In a minute.

Susan

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Is he going to be under solitary or high security ward within the prison, or will he be in gen pop?

If he's in the latter, he may not be wasting away too long unless the Muslim Brotherhood takes him under his wing. 

Jordan .

You know, I'm just feeling real sorry for Mary Surratt tonight...

Susan

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Sound like he's not going to be placed in General Population....

On Drudge now: U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema told Zacarias Moussaoui "you will die with a whimper," never allowed to speak publicly again, as she sentenced him to life in prison. 

Jordan .

No interviews from prison?  Even Charlie Manson has had that opportunity. 

No live radio show like Mumia abu Jamal?  

No commencement speeches to Oregonian universities?

How about books?  Can he at least have that RIGHT? Can he write a book?

Internet connection?

Access to the law library?

The workout equipment??? 

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

x-ray
if your back's against the wall, turn around and write on it...

I'm assuming he can't have any of these things, Susan. Surely?

x-ray
if your back's against the wall, turn around and write on it...

Jordan .

I don't know, Jordan... Some might consider living in France, punishment in itself.

Just kidding Frenchies, we Brits love you really.

x-ray
if your back's against the wall, turn around and write on it...

From what I've just heard on the radio, this new SUPER MAX (sounds like a hair salon) prison in the mountains of Colorado is top security. It is supposedly hidden away off the radar screens -- not even detactable by satelllite imagery.  This is good in case Al Qaeda wanted to spy on us to discover the harsh treatment Moussaoui may be enduring.  I've heard also that it is a 23-hour a day incarceration in the cell with the one remaining hour outside allowed for "recreation." His mom is very upset and wishes he had received the death penalty. Well, that's good. She says the punishment is cruel -- throwing him in a "rat hole." 

Hopefully we'll learn a little more about the structure of this prison, who else will be kept there and what the perks include. No frequent flier miles to be accumulated, I'd assume.

I also heard that the guards are not supposed to talk to him. Good again. If all these things are true and the stuff on my list are false, it sounds like a decent arrangement for that maladroit wannabee martyr.  It has been said that this kind of isolation from one's fellow humans is the fastest and surest route to insanity. 

Susan

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Richard Reid

Ted Kazinski

Terry Nichols

Erick Rudolph

Ramsi Yousef 

just to name a few of those that are there... 

Kelly

How Do You Live Your Dash?

Check out the Kids' blogs:
The CaleBlog and the Zoe Blog

Here's how the polite NY Times -- they call everybody Mr. or Ms. or Mrs. regardless of whether they are deserving of such respect -- describes the prison.

And Walid Phares's view of the trial itself, verdict and sentencing. This is pretty persuasive to me.  I worry about the precedent set.

Susan

MOUSSAOUI: WRONG COURT, WRONG DEBATE..
By Walid Phares


Should we be surprised by the watershed debate following Zacarias Moussaoui’s trial ending? Not really. The jury rendering of its recommendation is not unusual throughout the American legal war with Terrorism: For the five years court struggle to try al Qaida members and other terrorists in the US legal structure hasn’t been working. After the classroom, America’s court room is too alien to the conflict. In short Moussaoui’s case is not the only one to display a systemic crisis, all other cases did and will continue to do. My take on it, as an analyst of past and future terror wars, can be simplified: The terrorists are processed in the wrong courts and our debate on this legal process is the wrong debate.

Let me be clear from the beginning: The issue I am raising is not about the death sentence or life in prison sentencing. That part should have been the last stage in the debate: The one that seals the sentencing logic, not the discussion that makes the debate. The Moussaoui trial is not about the principle of common criminal sentencing per se; it is about criminalizing Terrorism and its root ideologies. Here are few points that make my analytical case:

1. Zacarias Moussaoui’s personal life is not a main factor in determining this particular mass crime, but one of the factors that could lower the punishment, if incriminated. If he had a bad childhood or other negative factors that affected his clarity of thinking, it should be considered as elements of clemency in the case of extreme sentencing, but not the foundations of the case evaluation. For 9/11 and the war it was part of, was not a personal vendetta by M. Moussaoui against the US Government, but an al Qaida genocidal war against the American people. This and other similar cases aren’t a private affair between individuals –with some bad luck- and US policies with consequences on national security. By his own admitting, M Moussaoui is a member, call him Jihadist or not, of a Terrorist organization. He shouldn’t be tried in a US Court system designed to process common crimes instead of war crimes.

