Moussaoui Case: 9/11 Show Trial

MAY 9—Last week a federal jury stunned the government when it announced, after seven days of deliberation in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui: “We the jury, do not unanimously find that a sentence of death should be imposed on the defendant.” Rejecting the prosecutors’ bloodthirsty pleas, the jury sentenced Moussaoui to life in prison. As opponents of the racist death penalty, we welcome this rebuff to the government. At the same time, we recognize that from beginning to end the detention and trial of Zacarias Moussaoui was a mockery of justice—a September 11 show trial aimed at furthering the capitalist rulers’ crusade against civil liberties in the name of the “war on terror.”

Arrested and imprisoned on immigration charges while attending a Minnesota flight school in August 2001, Moussaoui was charged four months later with six conspiracy counts related to the September 11 attacks. Deviating from their usual script, in which untold numbers are held and tortured in secret prisons around the world and hundreds are confined without charge as “enemy combatants” at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo, Bush & Co. staged a public trial. They sought to exploit the unstable Moussaoui and passions for revenge for the September 11 attacks to get a slam dunk conviction. In April 2005, Moussaoui pleaded guilty to conspiring with Al Qaeda to fly planes into U.S. buildings and to training to fly a plane into the White House in a later attack, while also insisting he had nothing to do with September 11. This set the stage for the trial to determine whether he’d receive the death sentence or life in prison. On the stand, contradicting his prior statements, the mentally unhinged Moussaoui claimed he was part of the September 11 plot. After he was sentenced to life, on May 8 Moussaoui’s lawyers announced that they filed a motion to withdraw his guilty plea, and Moussaoui now says he had nothing to do with September 11.

Throughout the trial, the government pulled out all the stops to see Moussaoui killed. This included parading on the witness stand relatives of those who were killed in the September 11 attacks. Yet several of the relatives made clear that they did not want Moussaoui to die. On 11 September 2001, two civilian airliners were crashed into the World Trade Center, another hit the Pentagon and a fourth was brought down by its passengers in a Pennsylvania field. The attack on the World Trade Center was indeed a criminal act of terrorism that murdered nearly 3,000 everyday working people. However, unlike the World Trade Center, the Pentagon is the command and administrative center of the U.S. imperialist military, and being a military installation, the possibility of getting hit comes with the territory. That recognition does not make the attack on the Pentagon an “anti-imperialist” act, nor does it change the fact that terrorism almost always gets innocent people—in this case, the passengers on the plane as well as the maintenance workers, janitors and secretaries at the Pentagon.

In the Spartacist League’s initial statement on the World Trade Center attack, issued on 12 September 2001 (see WV No. 764, 14 September 2001), we warned: “The ruling parties—Democrats and Republicans—are all too eager to be able to wield the bodies of those who were killed and wounded in order to reinforce capitalist class rule” and the “arsenal of domestic state repression against all the working people.” And that is what has happened with the Moussaoui case. Moussaoui’s bloodthirsty views are reprehensible, but the government had not one shred of evidence that he was involved in the September 11 attacks. The fact that the government will put him away for life on the basis of lies and manipulation will only serve to reinforce its assaults on the democratic rights of the entire population.

Deprivation of Moussaoui’s rights and dirty tricks by the prosecutors pervaded the case. According to the government’s indictment, Moussaoui deserved to die because “while being interviewed by federal agents in Minneapolis,” he “attempted to explain his presence in the United States by falsely stating that he was simply interested in learning to fly.” The Feds ludicrously claimed that without this diversion they could have prevented the September 11 attacks. As Elaine Cassel, a Virginia lawyer and author of The War on Civil Liberties: How Bush and Ashcroft Have Dismantled the Bill of Rights, pointed out in CounterPunch (7 April): “The problem with this argument, though, is that like all those facing custodial government questioning, Moussaoui had the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.” Cassel added that Moussaoui was facing death “for his silence, through which he exercised a constitutional right.”

In 2004, a federal appeals court upheld the government’s refusal to allow Moussaoui to question Al Qaeda leaders in U.S. custody who would provide evidence that he had nothing to do with September 11 —a clear violation of Moussaoui’s Sixth Amendment right to present witnesses on his behalf. After the Supreme Court refused to consider his appeal, Moussaoui entered his guilty plea.

The fact that Moussaoui was sitting in a Minnesota jail on 11 September 2001 meant little to the prosecutors, who based their case entirely on conspiracy charges. Historically, conspiracy law has been used to nail anyone the government wants to silence yet can’t charge with a single demonstrable criminal act—organizing against slavery was “conspiratorial,” and labor unions used to be considered illegal conspiracies in this country.

An important historical example that comes from Britain was the case of Derek Bentley. Bentley and a younger friend broke into a warehouse in 1952. When the police arrived, they managed to arrest Bentley but not his friend, Christopher Craig, who opened fire. One of the cops was killed. Prosecutors could not hang Craig because he was under 18. Even though Bentley was in police custody when the cop was killed, both were charged with the murder, with the cops claiming that Bentley egged on Craig to shoot the police officer. Bentley was hanged in 1953. The case would go on to play a notable role in the abolition of the death penalty in Britain in 1965.

