Accused terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui has spent the last two years like a freak on a leash -- raving his hate-filled fantasies as Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft pulls him from jurisdiction to jurisdiction in search of a speedy execution.
Now Ashcroft is upset that a federal court ruled against the government in a critical motion, and he may yank Moussaoui out of his civilian trial and send him to a military tribunal where the attorney general's notion of justice will not be impeded by legal process.
When he was first charged, Moussaoui was presented as the 20th hijacker -- the sole survivor of the 9/11 conspiracy who would pay for that crime with his life. To better guarantee execution, Ashcroft had Moussaoui sent from Minnesota to Virginia, where the notorious "rocket docket" makes fast work of criminal defendants.
From the beginning, however, there was doubt that Moussaoui was ever a part of the conspiracy, and there is growing agreement that he is a barking lunatic. Now the Justice Department is facing the prospect of losing all or part of its high-profile case to a hate-spewing, rug-chewing maniac. Worse still, the government's growing disaster is of its own making.
Lacking any meaningful evidence linking Moussaoui to the 9/11 plot, the government wrote an indictment that reads like a bad dime-store novel, describing shadowy figures and loosely imputing their actions to Moussaoui. A central character in this criminal novelette is alleged 9/11 mastermind Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who figures so prominently in the indictment that the government named him an unindicted co-conspirator.
That made Bin al-Shibh a material witness in the case, but the Justice Department was not concerned about his being called to confirm these facts because Bin al-Shibh was at large and believed to be possibly dead. That changed last September when a very much alive Bin al-Shibh was arrested in Pakistan.
Under interrogation, Bin al-Shibh has reportedly given the CIA some valuable information, but also one highly unwelcome tidbit: Al Qaeda thinks Moussaoui is as crazy as we do.
Bin al-Shibh reportedly stated that he did send money to Moussaoui as a type of terrorist retainer. However, he also stated that no one trusted the unhinged Moussaoui for such an important mission and that Moussaoui was never made part of the 9/11 conspiracy.