2. The victims of September 11, 2001 weren’t selected by al Qaida, or even by the perpetrators –including Moussaoui- personally. The men, women and children massacred throughout that day of infamy are the targets of a Terror war on America not vandalism on two towers in New York and a large building in Washington. Terrorism could have targeted other high rises and objectives in different cities. The matter is not an individual vendetta between Moussaoui and the 3,000 persons Mohammed Atta and his Jihadists have killed. America was targeted as a nation for the purpose of genocide. As a massacred collectivity, the victims of 9/11 belong to the nation not to their relatives. As individuals the victims are profoundly mourned by all Americans and above all by their survivors. So who tried al Qaida on behalf of the nation?

3. Moussaoui is part of machinery larger than himself. In the 9/11 planning process, he is not a sole mechanism acting individually. He was executing orders by al Qaida and had the intention of carrying them out. He is a nucleus that fell behind, in a wider cell that moved forward. His relation to the massacre is not pragmatic but mechanical. Hence the judicial process of finding out if he caused or not, the process of specific deaths of 9/11 is not the issue: For he has openly admitted, and it was proven, that he was part of the machinery put in place to perpetrate the massacre. That he slipped, failed or missed his opportunity is only one fact within a greater reality: his commitment to achieve the mass-killing and his participation in a chain of event that led to it, even if he didn’t walk through the last part of the horror.

4. More seriously is the current system ability to process the Terror cases: Per my own experience and open documents available, most of the players in a current court room setting are often unable to absorb the density of the confrontation. The Jury, made of ordinary citizens, generally do not comprehend the ideology of the Jihadists, hence can’t make a strategically educated decision, not on the sentencing process but on the essence of the war crime at hand. US Judges are highly capable of controlling the procedure in their court rooms but haven’t been enabled by the system to try a war with Jihadi terror, if not specialized in Salafism, Khumeinism and other movements’ strategies, thinking process or even tactics. Prosecutors as well are thrown into battles of ideas beyond their basic training. In the Moussaoui case, the jury asked for a dictionary, refused by the judge. The question deserves an answer.

5. As for the defense lawyers, and I was one in the past, in the absence of specialized courts, they would twist history and geopolitics to achieve a legitimate goal: win their case. But instead of focusing on proving the innocence of their clients and distancing him/her from the enemy, they tend to defend the ideology of their client, putting themselves in the wrong side of the war their nation is victim of.

These above five facts and many more to develop in the future constitute the basis of US failure in the courts processing of Jihadism-related Terror cases. What is needed for future successes is the following:

a. That Congress identifies the ideologies of the Terrorists. In the heels of many congressional hearings which already produced significant bipartisan consensus, as well as in several speeches by the President since last September, the country not so far from identifying the missing link. Simply speaking: educate the jury, the judges, the prosecutors and the defense attorneys, as to who is the enemy and what is its ideology. The rest should flow as American justice at its best, impartial and fair.

b. As in France and Spain, train “Counter-Terrorism Judges.” From Paris to Madrid, these bright specialized men and women have all the tools they need to decide on procedures deemed appropriate to prosecute and ultimately try the Terrorists at war with democracies. A similar training could provide the Justice Department with “Counter Terrorism Prosecutors.” In a sum, all players in the court room must at some point be acquainted with what they will have to reflect on, in Terrorism cases.

