CHICAGO _ A Cook County man was sentenced to 16 years in prison Monday afternoon more than 6 { years after pressing the detonator on what he thought was a 1,000-pound car bomb outside a crowded Chicago bar.
U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman imposed the sentence on Adel Daoud, 25, after a marathon three-day sentencing hearing last week at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.
Daoud, who has been in custody since his arrest in the FBI sting in September 2012, faced a wide range of potential penalties. Prosecutors sought a sentence of 40 years in prison and a lifetime of court supervision once he's released. Daoud's attorneys, meanwhile, had asked Coleman to place him in a mental health treatment program that could result in his release in time to enroll in college in fall 2021.
The sentencing hearing last week played out more like a mini-trial since Daoud, of Hillside, was allowed to enter his guilty plea in November without actually admitting he did anything wrong _ an unusual arrangement known in federal court as an Alford plea.
In addition to terrorism charges stemming from the plot to bomb the Cactus Bar & Grill, Daoud pleaded guilty to separate indictments accusing him of soliciting the murder of the undercover FBI agent at the center of the sting operation and attacking a fellow inmate with a jailhouse shank while awaiting trial in 2015.
In arguing last week for a lenient sentence, Daoud's lead attorney, Thomas Anthony Durkin, called the prosecution another example of government overreach in an ineffective and seemingly never-ending war on terror.
Durkin also criticized the undercover FBI agent in the case who posed as a jihadist and used a phony sheikh purportedly from Saudi Arabia to help convince Daoud that Islam allowed the killing of scores of innocent civilians.
In recorded conversations with the agent, Daoud expressed interest in committing a large-scale terrorist attack but seemed clueless on how to do it, at one point talking about using "flying cars" to bomb targets.
"They don't all have to be turned into terrorists," Durkin said of FBI sting operations like the one that ensnared Daoud. "Maybe some of them are terrorists, I don't know. But if this guy (Daoud) sounded like a real terrorist on some of those tapes, then I'm in another universe."
In his argument last week, Assistant U.S. Attorney Barry Jonas said Daoud was a dangerous person who made up his mind to murder in the name of Islam "based upon his own research," not anything the government made up for him.
Jonas noted that while Daoud may not have had the capability to construct a large car bomb at the time, he had been researching online how to plan an attack with an AK-47 or chemical weapons, and viewed videos depicting someone building a bomb out of a pen.
Before the planned attack on the Cactus Bar, Daoud was told that the powerful car bomb would level a quarter of a city block and cause catastrophic casualties, Jonas said. The bomb itself, though inert, was made to look real, with "bags and bags of fertilizer" and wires sticking out of it and "a strong smell of diesel," Jonas said.
"I saw it a few days before, and it scared me," Jonas said.
In his address to the court last week, Daoud apologized to his family, the judge and the United States for what he called a stupid mistake when he was a naive teen "trying to make friends."
"At the time I thought it was too late to turn back," Daoud, shackled at the ankles, told the judge. "Sometimes I laugh at my stupidity. Was that really me?"
In the nearly seven years since his arrest, Daoud said he realized he was "crazy for God knows how long" but has found clarity with treatment and medication while in jail. He has also come to realize that his beliefs were terribly misguided on what the Islamic faith teaches about violence.
"I was naive, gullible and confused," he said about his life in 2012. "I thought jihad could only mean war."
Unlike previous court appearances when Daoud rambled incoherently about Freemasons and lizard people, his remarks last week were lucid, his voice deeper and steadier. He ended by asking for leniency.
"Please don't make my sentence a payback for events or to people around the world that have nothing to do with me," he said. "I'm sorry for taking the court's time, for making my parents cry, for making a bad name for the Muslim community, and I'm sorry to the United States of America. God bless you."
