Verdict Underscores What's Undone

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

By Tom Raum, Richmond Times Dispatch

May 4, 2006

A federal jury's decision to put a lone al-Qaida conspirator behind bars for life serves as a reminder of lingering issues from the attacks of five years ago.

Osama bin Laden remains free, and hundreds captured in the war on terrorism have yet to be brought to justice.

That Zacarias Moussaoui is the only person charged in the U.S. in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks underscores the difficulty the Bush administration faces in making concrete headway in the war on terror - and its inability or unwillingness to bring terror suspects held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other locations to trial.

The verdict also renewed calls for more trials, including one targeting al-Qaida's former No. 3, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a key planner in the 9/11 attacks. He was arrested in March 2003 in Pakistan and remains in U.S. custody in an undisclosed location.

"He should be tried. He's the person responsible for 3,000 people dying," said former Rep. Tim Roemer, D-Ind., who served on the 9/11 commission.

Still, Roemer said, the jury's verdict shows "we have a system that works. This is what really separates us from the terrorists."

That sentiment was voiced over and over again yesterday, both by those who thought Moussaoui should have gotten the death penalty, and those who agreed with the verdict.

"Maybe there's something good that can come out of this," said former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. While he said he favored the death penalty, "I have tremendous respect for our legal system," Giuliani told MSNBC.

Even though Moussaoui had a self-proclaimed role in planning for the Sept. 11 attacks and took flight lessons, the 37-year-old French citizen of Moroccan descent didn't actually kill anyone, despite his claim that he was meant to pilot a fifth airplane into the White House as part of the plot.

He was in prison at the time, arrested on immigration violations three weeks before the attacks.

Prosecutors charged that he lied to FBI officials when he didn't disclose the terror plot, thereby leading to the deaths. The defense argued he was a fringe figure.

"His relationship to 9/11 was tangential to begin with," said Daniel Benjamin, who served on the National Security Council staff in the Clinton administration, where he was involved with coordinating U.S. counterterrorism policy. The fact that bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders remain free "is not a success story."

"And that is certainly more important to a lot of jihadists and would-be jihadists than anything that happened to Moussaoui," he said.

Still, Benjamin, now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, suggested a death penalty would have further inflamed Islamic militants than Moussaoui's life sentence.

Only 10 of the approximately 490 detainees at the Guantanamo Bay naval base have begun trials before specially designated military commissions.

The Bush administration boasts that more than 200 terrorists have been convicted under provisions of the Patriot Act since the Sept. 11 attacks, claiming terrorist cells have been broken up in New York, Oregon, Virginia and Florida.

But critics have suggested that those arrested in these cases were comparatively minor figures.

Stephen J. Cimbala, a Pennsylvania State University professor who studies U.S. foreign policy, said the Moussaoui decision was "a victory for the U.S. system of justice, a win on the war on terror, but also a reminder that there are still some important things to do."