Thoughts on Moussaoui

Zacarias Moussaoui is a lunatic and maybe the most unreliable witness in the history of jurisprudence. He's a braggart and self-aggrandizer and I believe his lawyers are more credible than he is. His own testimony should be enough for an insanity plea, especially when it's corroborated by everyone who knew him.

The lawyers presented the accounts of senior Qaeda terrorists who gave statements from captivity to deflate Mr. Moussaoui's surprise claim on Monday that he was to have played a major role in the Sept. 11 attacks. The Qaeda officials, whose testimony was recited in court, portrayed Mr. Moussaoui as an unreliable and unstable colleague who was unconnected to the Sept. 11 plot.

"He had dreams about flying a plane into the White House," a South Asian terrorist known as Hambali, captured in 2003, was quoted as saying. Hambali said Mr. Moussaoui was known to be "not right in the head and having a bad character."

Besides the account of Hambali, the defense on Tuesday offered the recollections of Mustafa al-Hawsawi, a financial and travel planner for Al Qaeda who worked closely with the Sept. 11 hijackers; Mohammed al-Qahtani, who is widely believed to be the real missing "20th hijacker"; and a Qaeda operative known as Khallad, whom investigators have linked to the bombing of two American embassies in Africa in 1998 and the attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen 2000, as well as to the Sept. 11 plot [...]

All provided statements that Mr. Moussaoui was never meant to be part of the Sept. 11 plot.

Mr. Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers, who did not want him to testify, put on less than two full days of testimony, far less than did prosecutors. In a brief rebuttal, prosecutors produced evidence that Mr. Moussaoui had offered to testify for them against himself if they would have agreed to see that he spent his time before execution in a more comfortable jail cell.

This is a crazy person, someone who clearly wanted to kill himself as a martyr years before he faced the penalty of martyrdom. Despite the government's best efforts to bungle the case, it's likely he will get his death wish. How exactly do you deal in the legal system with unstable maniacs that want to die? It's an interesting question, and I'm not sure I have the answer. But one thing I do believe is that all Moussaoui wanted were those 15 minutes of fame in front of the jury and the country. He got to stick it in our faces and become that hijacker and terrorist he always wanted to be.

It would almost be poetic justice not to kill him. Let him rot and deprive him of the glory he seeks.