The debate on the Moussaoui case won’t stop nationwide and beyond in view of the progressive realization by most Americans and many citizens of other democracies that this case will be a benchmark in the history of the judicial front with Terror. Therefore, it is important to avoid Byzantine debates and reserve the energies to the center of the crisis not its peripheries. Consider for example how the “martyrdom” affair plays in the Salafist chat rooms: “These Kuffars (infidels) are easy to dupe,” said a cadre in the al-Ansar Paltalk room few months ago. “All you have to do is to play their akhlaq(ethics) or lead them to believe that we are busat’a (simple minded).

That’s what Zacarias was able to achieve, alone against the whole American political culture: First, he dramatized his personal life to the extreme, leading some to believe that his past was the root cause for his violent choices. While in fact the ideology that recruited him was responsible for the Jihad he chose to practice. Second, he dramatized his stance to the limits by threatening to throw himself into the death row and force the jury to retreat into psychological guilt. Indeed, one al Qaida man, initial member of the 9/11 Ghazwa (terror-raid) single handedly outmaneuvered the jury, the court and potentially the public. By transforming the judicial challenge into a debate about “death penalty” and all the American psychological consequences that follows, Zacharias Moussaoui deflected the attention from the real mammoth in the courtroom: The ideology of Salafi Jihadism. Instead of trying the “criminal ideology” he acted on behalf, America fell into the trap of struggling with itself as a merciful or revengeful society.

Moussaoui feels he won all the way, even if he got life in prison. He played the martyrdom card till his audience nauseated. He then played his personal life card till he obtained the mitigating factor. He played it tight, close, and smartly. His colleagues brought down towers five years ago, but Moussaoui administered another type of strikes against his foes: Defeating them through their own system.

What the court room in Virginia missed in its trial of the decade was the factory that produced Moussaoui’s mind. A life sentence is not necessarily a bad choice in democracies, or the wrong message to send when needed, if the nation the jury came from is enabled to cast a death sentence on the ideologies of hatred.

Dr Walid Phares is a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington and a Professor of Comparative Politics. He is the author of Future Jihad. Dr Phares practiced as a defense lawyer in the 1980s and served as a Jihadism Expert in Terrorism cases in the US and Europe after 2001.

May 4, 2006 01:16 AM

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Point number 3 is the one that has intrigued me the most about Moussaoui, how culpable is he and how credible are his links to the hierachy (of plotters) behind 911? His own testimonies seemed solely aimed at maximising his moment in the limelight and achieveing his goal of matyrdom. The inaccuracies of his testimony in regards to the 5th plane make me wonder if we'll ever know the truth about his actual involvement in the planning of the 911 attacks. I mean, if he really was as much of a loose cannon (as he seems) would Al Qaida have trusted him with such a high profile mission in the first place? Was Moussaoui the real thing or some sort of diversion, perhaps a sideshow to the main event?

x-ray
if your back's against the wall, turn around and write on it...

Ray, there is a similar problem with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's transcribed testimony, but he addresses the Moussaoui and Reid angle.  You never know how much is self-aggrandisment. 

Let's see if I can find that link. 

 Here it is.  If you haven't read it, you should.  There's enough to cull from it that jives with previous Al Qaeda knowledge.  

  http://www.rcfp.org/moussaoui/pdf/DX-0941.pdf

You're probably right in your suspicions that we'll never know the whole background on who did what when and why but KSM is a good source of potential information.  As is the Inside Al Qaeda Hard-Drive" that was found in Aghanistan/Pakistan by a reporter for Atlantic Monthly.  There'll be more and more of this stuff that emerges has time goes by.  And then, when/if Bin Laden or Zawahiri or any other of the top bananas are captured, more still.  

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200409/cullison 

Then there is that book I've been hyping -- Osama Bin Laden's complete works or something.  Let me find that link.  "Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden."  Must reading!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1844670457/qid=1146772778/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_
b_2_2/102-1956936-0552968?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Dave, Zacarias Moussaoui:

1. Was convicted of Conspiracy

2. Confessed

There's not any reason to assume he was charged, tried, and convicted because he was a member of a Muslim organization or something. He was a part of a massive conspiracy. Not the main part. But, had he been slightly less high strung, it's not unreasonable to assume he'd have pulled off a greater role.

