Death becomes us.

Has anyone else noticed that Zacharias Moussaoui is a lunatic? The man’s ravings go way beyond incoherence, and he has a total disregard for his own well-being — he’s suicidal, as a matter of fact. So… are we going to execute the criminally insane and, if so, what do we hope to achieve by doing so, other than cementing ourselves on the extreme of those great nations (China, Iran, etc.) who still employ capital punishment with abandon? That special kind of vengeance we Americans call “closure”? Yes, Moussaoui appears to have been part of the 9/11 plot — that’s a lot more than we can say about the vast majority of people our government has killed in the name of those gruesome attacks. But I don’t believe Moussaoui could have actually stopped the attacks from happening precisely because he is a mad man; I think it’s a stretch to consider him responsible for more than 3,000 deaths when he was obviously cannon fodder too incompetent to evade apprehension by a wholly dysfunctional FBI. If he is executed, it will be because he was addle-brained enough to get caught… and because the government is anxious to make someone — anyone — pay the ultimate penalty for the crimes of 9/11. These, it seems to me, are insufficient reasons for putting someone to death.

Granted, I’m against the death penalty in general. But this goes beyond the moral issue of whether or not it’s right to allow the state to kill people. The feds are trying to execute an incompetent for crimes perpetrated by others. What is the point of showing the jury photos of charred bodies from the terror attacks on the WTC and Pentagon? Who hasn’t seen these and/or similar images? The jury is obviously being stoked up with scenes of atrocities committed by long-dead co-conspirators of Moussaoui. He may have wanted to be on one of those hijacked planes, but ultimately he wasn’t. And if Moussaoui might have prevented the attacks, so too might the FBI have done so if they’d been doing their jobs properly. It seems to me the gap between Moussaoui’s intentions and the actual deed may have been virtually insurmountable for him, given his mental state and his apparent lack of self-control. What ever the case may have been, he did not kill those people… he just refrained from sparing them.

Will adding another body to the heap help the dead rest easier? Will it help their families achieve a modicum of justice? The first question is unanswerable; the second is for the families themselves to decide. I’m sure 9/11 families are all over the map on this one. Some have taken very principled stands against the government’s use of violence under the banner of the terror attacks; others have reacted with bitterness and even indiscriminate anger. I for one can’t blame people for feeling rage over the loss of a loved one in such a heinous way. But the law should not be in the business of using that rage to further specific policy objectives. The push for Moussaoui’s execution is one small part of that misappropriation. Probably the most fascinating aspect of this trial has been what it revealed about the FBI and the Justice Department. After all, there has been a concerted effort to tamp down scrutiny of the administration’s actions leading up to 9/11. Dubya fought the establishment of the 9/11 Commission tooth and nail; when he lost that battle, he tried to hamper its effectiveness in a number of ways — by putting Henry Kissinger at the helm, by restricting it to an impossible timetable, by refusing to give it subpoena power, and so on. He refused to allow Condi Rice to appear before the panel, then relented under pressure. He initially refused to testify, then agreed… but only before select members and only in the company of Dick Cheney, without being sworn and without allowing the Commission members to take notes out of the meeting. Why, exactly?