Kill Them
Kill the jury that didn’t want to kill Moussaoui. Or kill the jury system. Why do we trust twelve ordinary people to make decisions on life and death? Kill the jury. Peggy Noonan offers laments.
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. . . . How removed from our base passions we’ve become. Or hope to seem.
In these tough times, the only the truly tough know what is needed. The tough get going and the less tough should be smart enough to go along. Hot times demand hot heads. And hot heads demand death. Death? Death! Death! Death! Moussaoui had a chance to stop all the death on September Eleventh and he did nothing. The jury had a chance to stop Moussaoui forever. And did nothing. Peggy Noonan has balls or ovaries as big as the moon. They are hanging in front of her face offering a clear, double vision.
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?
Vengeance is not the answer, but the only answer to murder is vengeance. If we just had the will to be as barbarous as our enemies, Peggy Noonan would have a better feeling. Any jury that had a chance to stop a killer and didn’t should be put to death. What is this thing called justice? September Eleventh changed everything.
How removed from our base passions we’ve become. Is that a good thing? Maybe certain small facts got in the way of the death Peggy Noonan demands. Dahlia Lithwick suggests a look at one or two troublesome details:
But in refusing to find what seemed the most obvious of the aggravating factors, that he “committed his crimes in an ‘especially heinous, cruel, or depraved manner’,” or that Moussaoui—in jail on 9/11—was responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths, the jurors seemed to be acknowledging that while Moussaoui wanted 9/11 to happen, wanted many more innocents to die, and that he plotted and planned for a future 9/11, he wasn’t sufficiently central to this particular plot to be credited, or killed, for its hideousness.
And that’s the message we can also glean from the jury’s findings of mitigating factors—revealing that three separate jurors believed Moussaoui had “limited knowledge of the 9/11 attack plans” and three believed he played a minor role.
Such a cool head in hot times is a dangerous thing. Reason is not a good enough reason for Moussaoui to live. Death to all who disagree. Or something. Let’s roll with the rolling of the heads. September Eleventh . . .
Crossposted at The Heretik
May 4th, 2006 at 8:08 am
I haven’t been following the case but….. correct me if I’m wrong… this guy hasn’t actually commited any crime. right? He’s never done anything, killed anyone, bombed anything at all, right? This is another political killing by the US people? A simple witchhunt.
In terms of the US regime’s fantasy vocabulary this guy was an enemy soldier and ought to have been protected by the Geneva conventions. Apparently they are being interpreted to say all enemy POWs should be executed now.
In terms of a saner interpretation where Bush would be in jail about now, it’s not clear the guy broke any law either. He’s a wannabee criminal perhaps. Or a blowhard. In that regard he’s like Peggy Noonan. They’d probably get on well together in different circumstances. Or maybe not. Perhaps she’s not got the balls to keep up the tough talk when she’s facing a court who might execute her. Come to think of it I can’t believe she’d have the balls for that, nor any of the Bushistas. So this guy’s now a matyr in the face of US oppression I suppose.
Political thought has become a crime in America. Punishable by death. Since the Republicans have been calling liberals traitors and calling for killings of liberals for a while now, I can’t help feeling that even the so-called conviction in this mock trial was a very bad thing.
May 4th, 2006 at 8:48 am
The Dahlia Lithwick diary was ok until the end where I nearly barfed over the endorsement of the Bushian view that “they hate us for our freedoms”:
Riiiiight. Didn’t want to attack the US because the US was murdering thousands of muslims. He hates us because we’re so nice. Got it.
Am I the only one who sees a problem with pretending that not voluntarily giving information to incriminate yourself to the police is now itself a crime in America? Apart from anything else isn’t that a breach of the 5th amendment? Or are they saying the guy did no crime and therefore commited a “crime” of not being as helpful as he might have been? If so why isn’t Heckuva job Brownie on trial for murder?
May 4th, 2006 at 9:23 am
Vengeance is the only way to achieve closure, which, you know, is so important.
May 4th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
The defendant’s derangement was not an act; he did everything his cunning mind could devise to get the jury to condemn him to death. But they did not oblige him. Moussaoui continuously undermined his defense team, and single-handedly erased the disadvantage of the prosecution’s misconduct.
Noonan says we’ve become removed from our base passions, the passions of the mob we must presume. Can’t we just agree to disagree? Apparently not. Where’s the payoff?–the dead body?
Moussaoui will have to settle for a neighborhood of one. He has been condemned to solitary confinement for the rest of his natural life.
The jury weighs facts, decides about mitigation; it is democratic. But to hear the President speak in his perverse coded language, “America will not be defeated” and this verdict is in the frame of that comment. No, we must just soldier on, frustrated all the way down to our national id, unable to exact the needful rite of blood. This time, anyway.
“What we witnessed here was not the higher compassion but a dizzy failure of nerve”
Those in the White House and Pentagon who are finalizing plans for a war of aggression against Iran certainly suffer from no such “dizzy failure of nerve” The world after 9/11 is a place of vengeance, answers, and more murder–take your pick.