Posted on 05/03/2006 3:35:00 PM PDT by ICE-FLYER
Zacarias Moussaoui gets life in prison and America gets another chain strapped across her national will.
This verdict should not come as a total surprise to everyone. Though it is amazing in and of itself it is indicative of a culture in decline for many years. No one specific event can be pointed to which would define our turning point away from absolutes and standards to a watered-down national will that seeks to lose at all costs. We no longer believe in them or a victory when in a battle for our very soul.
The jurors no doubt had a tough thing on their hands, the decision to put an end to a life or not is never easy to good and or moral people. Who, after all, on a daily basis makes a decision that could ends the life of someone? Its not that frequent a decision by anyone in our nation. You can’t hold out that its done by Police or Military in the same manner as it is done in a court room. More often than not they are in defense of their own life or that of others, it is a different dynamic. Here others not associated with the condemned have to decide if he lives or dies.
In comes the evidence. More than we could talk about over coffee and even more than we could write about in a book. Zacarias Moussaoui was in this matter to a degree that no one else alive and in this country was. Gleeful it was carried out, unrepentant of his own complicit actions and inactions and more upset at being in jail on an unrelated issue when it all happened. Over 3000 people were murdered and he could have stopped it but wanted it to happen. Yet he will be a guest in our prison system and most likely afforded special considerations for protection as he watched cable TV and studies to get a degree in law on tax-payer funding.
There was a day when the mere mention to a foreign power of national secrets had you at the end of a rope or in front of a firing squad. Now? Well now we have people in our nation who make more apologies to the world for the actions of murder carried out upon us than they make comments about the horrific and terroristic activities of unrepentant animals like Moussaoui.
The synergistic effect of many years of a defining down of standards has brought us here. And each of us in our own way has helped it along. We no longer have the will to put a guy in jail for a lot of criminal activities much less put a man to a proper death for actions he chose to take. Yet we WILL suspend a Kindergartner from school for two weeks for invented sexual harassment charges because he kissed a school mate. We can’t bring ourselves to fully unleash the dogs of war to put an end to people like Moussaoui in Iraq or Afghanistan but we will draw guns on honorable soldiers who were in Iraq and Afghanistan for over year but while at home were innocently going to target shoot with friends until some neighbor phones in anonymously that he “thought he heard them say” they are headed for a school to shoot it up Click here for the story. We more easily turn on our neighbor than we do on Osama.
Where are we going then? Are we on the sunset ride into third rate status as a nation and culture? Will we ever again rise to the occasion or like the song says “Have we forgotten?” 9-11 has brought us into the new normal yet too many of us are acting like we caused it or that it did not change things at all. In the end it is always clear about bullies…they will never quit taking you for a ride until you bloody their nose. The animals we are fighting are careful, calculating and militant to be sure, but they are actually wise and willing to a greater degree than we are. Had they a nuclear device in their possession on 9-11 we would never be able to see Manhattan in person without a radiation suit on.
While not making it all go away overnight a change in how we do things would help. Start making discipline real at all levels. From the day people can start to talk to the day they die make and uphold standards and absolutes and DEMAND adherence. The culture will take a while to change and our enemies within will stand against such a change but in the end when a bad guy comes and only sends one of our citizens to the hospital we will finally have the national will again to send either the bad guy or one of his people to the morgue!
Just wait for the terrorists to take a school full of children hostage, demanding his release.
Ditto that.
And for those who think it's better to keep him alive in solitary confinement, consider this:
Ramzi Yousef, mastermind along with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed of the 1993 WTC bombing and the Operation Bojinka plots, is in a maximum-security prison, sentenced to hundreds of years of prison time for his plots.
However, he can communicate with Gregory Scarpa Jr., a mob figure in the cell next to him. The FBI sets up a sting operation with Scarpa’s cooperation to learn more of what and whom Yousef knows. Scarpa is given a telephone, and he allows Yousef to use it.
However, Yousef uses the sting operation for his own ends, communicating with operatives on the outside in code language without giving away their identities. He attempts to find passports to get co-conspirators into the US, and there is some discussion about imminent attacks on US passenger jets.
Realizing the scheme has backfired, the FBI terminates the telephone sting in late 1996, but Yousef manages to keep communicating with the outside world for several more months. [Lance, 2003; New York Daily News, 10/24/2000; New York Daily News, 2/21/2002]
It's more than just this. This isn't even so bad.
You have some good thoughts but when you put in something like this, which is clearly untrue, you lose me. I don't see too many prisons standing empty around this country.
I am afraid that such an event would being out the freaks like you have not ever imagined. Remember that the left hates our founding fathers and has manouvered over the years to get judges with their world view to invent ridiculous interpretations as to what was meant by them. I see greater destruction in that event than I do by aimply adhering to what we have. We don't do that right now and that alone would be refreshing.
