Listen for it as a Grammy winner next year, an MP3 download, and maybe as the soundtrack for a movie of the week on Fox—the cell phone tapes from passengers on the doomed 9-11 flights. Likely to be released by the Bush administration to get our blood coursing again, stir our primal need for payback, and of course try to give Bush’s flagging approval numbers a kick in the arse, the tapes seem to have been held in reserve for a special day.
That day might be the penalty trial of Zacharias Moussaoui, the 911 pilot that never got to fly and wouldn’t tell the FBI what his murderous colleagues were up to. The Bush administration wants his blood, wants him D-E-A-D. They are going through a lot of trouble to kill this guy. The whole 911 scenario is being wrung out again, the burning buildings and falling bodies, images that are seared in our memories. It’s E-X-P-L-O-I-T-A-T-I-O-N time, and Moussaoui is the sacrificial lamb, no, too close to Easter, make that P-I-G. Even self-annointed hero and presidential hopeful, Rudy Guliani, showed up at the trial to describe falling bodies.
Lost in all this is that Moussaoui never even got close to killing anybody. He might have been on the team, but can’t even be said to be an accomplice. His crime is that he wouldn’t tell the FBI what was going to happen—even though FBI testimony at the trial says they already had been told what was going to happen in New York on 911 . Even the FBI gets to shift some blame from itself. Moussaoui must die for their sins of omission. In a country in which a good percentage still believes that there were Iraqis flying those planes on 9-11 there are likely plenty of dim-witted Republicans who believe that Moussaoui actually did kill somebody.
This is no brief for Moussaoui. He’s a wannabe suicide bomber and a piece of moral scum, and I have no problem with him sitting in some prison, going crazier and crazier (he may already be well on his way) for the rest of his rotten life. He will probably always be a danger. But Terry Nichols didn’t get the death penalty, so why Moussaoui? There are the immediate reasons, stated above, plus the fact that he is a constant reminder of what a bunch of screw-ups the FBI (with the notable exception of agent Colleen Rowley, who wanted to peek into Moussaoui’s hard drive after French authorities informed her that he was a likely terrorist, but was prevented from doing so), and the Bush administration would like to create the fiction that they have finally caught somebody.
Because America just can’t seem to get the right guy. It just can’t seem to shoot straight. Vietnam seems to have taught us nothing. Cold warriors and war profiteers cocked up the Tonkin incident, flaunted the ‘domino theory” and had enough of the public ready to believe that the Viet Cong were going to invade California from those woven basket boats they use in the Mekong delta. None of the millions dead are recorded on cell phones. Our aim straightened a bit when we took out the Taliban who were hiding out Al Qaeda and bin Laden. But we blew it when we had a chance to get him, and the Bush administration seems to have lost interest in him in the sands of its shifting rationale for the Iraq war. Perhaps finding bin Laden was not a sufficient war profiteering venture; hence Iraq, with its fictitious WMD threat to America, tens of thousands more dead, and no end in sight.
Now the rights of the families of 911 victims—at least some of them—are to be perversely sacrificed to the Bush administration’s machinations. The burning buildings are trotted out again, and now the world might be able to hear their loved ones’ voices exploited for political opportunity, supposedly to be assuaged with the blood of Zacharias Moussaoui. Yet the irony of an administration that wraps itself in a moral cloak of its own manufacture, yet exploits the very people it claims to protect and avenge, seems to continue to escape the reasoning capabilities of a significant number of Americans. They are unwilling to see their putative “leader” as a person who has a history of never accepting responsibility for his screw-ups, failures and shirking of duty, who has always been bailed out and covered up. He does not admit failure and does not apologize. The most recent evidence of his moral failure appears to be that he may well have been complicit in the “outing” of CIA agent Valerie Plame and, at the very least, in allowing the “leaking” of information about her (via a convenient “declassification”), is a hypocrite.
So Moussaoui is a convenient scapegoat. Most people probably won’t even know that he was in jail on 911 or will even be able to identify his national origin or spell his name correctly. He will serve the dual, questionable, purpose of a momentary frisson of—once again—misdirected vengeance. Maybe Moussaoui did have the intent to kill Americans; but since when does intent justify capital punishment? And what kind of crime is it to create the fiction that this one person bears the responsibility for the attack of 911 succeeding.
Once again, the incompetent fools who have concocted ruinous policies have painted themselves into a corner. A living Moussaoui would be a constant reminder that those who bear the real responsibility for the success of 911 failed in their responsibility, and failed us. But killing him would make him the terrorist Muslim-martyr he desires to be? So, if we are to really punish him, we must keep him alive, wondering in his cell for years and years what it would be like to be frolicking in the Islamic afterlife with those seventy-two virgins. *
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©2006, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 4.26.2006)
*Logic-challenged Republicans should re-read this last paragraph until they get it.