You Took The Words Right Outta My Mouth!

Samurai Sam on his blog A Beginner's Mind once again read my mind or I his. Check out his article on the Zacarias Moussaoui verdict here.

I was not surprised by the juries verdict one bit. What I was trying to figure out was HOW weak was the government's case going in. Moussaoui would never be confused with a criminal mastermind and even his compatriots agreed with that. He was a nut. A loose cannon who could not be trusted. Imagine, not being trusted to be a passenger on a plane due to crash into a building. That just doesn't define incompetence, it redefines it.

I knew my gut reaction on this trial was right once the government resorted to theatrics to gain a death verdict. Moussaoui was in prison on 9/11, he by most accounts supposedly knew about the planning but not the details. So showing the 9/11 footage and bringing Giuliani in to recapture his fleeting glory days as mayor was heart wrenching but completely irrelevant to the case. It is insulting to ones intelligence to believe that an American jury needed to be reminded, what 9/11 looked and sounded like.

So Moussaoui will be in prison for the remainder of his miserable life; good I am glad the bastard will rot. Insane, sane, or inane I don't care. Let him sit in the dark and suffer with the ghosts that haunt his infested mind. The real travesty is the government's shoddy prosecutions and clearly meager evidence procurement when prosecuting these cases. When a jury is charged to sentence a prisoner, and is ordered to do so based on the evidence, don't be surprised when they do.
The WaPo editorial on 3/20/06 was prophetic:

Prosecuting terrorists isn't easy, as Mr. Moussaoui's trial has repeatedly illustrated, but much of this is the Bush administration's fault. The administration failed to work with Congress to create viable legal structures to handle these cases, proceeding in whatever way seemed most convenient in any given situation. The results are abysmal. And, ironically, they undermine the case for the more secretive military trial procedures the government is trying to create. If authorities fail so often to play by the rules in the relatively open federal court system, it's hard to believe their behavior will be better when the spotlight is turned off.