Daniel Henninger discusses the jury verdict re: the 20th 9/11 highjacker:
"We arrive at the end of these interminable trial circuses of procedural delay and then claim "the system works" and "justice" has been done. No, it has done damage to the normal idea of justice. He saw the game early on and made a mockery of it. Moussaoui achieved a two-year delay in his trial by demanding to interview al Qaeda detainees. But our moral betters insist that the whole lot of Guantanamo detainees be given access to this same system of justice. They would diminish and crush it.
The odds were strong, as Moussaoui's lawyers knew and the government's should have known, that 9 of 12 jurors would vote that Moussaoui's childhood was "dysfunctional" and "mitigating." This is the therapeutic vocabulary that the West has developed to explain anything in the years from the postwar period to, say, September 11.
For quite awhile after September 11, we were a people united in the war on terror. By now we have let the adrenal pleasures of political fighting over the presidency dissipate the difficult emotions of staying united against a real enemy. The war in Iraq has contributed, but you can't lay it all off on Iraq. The ambiguity of the Moussaoui jury is a portent."
Meanwhile, "French authorities said Thursday they may eventually press the United States to have Moussaoui serve his life sentence in France under two conventions on the transfer of convicts." They'd release him within 10 years, count on it.
I think he was given life, rather than death, less cause of his childhood, than cause of his limited role in the plot. Thats the way conspiracy law is supposed to work - you get the same punishment as the direct perps IF you had a central role. Minor accomplices should not.
And, hell, hes just been sentenced to life without parole. hardly a soft sentence. Maybe one he feared MORE than death. If this is what a disfuntional childhood buys you in our justice system, its not much.
From the Wall Street Journal, one of the links above...
It would be a salutory thing, I think, were Moussaoui to be the subject of a "letter of reprisal", something that might not even need presidential approval. The letter would take effect the 1st day that Moussaoui would leave prison a free man and would grant the right to execute the man on the spot. The spouses, parents, children, and other relatives of the 9/11 dead or their agents would be granted those rights.
It is the only method I can think of to ensure that life without parole would actually be enforced.
This is another illustration of the bankruptcy of the law enforcement model in fighting Islamic terror.
The right way to deal with captured terrorists, excepting those who American citizens (Padilla and Hamdi) is to try them before secret military tribunals. The only issue to decide should be whether they are unlawful combatants, i.e., their status, not their acts as individuals.
This is the equivalent of a "more-likely-than-not finding of agreement to act in concert with other unlawful combatants to use unlawful means to achieve any act", which are legal words of art similar to those for a finding of conspiracy under civil tort law (though the latter also includes agreement to act in concert to achieve an unlawful end).
The penalty for a finding that a given non-citizen terrorist suspect is an unlawful combatant should always be death. Execution of sentence should be suspended while the prisoner has intelligence value, and leniency given to those who cooperate. But when the uncooperative cease to have intelligence value, kill them. Every time.
Citizens are different. IMO they are entitled to far more legal protection - at least until a finding after adequate Constitutional due process (including appeal) that they are adherents of foreign powers and/or terrorist groups, at which point they should be deemed to have forfeited their rights under the Constitution, and treated the same as non-citizen terrorists.
Check out this Mark Steyn column on the subject:
http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn07.html
"... America "lost" for a more basic reason: turning a war into a court case and upgrading the enemy to a defendant ensures you pretty much lose however it turns out. And the notion, peddled by some sappy member of the ghastly 9/11 Commission on one of the cable yakfests last week, that jihadists around the world are marveling at the fairness of the U.S. justice system, is preposterous. The leisurely legal process Moussaoui enjoyed lasted longer than America's participation in the Second World War. Around the world, everybody's enjoying a grand old laugh at the U.S. justice system.
Except for Saddam Hussein, who must be regretting he fell into the hands of the Iraqi justice system. Nine out of 12 U.S. jurors agreed that the "emotional abuse" Moussaoui suffered as a child should be a mitigating factor. Saddam could claim the same but his jury isn't operating to the legal principles of the Oprahfonic Code. However, if we ever catch Mullah Omar or the elderly Adolf Hitler or pretty much anyone else we're at war with, they can all cite the same list of general grievances as Moussaoui.
He did, in that sense, hit the jackpot. We think of him as an "Islamic terrorist," an Arab, but he is, in fact, a product of the Western world: raised in France, radicalized in Britain, and now enjoying a long vacation in America. The taxpayers of the United Kingdom subsidized his jihad training while he was on welfare in London. Now the taxpayers of the United States will get to chip in, too.
On the afternoon of Sept. 11, as the Pentagon still burned, Donald Rumsfeld told the president, "This is not a criminal action. This is war."
That's still the distinction that matters. By contrast, after the 2005 London bombings, Boris Johnson, the Conservative member of Parliament, wrote a piece headlined "Just Don't Call It War." Johnson objected to the language of "war, whether military or cultural . . . Last week's bombs were placed not by martyrs nor by soldiers, but by criminals."
Sorry, but that's the way to lose. A narrowly focused "criminal" approach means entrusting the whole business to the state bureaucracy. The obvious problem with that is that it's mostly reactive: blow somewhere up, we'll seal it off, and detectives will investigate it as a crime scene, and we'll arrest someone, and give him legal representation, and five years later when the bombing's faded into memory we'll bring him to trial, and maybe conviction, and appeal of the conviction, and all the rest. A "criminal" approach gives terrorists all the rights of criminals, including the "Gee, Officer Krupke" defense: I'm depraved on account of I'm deprived. If you fight this thing as a law enforcement matter, Islamist welfare queens around the world will figure there's no downside to jihad ..."