Though labeling Moussaoui the “20th hijacker,” the government has never produced anything linking him to the September 11 hijackings—no witness, no evidence that he ever met the plot’s purported leader, Mohammed Atta, or any other hijacker, or that he even had any communications with them. French intelligence, which had been watching Moussaoui for some time, as well as numerous unnamed U.S. government officials confirmed that Moussaoui had nothing to do with September 11. In videotaped statements, other Al Qaeda members recalled Moussaoui as so incompetent that Osama bin Laden would never have trusted him with anything. The September 11 commission set up to investigate the government’s “intelligence failures” concluded that Moussaoui had no direct involvement in the attacks.

One juror told the Washington Post that he and others questioned whether “the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for lying.” It certainly isn’t a basis for a life in prison either. Moussaoui will be confined to the super-maximum security prison at Florence, Colorado, one of the “control units” which came into use in the 1970s to isolate those deemed “dangerous,” among them leftist political prisoners. Writing some time ago, class-war prisoner Ray Luc Levasseur of the Ohio 7 described his experience at the prison: “Lock yourself in your bathroom for four years and tell me how it affects your mind.” For all the bourgeoisie’s talk about Constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment, such maximum security prisons are designed to be cruel and unusual.

We pointed out from the outset of the “war on terror” that while initially directed against immigrants from Muslim backgrounds, the government’s repressive measures threatened a qualitative diminution of democratic rights and would target perceived opponents of government policy, black people, leftists and, ultimately, the labor movement. Those currently being investigated for “terrorism” include black radicals, anarchists, animal rights activists, antiwar groups and proponents of Puerto Rican independence, as well as numerous people from predominantly Muslim countries.

At the core of the USA Patriot Act and other repressive measures enacted in the wake of September 11 are definitions of “terrorism” and “material support to terrorism” that are broad enough to encompass anyone whose political views put them afoul of the madmen running this country. In a New York Times (7 May) op-ed piece about previous sedition laws that have been used to criminalize criticism of the government (many enacted in reaction to the 1917 Russian Revolution), Adam Liptak points out that there are “echoes of earlier sedition charges in some terrorism charges today,” and quotes law professor David Cole: “Sedition laws and the material support laws are all designed to serve the same purpose: to give the government incredible discretion to go after people without proving they took part in any criminal or violent act.” This is seen in the vendetta against leftist attorney Lynne Stewart, who faces 20 years in prison on frame-up conspiracy charges for her vigilant defense of her client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who is serving a life sentence for conspiracy to blow up New York City-area landmarks.

That the Democratic Party and its liberal mouthpieces share the aims of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” can be seen in their responses to the Moussaoui trial. In a 4 May editorial, “Due Process,” the New York Times cites the Moussaoui trial as the way to deal with “terror threats,” calling it, “fair and in accordance with the rules of American justice.” Writing in the radical-liberal CounterPunch (18 February), Elaine Cassel, a critic of the administration, stated of Moussaoui: “He’s a dangerous man who should be locked up—a sworn enemy to the United States. Indeed, enemy combatant status which would keep him locked up in military custody until the end of the war on terrorism would be appropriate.”

The Democrats have endorsed nearly every repressive measure implemented by the Bush administration and put themselves forward as more capable enforcers of the “war on terror.” In anticipation of recapturing control of the House of Representatives in November’s elections, the Democrats have already announced plans to fully implement the recommendations of the September 11 commission to shore up “homeland security.” To get a picture of what this portends, the Bush administration announced last month that it will start conducting background checks on some 400,000 port workers—a frontal assault on labor—taking up a longstanding complaint of the Democrats that the administration hasn’t done enough to “secure” the ports.

As the U.S. imperialist rulers terrorize countries in the name of bringing them “democracy,” at home they are implementing the sorts of measures normally associated with the military dictatorships propped up by Washington around the globe—torture, unlimited detention, “disappearing” those who run afoul of the government. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin explained in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918):

“There is not a single state, however democratic, which has no loopholes or reservations in its constitution guaranteeing the bourgeoisie the possibility of dispatching troops against the workers, of proclaiming martial law, and so forth, in case of a ‘violation of public order,’ and actually in case the exploited class ‘violates’ its position of slavery and tries to behave in a non-slavish manner.”

The U.S. capitalist rulers have long sought these repressive measures, which the Bush administration seeks to inscribe as permanent features of the “justice” system. It is crucial that the labor movement mobilize in struggle against the government’s assaults on civil liberties. Short of the overthrow of capitalist rule, none of the rights that working people fought for are secure. What’s needed is a thoroughgoing socialist revolution led by a multiracial workers party to sweep away the brutal bourgeois order and establish in its place the rule of the working class.