Moussaoui Jury Pusses Out

[1549]

Brother you have serious problems if you equate legal execution to what the Islamic Terrorists did to US on 11 September. I mean, you may have SERIOUS issues....seek help.

At least, you haven't a clear understanding of the definition of 'justice'.

Actually, those who feel good about a person's death probably have more serious issues.

My mind is not the issue here, to get back on topic if you don't mind:

It seems more logical not to execute terrorists...even if there acts are more atrocious than what standard convicts are executed for. Seriously, would William Wallace be the same sort of inspirational hero to his people if he was left to rot in a dungeon?

Same sort of a thing. If you want to make someone miserable and slap that person's supporter in the face, lock them up and throw away the key.

 

[dmp]

Actually, those who feel good about a person's death probably have more serious issues.

My mind is not the issue here, to get back on topic if you don't mind:

It seems more logical not to execute terrorists...even if there acts are more atrocious than what standard convicts are executed for. Seriously, would William Wallace be the same sort of inspirational hero to his people if he was left to rot in a dungeon?

Same sort of a thing. If you want to make someone miserable and slap that person's supporter in the face, lock them up and throw away the key.

The topic is crime and punishment. YOU equated lawful execution to Mass-Murder. Your Mind is in question because that equation defies logic.

 

[1549]

The topic is crime and punishment. YOU equated lawful execution to Mass-Murder. Your Mind is in question because that equation defies logic.

You know what, you are right. My mind is at question. I apologize for poorly wording my response. My mental state is not at question, and off topic. And that is what you attacked.

If you want dispute my stance on the life sentence, then read into that. Do not question whether or not I am mentally sick because I prefer life in prison over lethal injection.

 

[Avatar4321]

Good decision by the jury:

1) We are not stooping to the terrorist's level of execution. Terrorists beheaded our soldiers, lets show the terrorists how justice is served. Not with a heroic death at the hands of the enemy, but with a slow unglamorous 'fading away' in a jail cell.

2) For those of you who want him executed, don't be surprised if he is beaten to death. It happens often to child molestors, don't be surprised if America's first big-time terror convict meets a similar fate.

How exactly is justice served by locking him up and letting him live off the tax payers for the rest of his life?

Also, since when are terrorists trying to do justice in beheading civilians. By definition they arent attempting to do justice. They are attempting to install fear in others. They wont be deterred by knowing that if they get captured they can have their enemies subsidize the rest of their lives.

And you know it doesnt matter that he will likely be killed in prison. Its just annoying that the government can't execute confessed and gleeful enemies of the United States who are responsible for the murder of thousands. Its frustrating that rather than Justice, we are getting PC bullcrap from the left.

 

[Avatar4321]

Actually, those who feel good about a person's death probably have more serious issues.

My mind is not the issue here, to get back on topic if you don't mind:

It seems more logical not to execute terrorists...even if there acts are more atrocious than what standard convicts are executed for. Seriously, would William Wallace be the same sort of inspirational hero to his people if he was left to rot in a dungeon?

Same sort of a thing. If you want to make someone miserable and slap that person's supporter in the face, lock them up and throw away the key.

It wasn't William Wallace's death that was inspirational. It's what he stood for in life.

No one can stand for evil and inspire a majority of people, even if they are brough to justice. A majority of people just wouldnt stand for it. If they ever did, they would be ripe for destruction.

 

[dmp]

Do not question whether or not I am mentally sick because I prefer life in prison over lethal injection.

Okay - I haven't questioned that fact, and will refrain from doing so.


The problem, little brother, is your comparison/equasion of a Legal Execution to Terrorism.

 

[Dr Grump]

They wont be deterred by knowing that if they get captured they can have their enemies subsidize the rest of their lives.

And you think they will/would be deterred if Mousoui was executed?

 

[Avatar4321]

And you think they will/would be deterred if Mousoui was executed?

They would be alot more deterred if they felt we would bring them to justice yes. As things are now they will look at us and think "Hey, even if we get caught, they are too afraid to stop us. They are simply going to take care of us for the rest of our lives."

 

[ScreamingEagle]

This is the message that is going out to our enemies:

"America, you lost, I won" http://www.shortnews.com/shownews.cfm?id=54183&CFID=2009696&CFTOKEN=27746546

That's what Moussaoui shouted after the verdict was read. Sickening. Because we don't have the moral backbone to mete out justice, we are now viewed as being more weak and stupid than ever before. This will only encourage our enemies.

