Moussaoui: terrorist or fantasist?

Rinty · Moussaoui: terrorist or fantasist?

Moussaoui: terrorist or fantasist?

http://www.sundayherald.com/54974

With the jury out on whether Zacarias Moussaoui was a 9/11 terrorist, Neil Mackay asks if the US justice system can escape executing him

wisnaeme

I think "diminished responsibility" should be a major consideration for the powers that be.Maybe Dubya and pals could use that excuse to expain to the world community some of the reasoning behind their own very dubious behaviour in the past few years. The problem for the US administration is quite an old one in that some powerful and influential nations,both in the past and in the present times have had and are having great difficulty equating their regimes and other nations regimes with the vexing question of human rights.Without which no nation can hold the moral high ground.Neither can revenge be equated with or uphold justice. If a nation's government cannot be held accountable to it's citizens for the actions it perpetrates in it's citizen's name on others then how can it possibly have the moral right to condem others for the same actions perpetrated against it's citizens. Two wrongs do not make a right.Nor does it heal an open wound.Revenge is not nor can it be compared with moral justice.

RFM

Great post Wisnaeme;
On Public Radio in the USA on April 6, 2006, (a Great Day for the Scots) a certain gentleman who it is said was recently General Counsel for the American Central Intelligence Agency, now a lecturer at a law school in Minnesota, volunteered the information that he was one of the officials who were instrumental in the Massoui trial. He led the group within the intelligence community in a dispute with the US Department of Justice about whether Massoui should be tried in the civil courts. He stated he opposed the idea, that Massoui should have been removed to a facility somewhere for interrogation ( his words) and after all the useful information had been extracted or obtained by "aggressive interrogation techniques" (his words) Massoui should have been tried by a military court. Principally because Massoui had been given an opportunity to publicly state his beliefs in a civil courtroom, he "had been given a soapbox". In a military court they would not have to provide the defendant with material necessary to raise a defense nor anything deemed classified. The lawyer from the team that had defended Sheik Abdul Raman, who bombed the world trade center the first time before 9/11, was also interviewed and pointed out pretty much the same things that you have mentioned. That by affording Massoui a public trial the issues of guilt and innocence were more likely to be accepted not only by the American people, but also by the world community. Questions of classified intellegence and information being leaked publicly were a small price to pay for the affirmation of the principal that a jury of twelve ordinary men and women would be the persons who decided his fate, not a group of military officers.
The grave difficulty that his trial raises in the death penalty phase is that the government has been allowed to assert that by withholding information from the government investigators, and being a member of the group which was to fly the aircraft on 9/11, innocent people were killed by his companions. Only a small group of lawyers have raised the public objection that Massoui was under no legal duty to give information to anyone about a crime which had not yet been commited (the priviledge against self-incriminaton). Thankfully it now appears that the government themselves had ample evidence of the planned attack on 9/11 from other sources and chose to withhold it for a number of trivial reasons, such as bureaucratic turf battles, etc.
But note well the remarks of the CIA general counsel and his views about how these matters should be resolved in the land of the free.
RFM