muslim lands under the pretext of democracy and freedom. We do not accept your democracy and freedom. Brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun." There's a rather long but very informative article about this in the UK Guardian newspaper, which quotes a "police source" as saying "The timer on the detonator, it was on military time. He set it for 7.00. That was 7am on this thing. For 7pm, what he wanted, it should have been 19.00." I didn't know that. A simple error about how the time of day is expressed had saved the lives of several innocent people. Is it true? - I suspect the cop was lying, for the bomb was detected only when smoke was observed coming from the SUV, and bombs don't usually smoke when timers fail to trigger. However, what's more important is the motivation factor, which the US media has so carefully avoided discussing ever since 2001. Shahzad's courtroom speeches, at his arraignment as well as this week, throw a deal of light on them. As he sees it, all Muslims are outraged that the US government is waging war on them - and doing so often with air strikes, which randomly kill children and other innocents as well as the armed leaders of its enemies. Therefore, in striking back, he said it's not inappropriate to kill randomly, including children. Eye for an eye. They do it deliberately, the FedGov calls it "collateral damage"; the kids are just as dead. The Guardian piece includes this phrase: "The anti-terror police... prevent another 9/11, but it cannot address root causes – American foreign policy..." Perhaps you have, but I've never seen any mainstream US publication even hint that American foreign policy was the "root cause" of 9/11 - or for that matter, anything else. Yet very clearly, it surely is; that was obvious to me a day or so after the attacks took place, which was when I wrote this page, unaltered since. So Shahzad chillingly warned that the Muslim war on the US has only just begun. I wonder if he is right. I'll be listening for some among the world's 1.5 billion of them to say "No, this man does not speak for us." I wonder how many of them will. I'm also waiting for Americans to say "Enough!" and dispense altogether with the wholly useless, expensive and lethally dangerous albatross called "government." Your feedback, please!