 

[Dr Grump]

They would be alot more deterred if they felt we would bring them to justice yes. As things are now they will look at us and think "Hey, even if we get caught, they are too afraid to stop us. They are simply going to take care of us for the rest of our lives."

No way. These idiots are undeterrable...Just ask Israel....

 

[1549]

Also, since when are terrorists trying to do justice in beheading civilians. By definition they arent attempting to do justice. They are attempting to install fear in others. They wont be deterred by knowing that if they get captured they can have their enemies subsidize the rest of their lives.

Do not propose for a single moment that execution would make a terrorist think twice about his actions, not even for a single second.

If a terrorist is successful, he often kills himself in the process. So what does he care if he is captured executed?

I would venture that Moussaoui wanted to be executed. Why else would he taunt the court room during the trial by bragging that he knows he will not be executed. It is like he dared the jury with reverse psychology.

There is no such thing as a living martyr.

No one can stand for evil and inspire a majority of people, even if they are brough to justice. A majority of people just wouldnt stand for it. If they ever did, they would be ripe for destruction.

Evil is in the eye of the beholder. You and I think Moussaoui's motivations are evil, but those who share his views would regard his execution as a great act of courage. It would probably inspire a reaction from extremists everywhere.

Lets not give them the pleasure of an execution.

 

[Annie]

The jury in the Moussaoui case has passed down a sentence of life in prison without parole. This guy conspired to kill thousands of people. If anybody deserves to be executed, it's this asshole. What the hell happened? No link yet as the story just broke, live, on the radio.

Agreed, me and others:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=20370_Little_Green_Nostradamus&only

Links at site

Little Green Nostradamus

In January 2002, I wrote this about the decision to try Zacarias Moussaoui in a criminal court:

A criminal trial is too good for the likes of Zacarias Moussaoui, who by any definition of the words has to be considered a spy and a saboteur. But he will now be afforded all the rights and privileges of a US citizen, in a trial that has a good possibility of becoming a fiasco. This is a very misguided decision, and I hereby predict that it’s going to come back and bite someone on the ass.

Ouch!

UPDATE at 5/3/06 4:36:44 pm:

My point is not so much that Moussaoui should have received the death penalty (although I don’t know if anyone in our country’s history has ever deserved it more), but that he never should have been allowed to exploit the criminal justice system, as he has done—and as he will now continue to do, for the rest of his life. He should have been tried as an enemy combatant.

But having gone through our courts, a death sentence would have been a more just outcome. Moussaoui is much more valuable to the global jihad (and its Western enablers) as a living symbol of Western “oppression” than he would be as a failed attacker, ignobly executed by infidels.

As several LGF readers have commented, it won’t be long before we see “Free Moussaoui” signs at moonbat rallies.

UPDATE at 5/3/06 5:35:10 pm:

Count on the Kos Kidz to be ahead of the kurve: Daily Kos: moussouai is innocent! (Hat tip: Killgore.)

UPDATE at 5/3/06 5:38:42 pm:

Rudy gets it right: New York politicians disappointed by Moussaoui verdict.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said he was disappointed that Zacarias Moussaoui was not sentenced to death for the September 11 attacks, but other US politicians hailed the verdict as fair.

“I believe the death penalty was appropriate in this case,” said Giuliani, who was mayor of New York in 2001 when two planes flown by Al-Qaeda hijackers smashed into the World Trade Center twin towers.

Had Moussaoui told the FBI about the plot, Giuliani told MSNBC television, “all those wonderful people would be alive and children that I know don’t have fathers would have fathers.”

 

[USViking]

I would have voted for death.

I hope Mossaoui tries some breakout escape shit,
and gets mowed down.

 

[Gunny]

I'm not sure what the actual reasoning behind the sentence is. My reasoning has NOTHING to do with being against the death penalty, nor any liberal inklings in my brain.

I see it as a no-winner, either way. Throughout the sentencing phase I was undecided as to which way I thought it should go.

One of the things that has gotten under my skin about this clash of cultures more than ANY other is that we are so PC-oriented we can no longer think objectively. Arabs/Arab muslims think differently than us, period.

