WHAT an irony that the jury in Alexandria, Virginia, has cheated both the prosecution and the defendant of the verdict that they wanted in the trial of Zacharias Moussaoui, the only person ever brought to trail in connection with the September 11 attacks on the United States.
By deciding not to execute Moussaoui but instead to send him to rot in jail, where, as the trial judge said, he will die with a whimper, instead of the big bang he had wanted, it has thwarted both the Bush administration, which had sought the death penalty, and the clearly delusional Moussaoui, who saw in his execution a martyr’s role denied him by his own incompetence as a jihadist.
It would indeed have been a travesty to give such glory to a man arrested on an immigration charge, a foot soldier of al Qaeda, yes, but one – as it emerged during the trial – very quickly sidelined by the organisers of 9/11 because he was seen as a liability to the operation.
The trial showed very clearly that Moussaoui was a thoroughly unpalatable character, one who would not have hesitated to kill Americans had he been given the opportunity. But he was not given the opportunity, and his behaviour during the trial shows exactly why. Moussaoui was constantly blowing hot and cold, he was boasting of imaginary exploits, he was taunting the relatives of the victims – hardly the cold-blooded operator to whom al Qaeda would have entrusted such a mission. In fact, he proved a thoroughly unreliable witness against himself in his attempt to convince the jury that he deserved to die. The fact that is he now demanding to change his plea to not guilty and secure a retrial is evidence that what he wanted from his trial – and perhaps his life – was a platform for attention.
But perhaps more than anything, it would have been grotesque to execute Moussaoui when the two men who actually masterminded the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, are actually in American custody in secret CIA prisons. They are unlikely ever to see the inside of a courtroom, human rights activists say, because of the torture they were submitted to during their interrogations.
The court in Alexandria has proved that it can serve justice to the very highest degree, despite the political pressure for an execution, despite the public desire for a scapegoat. It has shown that the doubts of a single juror are still enough to prevent what would have been a revenge killing to assuage America for its failure to parade the real culprits.
It’s no coincidence that Moussaoui wanted to be executed. Such a verdict would have fed the cycle of hatred and undermined the very values that al Qaeda is trying to strike. By sending him to waste away in jail, the court has affirmed the quality of American justice in the face of the most odious of suspects. It’s just a pity that the hundreds of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay cannot face justice in the same way.
