Death, to Moussaoui

Thankfully, I mean only to speak of death in the abstract. He keeps his distance yet, skirting the edges of my life, testing boundaries, nipping chicken wire. For many others death is far too regular, a fixture, background accompaniment like humming locusts and cicadas. He is endemic and anthemic to thousands of Africans, the only repetition with regularity. He is slicked with oil and dogma in the middle east; his cowl swells and ripples; he bellows.

Two days ago, twelve jurors saw fit to deny Zacarias Moussaoui a meeting with grim finality, and sentenced him to life in prison. I am unsure if the conspiracy charge alone sufficed to earn him the life sentence - certainly the severity of his attempted crimes merited as much. But the jurors did something I feared they would find impossible: convict a narcissistic, braggart terrorist (who had accomplished nothing) without stringing him up publicly. America should exhale coolly and strongly right now. His culpability in question, Moussaoui waited until he was near the end of his trial to recant and tell the world that he planned all along to hijack another plane and kill thousands more. Evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, even his rhetoric sounded like a pitchman who, having botched his sales shtick, finds his audience nonetheless receptive and, palms sweaty, seals the deal and thanks his gods. Moussaoui, nothing more than a hate-filled opportunist, saw his trial as his only means to become a martyr, but in his self-serving taunts and tirades managed to confuse jihad-al-asgar (struggle against an external force) with jihad-al-akbar (struggle for the soul). Whether he conflated the two because of misguided religious teaching or his abusive childhood or his disfranchisment growing up in France is irrelevant. What is relevant is that an apostatic (according to him) state managed to finesse the difference for him.

Moussaoui's sentence means that, for the rest of his natural life, America will spend about $25,000 per year keeping him incarcerated, doing goodness knows what. Now, if I may editorialize for a moment, I think this is a small price to pay for the triumph of the internal struggle despite our ongoing external struggle. Moussaoui is a misanthrope, to be sure, but he was not always so. As I've mentioned before, the emphasis among young Arabic Muslim men to attack America (or "the West") stems from isolation and demagoguery, not from inherent distaste for America. Killing Moussaoui would have validated both the worst fears and the highest hopes of a young, impressionable, impoverished Islamic Arab. Keeping him in prison may expose religious martyrdom for the fraud it is and keep others from accepting a radical imam's words at face value.

I cannot understand why so many people dislike this verdict! Do Americans thirst for death? Have we not seen that killing under false pretenses only ups the body count by an order of magnitude? Legally, it seems clear that he ought receive a life sentence instead of death. Ethically it seems even clearer! Kill a prisoner who, for all intents and purposes, was the merest attache to the masterminds and executors? Though I find the death penalty immoral without exception, here I would have found it especially reprehensible. Death, as I said, is regular for people in the middle east in a way we cannot understand. To give Moussaoui that release would be to grant that regularity on our shores. Now, if Osama bin Laden happens to be settling down for tea in Waziristan when a predator drone comes a-rampagin', I'll shed no tears at his death. But if a unit of Rangers apprehends him and extradites him to New York to stand trial, I hope those jurors would also keep him locked away for life. Far better that he languish, forced to pound license plates (irony of ironies; do inmates still do that?), than become practically deified. I daresay the internal struggle - is it right to kill if our opponent craves and needs death? - is the only path to resolving our place in the external struggle. (As I write, the fight for Iraq's trust, and for Afghanistan's peace)

I will not discuss which mitigating factors the jurors used to come to their decision; I'll let far smarter people do that for me. I will say that, no matter how those twelve people came to grips with Moussaoui's bigotry, they came to the right decision, the moral decision, and they will have my enduring respect.