We've given this moron a world stage to voice his message, and now, the purely vengeance-minded want to give him even more stature with HIS side by making a martyr of him.

Don't get me wrong. I'd be all for just putting a bullet in his head and leaving him in an alley from the get-go.

I don't care if "Bubba" sticks a shank in him in prison.

I DO care if we as a Nation give him and the rest of the world's Muslim terrorists what they want.

 

[jillian]

They would be alot more deterred if they felt we would bring them to justice yes. As things are now they will look at us and think "Hey, even if we get caught, they are too afraid to stop us. They are simply going to take care of us for the rest of our lives."

You can't deter people with the threat of death if it's death they want.

 

[theHawk]

He should spend the rest of his life in a cell wallowing in pig shit. And he should be fed nothing but bloody pig parts.

 

[Annie]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110008330

PEGGY NOONAN
They Should Have Killed Him
The death penalty has a meaning, and it isn't vengeance.

Thursday, May 4, 2006 12:01 a.m.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP)--Moussaoui said as he was led from the courtroom: "America, you lost." He clapped his hands.

Excuse me, I'm sorry, and I beg your pardon, but the jury's decision on Moussaoui gives me a very bad feeling. What we witnessed here was not the higher compassion but a dizzy failure of nerve.

From the moment the decision was announced yesterday, everyone, all the parties involved--the cable jockeys, the legal analysts, the politicians, the victim representatives--showed an elaborate and jarring politesse. "We thank the jury." "I accept the verdict of course." "We can't question their hard work." "I know they did their best." "We thank the media for their hard work in covering this trial." "I don't want to second-guess the jury."

How removed from our base passions we've become. Or hope to seem.

It is as if we've become sophisticated beyond our intelligence, savvy beyond wisdom. Some might say we are showing a great and careful generosity, as befits a great nation. But maybe we're just, or also, rolling in our high-mindedness like a puppy in the grass. Maybe we are losing some crude old grit. Maybe it's not good we lose it.

No one wants to say, "They should have killed him." This is understandable, for no one wants to be called vengeful, angry or, far worse, unenlightened. But we should have put him to death, and for one big reason.

This is what Moussaoui did: He was in jail on a visa violation in August 2001. He knew of the upcoming attacks. In fact, he had taken flight lessons to take part in them. He told no one what was coming. He lied to the FBI so the attacks could go forward. He pled guilty last year to conspiring with al Qaeda; at his trial he bragged to the court that he had intended to be on the fifth aircraft, which was supposed to destroy the White House.

He knew the trigger was about to be pulled. He knew innocent people had been targeted, and were about to meet gruesome, unjust deaths.

He could have stopped it. He did nothing. And so 2,700 people died.

This is what the jury announced yesterday. They did not doubt Moussaoui was guilty of conspiracy. They did not doubt his own testimony as to his guilt. They did not think he was incapable of telling right from wrong. They did not find him insane. They did believe, however, that he had had an unstable childhood, that his father was abusive and then abandoning, and that as a child, in his native France, he'd suffered the trauma of being exposed to racial slurs.

As I listened to the court officer read the jury's conclusions yesterday I thought: This isn't a decision, it's a non sequitur.

Of course he had a bad childhood; of course he was abused. You don't become a killer because you started out with love and sweetness. Of course he came from unhappiness. So, chances are, did the nice man sitting on the train the other day who rose to give you his seat. Life is hard and sometimes terrible, and that is a tragedy. It explains much, but it is not a free pass.

I have the sense that many good people in our country, normal modest folk who used to be forced to endure being patronized and instructed by the elites of all spheres--the academy and law and the media--have sort of given up and cut to the chase. They don't wait to be instructed in the higher virtues by the professional class now. They immediately incorporate and reflect the correct wisdom before they're lectured.

I'm not sure this is progress. It feels not like the higher compassion but the lower evasion. It feels dainty in a way that speaks not of gentleness but fear.

I happen, as most adults do, to feel a general ambivalence toward the death penalty. But I know why it exists. It is the expression of a certitude, of a shared national conviction, about the value of a human life. It says the deliberate and planned taking of a human life is so serious, such a wound to justice, such a tearing at the human fabric, that there is only one price that is justly paid for it, and that is the forfeiting of the life of the perpetrator. It is society's way of saying that murder is serious, dreadfully serious, the most serious of all human transgressions.

