The jury’s decision yesterday to give wannabe terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui life in prison instead of the death penalty was a public relations disaster for the Bush Administration. They needed a kill in the case in order to show progress in ridding the world of evildoers, but the jury heard convincing evidence that Moussaoui was shunted aside by al Qaeda big wigs well before 9/11 because he was a mentally deranged loose cannon.
Moussaoui was small fry but the administration has two of al Qaeda’s top leaders in custody and while it might seem obvious that they could salvage something out of the Moussaoui disaster by trying, convicting and frying the genuine coup plotters, it ain’t gonna happen.
Yesterday on CNN, terrorism expert Peter Bergen explained that the high-ranking terrorists will never be tried in a court of law because the Bush team permanently tainted any testimony they might provide by subjecting them to torture:
BERGEN: [The] real tragedy here is that I think it’s very unlikely that the people really responsible for 9/11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and [Ramzi Binalshibh], who were the operational planners, it was their idea, their execution. They’re in American custody, and I don’t think they’re ever going to see the inside of an American courtroom. I think most Americans would be surprised by that. Why will they not see inside an American courtroom? Very possibly because [they've been] treated in such a way that their evidence would be inadmissible. The “New York Times” said that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is being water [boarded], which is a technique somewhere between abuse and torture, where you make somebody — you put somebody’s head into the water and you make them think they’re drowning.
In the Los Angeles Times this morning, Clinton terrorism expert Michael Greenberger, who is now a University of Maryland law professor, agreed:
“They cannot be prosecuted because of the way they have been interrogated,” said [Greenberger]. “They have been subjected to very aggressive questioning, and any statements they made now can’t be used against them.”
An open trial for the Al Qaeda leaders could reveal that U.S. agents used harsh methods, even torture, to extract information, he added.
“That has been the irony of the Moussaoui case from the beginning. We have prosecuted a marginal character who appeared unmoored from reality, while the real planners of the crime will not be brought before justice in the United States,” Greenberger said.
Is there anything about the so-called War on Terror that this gang has not screwed up?
Well ain’t that special…
Pensito: The jury’s decision yesterday to give wannabe terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui life in prison instead of the death penalty was a public relations disaster for the Bush Administration who were hoping to kill Moussaoui so that he could show progres…
When the prosecution made the statement that “If Moussaoui had alerted the FBI, he could have saved 3000 lives from perishing on 9/11″, it begged for the argument that every attempt to warn the president of imminent attack was blocked, obstructed, ignored, from the NSA, FBI, CIA, etc., even if it came from the Office of Conter-terrorism, and, as such; to have made such a statement was to attempt to hold Moussaoui to a higher standard than the President of the United States, when it came to National Security. I thought this should have been mentioned. Thanks.
There have been reports the last couple of years that both al-Queda planners have been subjected to torture that they have become mentally unstable.
The facts are plain to see: Holding the hundreds of men (and boys) at Gitmo is not only morally wrong because they have had nothing to do with Bush’s GWOT but is counterproductive to how other nations view our conduct and will accordingly either cooperate or not with Bush. As a number of recent books have shown, like “Inside the Wire”, that Gitmo is an illegal, by any legal US or international standard, interrogation camp in which prisoners are held in legal limbo that is how Mr. Bush and his top officials like Alberto Gonzales and Donald Rumsfeld want given the legal history of the U.S. Naval coaling station.
What is shown by both Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh handling by Mr. Bush’s approval of torture is to disgrace America’s cause by harming our legal process that has been shown to work through much more trying times than what Mr. Bush and his advisors want the American people to believe- America with a eleven trillion dollar economy and a half trillion dollar defense and intelligence apparatus cannot defend us against a rag tag “army” of a few thousand “diehards” and “dead-enders”.
As John Dilulio, former head of Bush’s faith based community initiatives program, stated that this White House is all about politics; i.e., politics trumps policy in Bush’s administration.
The current handling of Gitmo and those al-Queda operatives being held in secret, black prisons should be viewed in this light of politics not policy aspect.
Therefore those men going to trial would hurt Mr. Bush’s GWOT (or rebranded as “the long war”)and hence the Republican political cause and how Republicans will fare in this election year by showing the effects of torture on those men at the hands this administration.
Great story…in Bush we have all the characteristics of a criminal dictatorship including 1) telling the truth has become a crime 2) and now fair trials (due process, itself) are denied for fear the truth will be told!
Wake up, America! The Bush administration is a criminal conspiracy.
Great article. Straw against Iran war, Was Goss? Scary.