Do you have a problem with his conviction?

His sentencing?

Susan

PS Maybe I should ask what specifically you considering disturbing in the article by Walid Phares. 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Good, Dave. Glad you don't have a problem with THIS particular case but only with the mythical, hypothetical, maybe, might happen cases. I can live with that distinction.

Today's LA Times has this article on what awaits Moussaoui. I found it a cheery way to begin my day. As George Costanza once said to the criminal he struggled with at an airport newsstand. Remember that one? George wanted the last copy of Time Magazine because George had a "blurb" while the convict was on the cover. The convict sneered at George, "If I wasn't shackled, I'd..." "Ah, but you ARE shackled. Have a nice life. Sentence, that is!" George cruelly taunted back.

Does it get any better than this?

Susan

The Slow Rot at Supermax
At Moussaoui's future home in Florence, Colo., inmates are reportedly not merely punished, but incapacitated and broken down.

By Richard A. Serrano
Times Staff Writer

May 5, 2006

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Halfway through the trial, prison expert James E. Aiken looked straight at jurors and told them what Zacarias Moussaoui could expect if they sent him away for the rest of his life.

"I have seen them rot," he said. "They rot."

Aiken was describing what happens to the nation's highest-risk prisoners after they settle in at the federal government's maximum-security prison in Florence, Colo., known as Supermax.

Moussaoui was formally sentenced Thursday to life in prison after a federal jury rejected a death sentence for the admitted Sept. 11 conspirator.

Officials at the Federal Bureau of Prisons said that Moussaoui was destined for the facility high in the Colorado Rockies.

Already there is a veritable "bombers' row" — Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center blast; Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski; Terry L. Nichols, an accomplice in the Oklahoma City bombing; Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber who Moussaoui testified was to join him in another Al Qaeda hijacking; and Eric Rudolph, who bombed abortion clinics and the Atlanta Olympics.

All, like Moussaoui, are serving life without parole — spending their days in prison wings that are partly underground. They exist alone in soundproof cells as small as 7 feet by 12 feet, with a concrete-poured desk, bed and stool, a small shower and sink, and a TV that offers religious and anger-management programs.

They are locked down 23 hours a day.

Larry Homenick, a former U.S. marshal who has taken prisoners to Supermax, said that there was a small triangular recreation area, known as "the dog run," where solitary Supermax prisoners could occasionally get a glimpse of sky.

He said it was chilling to walk down the cellblocks and glance through the plexiglass "sally port" chambers into the cells and see the faces inside.

Life there is harsh. Food is delivered through a slit in the cell door. Prisoners don't leave their cells to see a lawyer, a doctor or a prison official; those visitors must go to the cell.

But prisoners can earn extra privileges, like a wider variety of television offerings, more exercise time and visitation rights, based on their behavior.

There are 1,400 remote-controlled steel doors. Motion detectors and hidden cameras monitor every move. The prison walls and razor-wired grounds are patrolled by laser beams and dogs.

The facility is filling up. Four hundred inmates are there now. There is room for 90 more.

Looking to restore order after a rash of prison violence at the federal maximum-security lockup in Marion, Ill. — the facility that replaced the notorious Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay — officials in 1983 put the prisoners on indefinite lockdown.

California was among the first states to copy the concept, opening super-secure units in Corcoran in 1988 and Pelican Bay in 1989.

The federal Supermax prison in Colorado was opened in November 1994. Nobody has escaped.

"We just needed a more secure facility," said Tracy Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. "We needed to bring together the most dangerous, that required the most intense supervision, to one location."

In his trial testimony, Aiken said the whole point of Supermax was not just punishment, but "incapacitation."

There is no pretense that the prison is preparing the inmate for a return to society. Like the cellmate of the count of Monte Cristo who died an old, tired convict, Aiken said, "Moussaoui will deteriorate."