However, in this guys case, it doesn't really matter. He has been deprived of martyrdom and will rot in a Hannibel Leckter sort of cell until he goes mad.
As to our society in general, I would suggest that we are witnessing a world-wide cultural "paradigm shift."
911 was an eye opener for most but it wasn't the beginning. Paradigm shifts are best understood when thought of in technological terms, like the shift from horse and buggy to the automobile. There are forces who deny (like the democratic party and moderate muslims) and there are those Churchill/Cassandra types (so popular here at FR)...voices crying in the wilderness.
As always, the new paradigm will win...unless perhaps this time the Luddite forces get the nukes to prevent the otherwise inevitable march of time. And there is only one way to end the march of time...and that is to stop the clock...permanently!
I do agree that many are in prison. But how many times have you heard of a guy on the news getting the mere slap on the wrist for something very bad and the he commits again? And conversely there are many people who get the hammer put to them for things they did which did not end up murdering over 3000 people. I never said it was fair or just more than I am saying its out of kilter.
The media skew our perceptions. Don't let the exceptions and "interesting" stories form your conclusions. I feel the same way sometimes, but you have to remember, our media feeds on this stuff. It ain't reality.
The enemy within is everywhere. We have a large portion of our population that are nothing more than weak kneed, dim witted whimps. What a message these jurors sent out with this. SHAME ON THEM!!
This is why we should never try enemy combatants in our civil courts.
This was a matter for a military tribunal.
Can you imagine Bill Clinton rutting Osama on trial?
Remeber that was Clinton's strategy. He did not pursue Bin Laden because he did'nt know how to legally prosecute him.
Another sad legacy from the Clintons.
"Can you imagine Bill Clinton rutting Osama on trial?"
Hell, he's been rutting for years.
I only wish that this was realistic. Unfortunantly, at this point, something like that would just be a zoo. Remember, the left have the permanent protesters who would turn out in the hundreds of thousands to turn the entire thing into a circus. Sadly, at the moment, the "silent majority" of sane Americans - assuming such a thing exists anymore, just won't turn out to fight for much of anything. Ofcourse, most clear thinking Americans have jobs and families so the rent-a-mob lifestyle really isn't an option - still, the reality is the left could turn such a thing into joke and they'd have the media backing them.
No, I envision something far more "revolutionary". I feel that every so often a society needs a good scrubbing. A reclarification of what our shared values and principles are. A time to clean out the rot and filth, make a determination of where we stand and how the nation will move into the future. Such a thing will probably require an extra-constitutional period (such as was the case during some of the civil war), followed by modifications to the US constitution that, for example, would specifically write out virtually all types of socialism. State populations could still decide independently what they wished to do with their state constitutions since they'd have to compete with one another - but on a national level, socialism would simply be outlawed. That alone would go a long way to curing what ailes our nation. Other ideas - ban all government unions, ban all tenure for any schools that accept federal funds of any kind, further clarify in the constitution that military actions like Afghanistan and Iraq require congressional declarations of war which would give the commander in chief wide latitude to prosecute such a conflict with the authority to crush 5th columnists at home (Bush should most certainly have requested a declaration of war against Afghanistan after 9-11), etc, etc, etc...
That time may be coming in the not so distant future. Perhaps sooner rather than later. It will take something far worse than 9-11 to shake Americans to the point that a majority completely turn against the self-loathing, socialist, secular left amongst us. But if we arrive at such a time, I would expect a purge of our education, media and judicial establishments. Removing leftists from any positions of authority in any of these areas would have to be one of the first priorities.
Sigh..
It, unfortunantly, will take a massive catastrophe to spur Americans to action. We are destroying ourselves from within and have become vulerable, so such a disaster may not be so far off.
while I agree that this was probably the best outcome for the US given the circumstances of this case, there was another alternative.
We are either at war with Al Qaeda or not. I think we are, and Al Qaeda certainly does.
Moussaoui is our enemy, admittedly so. He belonged in the military tribunal process, to be tried, and then rot in prison or be executed, without all the public fanfare that he received during his criminal trial.
We are making a huge mistake using Senator Kerry's methodology for fighting Al Qaeda. Treating this war as a law enforcement issue will only waste US effort and resources, and end up getting more Americans killed in the process.
Can you even imagine how much more progress we would have made if we were using all of the resources of the United States to defeat this brutal enemy instead of fighting this war in a court of law.
Moussaoui is the enemy, and he should have been handled as such.
And yes, that could have been done legally.
It makes me sick to have to constantly ask Americans what part of war don't they understand.
Does anyone even remember what it felt like the morning of September 11th anymore?
Qusestion them in the field and take no prisoners. They wear the uniform of no country. If the libs get wind of it, just tell them it was a post natal abortion.Then then they'd be "down with it".
I still do..
Now there's a start, any more comments on how to take back America? Thanks.
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