Nicholas Teausant, the Californian who sought to join ISIS in Syria and spoke of bombing a “Zionist” daycare center, has pleaded guilty to supporting a terrorist organization. According to news reports, prosecutors had sought approval from the Justice Department for a plea deal with Teausant, but on December 1 he pleaded guilty apart from any such agreement.
The day after Teausant’s guilty plea, American-born Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik, a Pakistani national, murdered 14 Americans and injured 21 in San Bernardino, California. The mass murder was the worst terrorist attack since September 11, 2001 but in the early going public officials hesitated to identify the killings as terrorism. The president invoked “workplace violence,” as he had in the case of Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who murdered 13 unarmed American soldiers at Ford Hood, Texas, in 2009.
Unlike that case, San Bernardino police managed to kill Farook and Tashfeen in a shootout with no loss of innocent life. The couple’s residence, police and FBI agents discovered, was a veritable bomb factory and arsenal.