The inmate "is constantly monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week," he said. "He will never get lost in a crowd because he would never be in a crowd."

Christopher Boyce, a convicted spy who was incarcerated at Supermax, left the prison about 100 miles south of Denver with no regret. "You're slowly hung," he once told The Times. "You're ground down. You can barely keep your sanity."

Bernard Kleinman, a New York lawyer who represented Yousef, called it "extraordinarily draconian punishment."

Moussaoui might be a household name today, "but 20 years from now, people will forget him," Kleinman said. "He will sit there all alone, and all forgotten."

Ron Kuby, another New York defense lawyer, has handled several East Coast "revolutionaries" who went on a killing spree, and a radical fundamentalist who killed a rabbi in 1990. All were brought to Supermax.

He thought Aiken's description that prisoners rot inside its walls was too kind.

"It's beyond rotting," he said. "Rotting at least implies a slow, gradual disintegration."

He said there were a lot of prisons where inmates rot, where the staff "plants you in front of your TV in your cell and you just grow there like a mushroom."

"But Supermax is worse," he said. "It's not just the hothouse for the mushrooms. It's designed in the end to break you down."

Jordan .

Oops. Could it be the jury made a mistake? Well, if they could do it in the reverse with OJ, I suppose they could convict Zac Mous in error. At least this is according to the latest from the loquacious Osama. He's got a fresh nugget every month or so now. Wonder if anyone who believed "Loose Change" will change their minds??? He makes a fine point about Brother Atta. Truth be told, I always had a feeling Zac was a resume fluffer.

Susan

From Reuters:

May 23 - Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden said Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person convicted in a U.S. court for the Sept. 11 attacks, had nothing to do with the operations, according to a Web site audiotape released on Tuesday.

The following are excerpts from the tape posted on the Internet:

"I begin by talking about brother Zacarias Moussaoui. The truth is that he has no connection whatsoever with the events of September 11. I am certain of what I say, because I was responsible for entrusting the 19 brothers ... with those raids, and I did not assign brother Zacarias to be with them.

"His confession that he was assigned to participate in those raids is a false confession which no intelligent person doubts is a result of the pressure put upon him.

The participants in September 11 were two groups: pilots and support teams for each pilot in order to control the aircraft. And since Zacarias Moussaoui was learning how to fly, it follows that he was not the 20th person in the teams which helped to control the airplanes, as your (U.S.) government previously claimed.

If Moussaoui was studying aviation to become a pilot of one of the planes, then let him tell us the names of those assigned to help him control the plane, but he will not be able to do so for a simple reason: they do not exist.

Brother Moussaoui was arrested two weeks before the events, and had he known anything, however little, about the September 11 group, we would have told the brother commander Mohamed Atta and his brothers, may Allah's mercy be upon them, to leave America immediately before their affair was exposed.

I call to memory my brothers the prisoners in Guantanamo, may Allah free them all, and I state a fact, about which I also am certain: all the prisoners of Guantanamo, who were captured in 2001 and the first half of 2002 ... have no connection whatsoever to the events of September 11.

Many of them have no connection with al-Qaeda.

This is in addition to the arrest of those who were working in the relief agencies, like Abu Abdul-Aziz al-Mutrafi, or those working in the media, like (Al Jazeera television's) Sami al-Hajj and Tayseer Alouni.

All the prisoners to date have no connection with the events of September 11 and knew nothing about them, with the exception of two of the brothers, may Allah free them all.

(President George W.) Bush and his administration are aware of this fact, but they avoid mentioning it ... (beacuse they ) need to justify the massive spending of hundreds of billions on the Department of Defense and other agencies in their war against the Mujahideen.

I mention these facts not out of hope that Bush and his ranks will be fair in tackling the cases of our brothers because this is something no rational person expects, but rather it is meant to expose the tyranny, injustice and arbitrariness of your administration in using force.

Perhaps there will one day be among the Americans someone who desires justice and that is the path to security and safety, if you are interested in it."

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin