OK, Moussaoui is a head job. He confessed to being assigned to fly an airplane into the White House. There is not a bit of evidence that this is true. He claimed to know the 9-11 hijackers. He now says that is not true, and we have no other proof one way or another.
There is no possibility of a reversal. I am not advocating one. Still, I have to ask, is the guy guilty as a matter of fact?
Is he innocent of the charge of conspiracy with the 9-11 people? Would you vote to convict based only on a confession?
Does any of this matter? We can all agree he is a nasty fellow and is our collective scapegoat. Is this justice or vengeance?
Absent a solid diagnosis of mental illness (which we don’t have) or compelling evidence otherwise (which we also don’t have), I think it’s okay to take a guilty plea at face value if the defendent was aware of his rights and the confession was neither coerced nor recanted before the conviction (all of which appears to be the case here).
So the conviction was legally sound.
But did he actually do it? Did what he actually do justify the charges and sentence?
I don’t know. While I don’t want a reversal either, it seems to me that the government’s case was quite weak, and I would have like to have seen these issues argued in the court.
He conspired with other Al Qaeda to conduct terrorist attacks in the United States. He took substantial steps toward making those attacks happen. Whether they were the 9/11 attacks specifically or another wave is not really that important. So, yes, he’s guilty of conspiracy.
Personally, though, I don’t think he should have been eligible for the death penalty, which required proof that he also caused the deaths of others.
And his supposed mental instability means next to nothing to me. He’s not insane, he’s a homocidal religious fanatic. You have to have that kind of hatred and instability to fly a plane into a building.
How about his attending flight training school. Or his inquiries into crop dusting. Or the money he was supplied by Ramsey bin Al-Shied. Or that, even though they believed him to be iffy, members of Al-Qaeda knew him and knew he was working on an attack upon the United States. It’s not like the confession was the only thing the government had against the guy.
He may not have been, but that does not make him innocent of the charges against him.
Meh. He’s a loser from a broken home who found meaning to his pathetic life in extremist religion, hatred, and the possible murder of thousands of innocents and suicide. Pathetic…yes. Interesting…not so much.
That is absolutely incorrect. He was found guilty in the Trial and faced the Death Penalty for not informing the authorities about 9-11
Moussaoui was charged with six counts of conspiring to hijack planes and crash them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the penalty phase, when seeking a death sentence, prosecutors were required to prove, and to be clear the federal Government claimed, maintained and tried to prove that ZM “intentionally participated in an act…and the victim died as a direct result of the act.” (He was found guilty of this incourt when he claimed knew about the attacks and did nothing to stop them.)
Kahlid Sheik Mohamed, almost certainly coughing this up after being waterboarded and presumably telling the truth (as the government in this case would want him to say differently here), stated in his submitted deposition (pdf pops) – the defense could not cross - that Mossaoui didn’t know. Further OBL’s boastful tape implies almost no one incl. Mossaoui knew and Ramzi bin Binalshibh’s testimony (under the same circumstances as KSM) paint Mossaui as a clown who they didn’t trust. Yet he was found GUILTY and faced DEath for knowing about 9-11 and not telling the authorities
I think justice was served by decades in SuperMax but re this thread Dahlia Lithwick said it better than I ever could in Slate :
*In the end, the only real link between the acknowledged fact that Moussaoui was a terrorist who was willing to die in a suicide attack and the actual attacks of 9/11 existed in the minds of the prosecution. And, at the last minute, these links sprang to life in the fantasy world of the terrorist himself, who cooked up a strange Forrest Gump plot—starring himself and Richard Reid—that the judge herself considered to be hooey and that even the prosecutors didn’t believe.
This case was about a conspiracy, about some factual connection, however attenuated, between Zacarias Moussaoui’s jihadi heart and the events of 9/11. And although the government has steadfastly stood by its legal claim that it was enough for Moussaoui to have wanted to be on those planes on 9/11, enough for him to have delighted as those planes went down, the jurors recognized this afternoon that a conspiracy to aid in a terror plot requires more than just a bad heart, and more than mere willingness to participate in the next one. *
Whether technically insane or not, Moussaoui is certainly unstable enough that if you were planning a terrorist plot involving 20-30 people, millions of dollars and several aircraft you wouldn’t let him wihtin a hundered yards of it. This is basically what the “testimony” of the terrorists involved in 9-11 and held at Guatanamo said, that they considered using Moussaoui but decided he was too unreliable.
Of course he is still guilty of plotting his own attacks and certainly deserves a jail cell for that, but I don’t belive that is what he was actually sentenced for.
Also my understanding of what he was being tried for is that he knew about the upcoming terrorist attacks but when he was arrested didn’t come clean and tell authorities so they could attempt to stop the other plotters.
Assume that what the gov’ts lawyers said is true, that Moussaui was a key player in the 9-11 plot. My question is, how is punishing someone for not revealing a terrorist plot of which they are a part not a violation of thier 5th amendment right to silence? After all, if Moussaoui was helping with the whole deal, I don’t see how he could tell others about it without implicating himself in several counts of conspiracy, etc.
As has been already stated, he was not found guilty at trial, he pled guilty. The prosecution, in the penalty phase, had additional matters to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they wouldn’t have had to at trial. One of those things was that the conspiracy “result[ed] in the deaths of thousands of persons on September 11, 2001.” The end result of the conspiracy was not a necessary element for him to be found guilty of the charges, it was for the determination of his eligibility to the death penalty. And, since I’m sure you read my entire post, maybe you just forgot when I said: “Personally, though, I don’t think he should have been eligible for the death penalty, which required proof that he also caused the deaths of others.”
Counts 1 to 4 of his indictment required proof of him causing the death of thousands, which, I think we can agree is a tenuous case at best, only for the penalty phase, not the guilty or innocence phase. Counts 5 and 6 of his indictment, which did not carry the death penalty, only life in prison, did not require this additional proof.
Now, I suppose we could have a long, drawn out argument over the preciseness of the indictment, the necessity of proof of which elements, the sufficiency of the evidence, and the severability of the charges, but it would be an academic exercise, rife with speculation, at best. On the other hand, we could also just agree that I was not “absolutely incorrect”.
Look let me say that “absolutely incorrect” stuff was unnecessarily inflammatory and I am sorry.
Having said that this is what I saw:
Quoted by Paul in Saudi
Certainly he was a member of a terrorist group. Certainly he is nuts. I simply question the idea he was involved in the 9-11 plot.
Hamlet wrote (in response)
He may not have been, but that does not make him innocent of the charges against him.
This begs the question of what charges “against him” you would find him guilty of… I do not see the other position on this.
Either he was the 20th Highjacker, or he was a secret keeper. If that then you are not (as an unnecessary ass might say ) “absolutely incorrect.” However if - as I seem to think you are conceeding - he was part of a second wave or (most likely and I think the preponderance of the evidence suggests) placed on ice by the Al Qaeda leadership that saw him as crazy and unreliable. Then he was innocent of the charges that he faced death penalty for.
Again, I guess it’s an issue of semantics. There is a difference between the charges and the punishment for those charges. If you read that one post without reading the prior posts, you could confuse the two. By “charges”, I meant the conspiracy, and not the death penalty prerequistes. He was found, and is, guilty of Conspiracy to Commit Acts of Terrorism Transcending National Boundaries, Conspiracy to Commit Aircraft Piracy, Conspiracy to Destroy Aircraft, Conspiracy to Use Weapons of Mass Destruction, Conspiracy to Murder United States Employees, and Conspiracy to Destroy Property. He just shouldn’t have gotten the death penalty for those crimes.
Another question. Why is he going to the SuperMax? Who decided that and why?
I presume this guy is not a danger to other prisoners or to staff. Do some crimes just deserve the deepest dungeon? Again, what GS-14 decides that? On what basis?
I’m just guessing based on my own knowledge of supermax prisons, but I’d say that such a hated, high-profile inmate would be a threat to the security of any lesser institution. Even in a max, one would need a constant phalanx of guards committed to him exclusively to keep ZM protected from other inmates. And it would certainly stir up the rest of the max population, making them difficult to manage.
Supermax prisons generally don’t have these issues, as the inmates are kept in strict segregation 24/7.
Security placement status is generally based on risk assessment: Risk of flight, risk of danger to other inmates, risk of danger from other inmates, risk of destabilization of the institution by the inmate’s mere presence.