The Moussaoui Trial; Six weeks, wasted

Six weeks of trial and deliberation in the Moussaoui trial has resulted in exactly nothing. The jury's verdict in the Moussaoui awarded the nut life imprisonment, something the DoJ should have conceded to him after his initial confession, rather than pursue the death penalty. The man clearly had little idea about the 9/11 plot. The tedious death sentence trial, replete with weepy moments and histrionic replays of the Filght 93 audio tape, should never have even occurred.

Government claims that Moussaoui deserved the death penalty because he lied to FBI agents about any knowledge of 9/11 were, if anything, absurd. Their position was that, had a raving Moussaoui told the FBI about 9/11, surely America would have been spared that dreadful day. The absurdity came, also during the trial but before as well, when FBI agents themselves had testified that their own warnings had been ignored. But surely, the government argued, though we ignored the warnings of our own investigative agents in the field, we would not have ignore the ranting of Moussaoui.

Why the DoJ sought to pursue the death penalty for a man who was in prison at the time of the attacks and, as was testified by other al Qaeda operatives, had only the most vague understanding of the 9/11 scheme, is anyone's guess. My own suspicion is that it was nothing more than a grandstanding gesture to the American public; Moussaoui's would be the only prosecution of anyone for the attacks on the World Trade Center. It rekindled, or was meant to rekindle, the horror of the day just as Bush poll numbers were sinking fast. It was probably imagined that a recollection of 9/11, the high point of Bush's approval rating, might spark a slight resurgence for Bush and, by exacting deadly revenge on anyone even remotely related to the events of 9/11, bring those tanking numbers up, if only slightly. The entire trial was a sham and a show; a complete waste of time and taxpayer money.