It is not a matter of vengeance. Murder can never be avenged, it can only be answered.

If Moussaoui didn't deserve the death penalty, who does? Who ever did?

And if he didn't receive it, do we still have it?

I don't want to end with an air of hopelessness, so here's some hope, offered to the bureau of prisons. I hope he doesn't get cable TV in his cell. I hope he doesn't get to use his hour a day in general population getting buff and converting prisoners to jihad. I hope he isn't allowed visitors with whom he can do impolite things like plot against our country. I hope he isn't allowed anniversary interviews. I hope his jolly colleagues don't take captives whom they threaten to kill unless Moussaoui is released.

I hope he doesn't do any more damage. I hope this is the last we hear of him. But I'm not hopeful about my hopes.

 

[manu1959]

The jury in the Moussaoui case has passed down a sentence of life in prison without parole. This guy conspired to kill thousands of people. If anybody deserves to be executed, it's this asshole. What the hell happened? No link yet as the story just broke, live, on the radio.

i think life where he is going will work out just fine

 

[Annie]

Life is NOT enough. Best reasoning I've read:

http://vodkapundit.com/archives/008804.php

The First Mistake
Posted by Will Collier · 3 May 2006

I wish I could say I was surprised by today's verdict, but after all these years of rampant buffoonery in American criminal courts, I really wasn't. If it would have been possible, I wouldn't have been all that surprised if Moussaoui's defense had assembled a jury of cretins blinkered enough to acquit him.

The one and only good thing to come out of this fiasco is that it reveals once again the pointlessness of treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue. It's not about crime. It's about war. This waste of oxygen never should have set foot in a civilian court. He is an agent of a hostile foreign power, (albeit not a nation-state, but that's hardly exculpatory) caught red-handed in the act of planning violent attacks on American civilian, military, and government targets. There is no doubt of his guilt; he himself proclaims it with a pathetic sneer.

Like the Nazi sabateours captured during World War II, Moussaoui should have been turned over to the military, tried by a tribunal, and executed. Look at it this way: if we had captured Japanese forward observers just before Pearl Harbor, would they have deserved full constitutional protections and access to the civilian courts?

Of course not. They, like Moussaoui, would have been the very definition of enemy combatants. As a non-uniformed agent, acting without even the orders of a nation-state, Moussaoui didn't even qualify for Geneva Convention protections, much less the full constitutional rights of an American citizen.

All that said, I have no doubt the next floor-flushing scumbag we catch in this country will get the same exact treatment. And he'll probably get off lightly, too.

UPDATE: Several commentors have opined that a life imprisonment sentence is not "getting off lightly," and/or that since Moussaoui stated he wanted to become a martyr, executing him wouldn't have been appropriate in any case.

Two points. One, for a guy who wants to become a martyr, Moussaoui fought awfully hard to avoid a death sentence; at one of his early court appearances, he stated explicitly that he would fight against receiving the death penalty with (if I recall correctly), 'all his strength.'

Second, and far more important, is the message this verdict sends to Moussaoui's fellow Islamofascists. It tells them that America is weak. It tells them Americans don't have the stomach to do what must be done to achieve victory. It tells them our civilian culture doesn't have the fibre to deal seriously with terrorism (and they will, by now, ignore the contradictory lesson of United flight 93). It tells them they can be captured on our soil in the act of committing barbarism, and they will receive not just mercy, but actual succor from a considerable swath of our legal establishment.

It is a bad verdict, and those are very, very bad messages.

 

[William Joyce]

Hate to be lawyerly here, but the purpose of a criminal trial is not to exact revenge on a person for their evil associations, but to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that they committed a crime. Then, to affix punishment. I don't know the whole of the complaint against the little Muhammad here (I think he actually pleaded guilty and the jury was just there to decide die or no), but mostly what I heard about was about whether his failure to tell the FBI about 9/11 was the proximate cause of it. In a civilian context, that would be very weak indeed.

My own view is that this didn't belong in a civilian court to begin with. A military determination that he was 1) not a citizen of our country and 2) a member of AQ is enough for a cigarette and bullet, period.

By the standard we applied to Mouse-awee, if one million Red Chinese paratrooped in tomorrow, each and every one would be entitled to a full-dress trial, one at a time.