So, they're getting around to deciding the fate of this Moussaoui guy. The would-be 9-11 hijacker who couldn't make his flight because he was in jail.
Now, just to be clear: the guy's a scumball, and probably insane. He certainly does not any particular right to go on living. Had he the chance, he'd kill a whole bunch more people.
But.
He didn't actually do anything. Well, as far as 9-11 goes. The charge against him is that, had he come forward with what he knew, the FBI might have been able to stop the conspiracy.
In other words, the deliberation is whether or not to execute him for doing nothing.
My feeling is that they will condemn him to death. And I certainly shan't shed any tears as he jerks at the end of a rope or what have you. (Yes, I know they don't do that any more.) But, if we were the country we ought to be, the death penalty shouldn't even be an option. Three thousand and thirty counts of accessory to murder? Absolutely. Lock the fucker up forever, in that supermax they have out in Colorado. One hour of sunlight a day and no human faces for the rest of his life. Great. I mean, he's guilty as hell, he's unrepentant, he's an ongoing threat.
The question is not about what Moussaoui did or did not do. The question is what we want our government to do. And I personally don't want the government to have the power to convict anyone for not doing something. We have laws about conspiracy to commit crimes. But to gin up a charge, one that carries the death penalty, because this man failed to inform the FBI of what was being planned - that implies that we all have an obligation to inform the government of anything that might be criminal. If your friends, or your wife, or your son, or even someone you overhear in a bar - if any of them actually do go and commit that crime they were discussing, now you are guilty of not telling.
Do we really want to be a nation of informants?
It's sadly funny. There's an old witticism that only a President with solid credentials in a matter could turn on that matter. Only Nixon, devout commie-hunter, could go to China. Only Johnson, good ol' boy from Texas, could force integration. Only Eisenhower, a general, could denounce the military-industrial complex. Only Kennedy, a "soft" Democrat, could face down Khruschev. Only Reagan, old as dirt, could loot Social Security. It's not exact, but there is some substantial truth to it.
Well, now we suffer under the yoke of an Administration ostensibly from the party of small government and individual liberty. And what we see is an expansion of the government and its police powers like never before.
I'm tired of the Republican fear-mongers, telling us that we must be oh-so-afraid of terrorists. I'm tired of their cowardly followers, eager to give up every freedom on their masters' altar of "security". I'm tired of the Orwellian doublespeak, of the bullshit about spreading "freedom" abroad while curtailing it at home.
9-11 was a fluke. It happened the way it did solely because the public did not foresee that airplanes might be used as suicide bombs. It will never happen again. Already on 9-11 the tactic failed, because the passengers on United 93 realized that no, they weren't being taken to Cuba, and they damn well put a stop to whatever the murderous thugs at the controls had in mind. Next time a terrorist is in a position even to try such a thing, they will fail at the cockpit as the pilots resist. 9-11 was a fluke.
Terrorism is a tiny, minor bugaboo. You're going to get in a car crash. You'll die of cancer. You're not going to be attacked by a terrorist. Foreign terrorists have hit in the United States in 1993, in 2001. Not exactly a frequent occurance.
Which is not to say that the government should not be vigilant. Had the Bush administration paid any heed to the warnings of the Clinton administration, 9-11 would probably not have happened. Of course, the Bush administration owes all that it has achieved directly to 9-11, so that certainly worked out well for them.
The government should be vigilant and should be aggressive in protecting its citizenry. But it can do so without color-coded alert levels and invoking phantom danger at every turn. We should not be living in this climate of fear, where the evil acts of a few dozen men have dictated our policy and our politics for the better part of a decade. Where we flush two hundred years of rights down the drain because of nebulous enemies created and stoked by the administration and the media.
Anyway. Moussaoui is almost certainly going to die, and that won't bother me a bit. But it's the government that is going to put him to death, not for what he is guilty of but for what ought not be a crime, and that is something that saddens me a great deal.
- Sun Ra