Clear case for military tribunals

Well put them right up there with the OJ jury. Zacarias Moussaoui escaped the death penalty Wednesday when a jury, of his peers perhaps, decided he deserved life in prison instead. After avoiding the needle, Moussaoui taunted his benefactors with a "America, you lost," for good measure.

I am no great proponent of the death penalty. It occurs to me you have to have one because it may save one innocent life. If you have one, you must use it occasionally for the most heinous cases. Moussaoui’s would have filled that bill for me.

My biggest problem with the Moussaoui case though is not that he’ll be living on the tax payer for who knows how long. My biggest problem is that this guy ever saw the interior of an American civilian court room. The senate select committee and other complained that before 9-11, America treated terrorism as a law enforcement problem.

So as terrorist blew up the World Trade Center the first time, our ships, barracks and embassies they could count on a crack team of FBI agents to investigate the bombings and secure warrants. Sort of like FDR turning the Justice Department loose on Japan after Pearl Harbor.

Moussaoui should have found himself cooling his heels in a military brig before facing a military tribunal. The military is not big on the death penalty either, but that’s for their own. Who knows how military men might have reacted to a craven terrorist bent on killing women and children. Whatever they decided it would have been a better signal to the terrorist than the one we just sent. What we’ve told the terrorists is that we view this whole thing as a criminal matter and as such we’ll try terrorist and POWs in our civilian courts where a good Ohpra story is, likely as not, to get a guy off.