Moussaoui: A Contrarian View

Zacharias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker" from the 9/11 attacks took the witness stand yesterday, allegedly in his own behalf. I say allegedly because it is clear from the reports of his testimony that he didn't do himself a lot of good, if he's trying to avoid the death penalty. According to all the news reports I've seen--and that's a reasonably wide cross-section--Moussaoui made a number of claims.

He claimed he was supposed to pilot a plane into the White House as part of a second wave of attacks, but he had no information about when that second attack was to take place. He didn't even know when the 9/11 attack was to take place before it happened.

He claimed he knew that the first attacks were to take out the twin towers in New York, but he didn't know about the attack on the Pentagon or where the 4th plane was to strike.

He claimed to have trained with many of those who did the deed on 9/11, but the mastermind of those attacks was quoted as telling Guantanimo interrogators that Moussaoui was a fringe player, a wannabe, a loose cannon who could not be fully trusted.

I think Moussaoui is getting his time in the fame spotlight, and he's relishing it. I think he's a crude, ineffective, and ineffectual little man whose only claim to fame is to be linked to the terror attacks of 9/11 by a country--my country, America--that is desperate to punish someone--anyone--for what happened on that day.

He wants to be a martyr, but he lacks the courage to kill himself let alone take anyone else with him. He's a pathetic bumbler and a habitual liar who lies for personal aggrandizement.

Executing Zacharias Moussaoui is just what he wants us to do. It will make him a martyr to his cause all right, because Al Qaida does not miss a propaganda opportunity even if they wouldn't let him within 500 miles of a real operation. Moussaoui would see a death sentence as his reward not as his punishment.

I don't think he knew a thing about 9/11 other than that such an attack was in the planning stage. His superiors shuffled him off to the side to keep him away from the real action because they didn't trust him.

I also don't think, based on all of the investigations of the intelligence failure that was 9/11, that the FBI or the FAA or the CIA could have followed any leads he had given them, even if he had known anything worth following up on, because at that time those institutions were blind to what happened on 9/11 until they were confronted by smoking towers. Only then did the pieces fall into place.

Moussaoui isn't worth executing. If we want to punish him--for his arrogance, his bad behavior, his delusions of grandeur, and his sick sense of values--we should lock him away and forget about him. He isn't worth executing, and he isn't worth letting free, either. Just lock him away and let him rot while we go after the real perpetrators of 9/11. Those are the people we want, not some two-bit wannabe fool.