More on Moussaoui

Today a defense psychiatrist testified that convicted 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui is a paranoid schizophrenic. I live in San Francisco, so I see paranoid schizophrenics every time I walk downtown. I remember one time waiting in a train station in Newark, New Jersey, watching one of the local crazy people having an animated conversation with an invisible friend about how he had cashed somebody else's Social Security check. Every once in a while — often in mid-sentence — he would turn to his other invisible friend and exclaim, "Count your own dead!" and then resume his earlier conversation. I don't think that Moussaoui is quite that much of a nutbag, but he does seem to be — dare I say it — even less connected to reality than George W. Bush is.

Read more...Indeed, conviction by a jury of his peers notwithstanding, I'm still not convinced that Moussaoui's role in the 9/11 conspiracy was as great as he wants to portray it. Khalid Shaykh Mohammed, "The Mastermind of the 9/11 Attacks," has denied that Moussaoui had any meaningful role at all. If anything, he was training for a "second wave" of attacks, or as a backup for one of the other 19 terrorist scum. Moussaoui's claims about a fifth plane for 9/11 just don't hold up — the only co-conspirator he names for that mission was Richard Reid, the "shoe bomb" guy, who wasn't even in the United States at the time, and we uncovered no connections between the 19 known hijackers and any of their accomplices who, for whatever reason, did not crash their planes on 9/11. There is simply no evidence that Moussaoui was anything much more than a wannabe terrorist, just as he is now a wannabe martyr.

Again I will state my opinion that America and the world will be safer with Moussaoui locked up in a padded cell than with him executed and on the road to canonization as a martyr.

Technorati tags: Moussaoui Trial, Death Penalty, Paranoid Schizophrenic, Wannabe Martyr