freedom hater

* "The precise role Moussaoui did or did not play in the Sept. 11 plot may never be known. He is a maddening figure who has at turns insulted the trial judge and his own lawyers. Yet, he has written trenchant memos that are humorous - and accurate - in portraying the Justice Department's shifting theories about his role and its overall bungling of his prosecution. And there is no doubt that the department botched this prosecution... Even now, prosecutors haven't earned his guilty plea with a convincing case. Moussaoui has donated it." LINK

* "...ask whether Moussaoui, who has already pleaded guilty and changed his
mind, could have become saner over the years. When the proceedings against him
began, he was already filing crazy paranoid letters and making rambling paranoid
speeches. Three years of confinement, under highly restrictive special
administrative measures, can't have helped his mental state...
What's truly distressing about this turn of events is that Moussaoui
may just have decided to accept the bizarre government position in this case:
that he should be executed for being a poster boy for al-Qaida. Whether he now
hopes to become a martyr, or to fast-track his case to the Supreme Court, or
whether he's finally been beaten down by everyone else's unremitting craziness,
remains to be seen.
Everyone also appears to agree that Moussaoui should be
eligible for the death penalty. Even though no one is certain what he's done to
earn it...
But in allowing him to plead guilty to a crime he didn't commit, the
system really isn't working. Moussaoui should not be declared guilty—and
certainly should not be executed—unless the government can convict him of crimes
that fit the facts to which he can admit, be that providing material support to
terrorism or some other serious crime...
John Ashcroft always picked his terrorism poster boys before he knew
whether they were really criminals...
But Moussaoui may well die, because the insanity of the system under
which he's been relentlessly prosecuted marginally outweighs his own..."
LINK

* "Prosecutors and investigators, accustomed to Mr. Moussaoui's unpredictable, often angry courtroom ramblings, were surprised by the assertions, said the counterterrorism officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because much of the investigation remains classified. After more than three years of investigation, they had never heard of or found evidence of such a plot, they said, and in the days since Mr. Moussaoui's plea, they have not uncovered any information to corroborate it." LINK

* "Now that he has confessed - not for the first time; he did that once before but later recanted - the question is not whether Moussaoui is guilty, but of exactly what he is guilty. If the government stands by its refusal to allow him to present the best defense he can, and a judge agrees, the unanswered questions would leave a sense of skewed justice." LINK

* "Throughout the lengthy legal wrangling in the Moussaoui case, the Bush administration has placed the highest priority on maintaining secrecy and blocking any effort to call imprisoned Al Qaeda operatives as witnesses. This cannot be attributed to concerns for security, because anything Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or any other Al Qaeda witness could reveal about September 11 is already known to the bin Laden organization. The sole purpose is to keep this information from the American people, who remain almost entirely uninformed about the circumstances leading up to the bloodiest event on US soil since the Civil War." LINK