1115.org

When Moussaoui pleaded guilty last April, he said he was slated to fly an airplane into the White House some time after 9-11, but he denied any involvement in the 9-11 attacks.

When Moussaoui’s trial started, he was charged with being a member of al Qaeda, and of having personal knowledge of the 9-11 attacks in advance. The prosecution did not claim that he had detailed knowledge of the 9-11 plot. Rather, the charge against him was that he had just about enough knowledge that if he had spilled the beans as soon as he was arrested in August 2001, three weeks before the attacks, federal authorities might have been able to prevent the attacks. Apparently, he didn’t know enough to provide the FBI with information that would have allowed them to find and arrest any of the actual hijackers. Apparently, he didn’t know the exact date the attacks would occur. And the FBI did not turn up any evidence of contact between Moussaoui and the 9-11 hijackers. But, it is alleged, he knew enough about the rough outlines of the plot – that airplanes would be hijacked by al Qaeda members carrying box cutters – that the FBI could have alerted the FAA to instruct airport screeners to be on the lookout for men carrying box cutters.

Even though Moussaoui claims he was personally selected by Osama bin Laden to fly a plane into the White House, his defense lawyers have portrayed him as an unstable man, who was regarded as unreliable even within al Qaeda:

(Defense attorney Gerald) Zerkin has told jurors that mental health experts will testify that Moussaoui is a paranoid schizophrenic who suffers from delusions.

When Moussaoui took the stand on March 27, allegedly to testify in his own defense, he surprised everyone, including his own defense lawyers, by producing some sensational testimony which contradicted his own earlier statements, and went far beyond what the prosecution has alleged at any point. He claimed that had he not been arrested, he would have flown a fifth plane into the White House on 9-11. He claimed that Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber”, was to have been one of the members of his hijacking team.

Either Moussaoui is really as crazy as his defense attorneys make him out to be, and he’s just spinning out delusional fantasies. Or he is deliberately trying to play up his tenuous links to 9-11, in order to qualify for an express ticket to martyr’s heaven. And those seem to be the only two realistic possibilities. Clearly, the federal authorities have never taken seriously Moussaoui’s claim that he was to hijack and fly a plane into the White House after 9-11. If the authorities truly believed that this man was slated to fly a plane into anything as part of an al Qaeda plot, whether on 9-11 or later, why would he be treated so differently from the man described as “the 20th 9-11 hijacker”, Mohammad al-Qahtani?

Al-Qahtani has been held at Guantanamo Bay, where he is treated as one of the most high-value prisoners. He has been subjected to an extraordinarily harsh regime of intensive interrogation, a regime that only the U.S. military seems to regard as not constituting torture. Donald Rumsfeld has taken a personal interest in his interrogation, receiving weekly reports by telephone.

The ones we take seriously as members of al Qaeda are taken out of the U.S. justice system, and never put on trial, not even to satisfy demands that someone be held accountable for 9-11, that someone be brought to justice. That applies to head honcho planners like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. That applies to hands-on field operatives like Mohammad al-Qahtani.

The fact that Moussaoui was not given the full Guantanamo treatment is the clearest indication that we don’t take his al Qaeda credentials seriously at all. We don’t for a moment believe that he was really slated to fly a plane into anything, not on 9-11, not later. And that’s precisely why he was the perfect candidate to answer the Central Casting call for someone to hold accountable for 9-11. Moussaoui’s mother summed it up perfectly:

Moussaoui’s mother, Aicha el-Wafi, … who flew in from France for the trial’s first few days, said … that “the United States needs a guilty man. They made a scapegoat of him, but on his own agreement.”

Not only could Moussaoui be cast in this role, he wanted to be. That seems to pretty much sum up the purpose that Moussaoui’s trial is likely to serve. A win-win situation, all round. Moussaoui gets to play out his martyrdom fantasy. The families of the 9-11 victims get the symbolic justice they seem to think will provide them with a sense of closure. The rest of America gets to satisfy what can only be described as our collective bloodlust, our determination that someone must pay for 9-11 with their life. Too bad that the best we could come up with was this pathetically deluded little man.