Zachariah Moussaoui: "America, You Lost"

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

By Wolf Blitzer, CNN's The Situation Room

May 3, 2006

Transcript

Wolf Blitzer: I want to bring back former 9/11 Commissioner, Tim Roemer who has been watching all of this. Former U.S. Congressman from Indiana, you’ve had a chance to digest what we’ve heard; the reaction from family members, the reaction from the deputy attorney general Paul McNulty, the reaction from some the court appointed defense attorneys and that horrible statement that Zachariah Moussaoui made upon leaving the courthouse, “American you lost, I won,” and then he clapped his hands. What do you think Tim?

Tim Roemer: Wolf I think America won today; the government won, the American people won. There may be disagreements with the sentence but what ultimately happened was, our justice system worked. He was defended by our attorneys, our 9/11 families who were so brutally taken- their sons and daughters taken away from them had their day in court. And we continue to learn from Carie Lemack who spoke little bit earlier on your show who lost her mom, Abe Scott who lost his wife, that justice was served today. So what we need to do, I think now is to move now, to make sure that we protect this country Wolf. We know on the 9/11 Commission, in a bipartisan way that the FBI who was on trial in some ways in this Moussaoui case, still doesn’t have 21st century communications system. We know that we’re not adequately protecting our ports and our borders. We know that weapons of mass destruction can still be acquired by the most dangerous people in the world. As the people on Flight 93 said, let’s roll, let’s do something. We have a lot of work to do to protect this country and we have work to do to bring Khalid-Sheikh Mohammed to justice, and put him through our justice system. That will show the entire world that America has different values than these terrorists. We put them through a system that works; it has disagreement with the outcome, but it works. Moussaoui will quickly go away and slowly die.

Wolf Blitzer: He is 37 years old. He’s a Frenchman of Moroccan ancestry. He is going to spend the rest of his life in an American prison. Congressman Tim Roemer, thanks very much for those words.

###