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This isnt a question that one really wants to ask, but if one believes in fairness and getting at the truth, one must. Zacarias Moussaoui comes through as a nut trying to convert himself into a hero. But from a perspective well away from the emotionally loaded trial, he increasingly looks like a victim who had little to do with the events of 9/11. It seems that blood is needed and blood will be provided. The following is from an op-ed piece by John Farmer, a senior counsel to the 9/11 commission, in the New York Times: Zacarias Moussaoui is evil, and there is no doubt that he arrived here determined to kill Americans, but he was not a leader of Al Qaeda. He was not even, as initially reported, the "20th hijacker." He was not in contact with the 9/11 hijackers in the United States. His apprehension in late August 2001 did nothing to disrupt the plot's timing. He sat in jail while the attacks unfolded. ... As the primary focus of the government's prosecution of 9/11, Mr. Moussaoui is a poor stand-in not only for Osama bin Laden, who remains at large, but also for Qaeda leaders directly involved in 9/11 who have been in custody for years. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the attacks, was apprehended in 2003. Ramzi bin Al-Shieb, who was a close associate of Mohamed Atta in Germany, is also in custody. So is the real "20th hijacker," Mohamed al-Kahtani, who is being held in Guantánamo Bay. Any of these men would have been a more appropriate defendant than Mr. Moussaoui, based on actual involvement in the attacks, as a primary focus for the heartrending evidence of the mass murder of 9/11. ( "Right Trial, Wrong Defendant", New York Times, April 11, 2006) No one can deny the horrors of 9/11, but to use the voices of its victims and the grief of their kin as background to the Moussaoui trial has converted it from something that should focus on whether he could have averted 9/11 by providing information of US authorities to something that resembles a "lets git im" lynch mob. That, is seems, is what Moussaoui wants. In his twisted mind it would put him into the same class of martyrs as Mohamed Atta and the others who flew the planes into the towers, the Pentagon and the ground. What is truly tragic about 9/11 is that the terrorists were not flakes like Moussaoui. There was a backgrounder on one of the pilots of flight 93 on TV last night. He was a nice young man from a well-to-do family, a student and soon to be married. His family had given him a big black Mercedes as an advance wedding present, and he phoned his fiancé on the morning of September 11th to tell her he loved her very much. How he could then do what he did is the huge mystery that needs to be resolved. Simply killing Moussaoui wont do that for us. Ed |
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