democracyarsenal.org: More on Moussaoui

May 05, 2006

More on Moussaoui
Posted by Michael Signer

Two perhaps counterintuitive thoughts on the jury's decision not to give Zacharias Moussaoui the death penalty. I sympathize -- completely -- with the 9/11 victims' families desire to put the man to death. And I blogged here recently in a post I titled "Evil, Alive" about my feeling that Moussaoui was the sum of evil, whether banal in the Arendtian sense or not.

But in thinking over the jury's reasoning and the result of the case over the last couple of days, I've come to a couple of additional conclusions.

Here's what I'm thinking: yes, there were grounds to give Moussaoui the death penalty. Had federal investigators learned during their interrogation of him the 9/11 plot, it could have been stopped -- so he was the proximate cause of the murders.

But now that the jury's made its decision, it's worth thinking through its additional meanings.

Yes, Moussaoui's almost caricatured presentation of himself as evil, taunting the victims and the U.S.A. made me (like many Americans) bite -- hook, line, and sinker. Like he wanted me to, I bought his line that he was evil incarnate, and that we should vent our full national outrage on this pathetic, grotesque man.

But here's the rub -- it now seems clear that Moussaoui wanted to be a martyr. He wanted to be executed, because in his own small life, that's the only way he could ascend to the level of worship -- or even acceptance, really -- in the extremist/fascist Muslim world.

So in denying the death penalty, the jury denied Moussaoui that which he wanted most.

Just consider the ramshackle patchwork of facts and boasts he paraded before the court. He implausibly boasted that he was allied with Richard Reid (another clown who couldn't even figure out that if you're going to light a shoe-bomb, maybe you should DO IT IN THE BATHROOM rather than while you're sitting in your aisle seat). And anyway, the FBI said the link basically couldn't have been true. Also, there was just something cartoonish about Moussaoui's behavior. USA Today reported:

As the court adjourned for its morning break, Moussaoui chanted "Burn in the USA" to the melody of Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA."

So that's the Sum of All Evil. He was trying to taunt us into executing him, even if, at certain points in the trial, his courage flagged, and he waveringly tried to launch defenses. In the end, he knew he would be convicted -- so he tried to goad the jury into martyring him.

It's a fact that in the extremist/fascist Muslim world, martyrs are worshipped. Their photos are hung next to lampposts and their names chanted. Of course, clerics tell you you'll get dozens black-eyed virgins in the afterlife. One 15-year-old Palestinian boy, stopped before he could blow himself up, reportedly said:

“I would become a martyr and go to my God. It's better than being a singer or a footballer. It's better than everything.”

This is what Moussaoui wanted -- not 50-odd years in a cement cell-block with a four-inch aperture through which he could watch -- endlessly -- seedy, weedy grass in the courtyard go through the four seasons. Along these lines, Judge Brinkema's words to him were priceless:

"You came here to be a martyr and to die in a big bang of glory," Brinkema said. "But to paraphrase the poet T.S. Eliot, you will die with a whimper."

My second thought is that, by acting as they did, the jury reinforced to the rest of world the most American of values -- that constitutionalism and the rule of law trump feelings of vengeance and mass emotionalism.

This is precisely the example we need to be setting right now, when a great-power competitor like Russia is rolling back democratic reforms and the rule of law, and China never really seemed to care.

It also makes it harder to villify us in the Islamic world, if when dealing with a human abomination like Moussaoui, we deliberate and make such a surprising decision -- when their actors are cruelly and coldly venting their own rage (and utterly abandoning any pretense at lawfulness) by beheading innocents like Nicholas Berg.

So -- two silver linings. Not that we should want him alive -- but if has has to be, some good may still come out of it.

May 05, 2006 at 10:07 AM in Potpourri | Permalink

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May 05, 2006

More on Moussaoui
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May 05, 2006

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More on Moussaoui
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