Marked for Death?

I can think of 2,986 reasons why Zacarias Moussaoui should die, and die painfully. I can think of 2,986 reasons why Moussaoui should be strung up by his toenails and left to hang while crows peck at his face, and people can hear his screams for miles. 2,986 people, forever hereafter known as the victims of 9/11, give silent testimony to the atrocities of Moussaoui’s sin of omission. That he failed to tell authorities of the 9/11 plot is not only duplicitous, it is in my mind as blameworthy as the murderers behind the controls of the jets that day in 2001. There are 2,986 reasons why we should kill Zacarias Moussaoui, and I can think of one really good reason why we shouldn’t.


Besides the obvious points about the futility of executing a would-be suicide pilot, or the idea of creating yet another martyr for fundamentalists, the execution of Zacarias Moussaoui will accomplish an unintended objective: it will bring us that much closer to their level.

Allow me to qualify that. Prior to the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, the Iraqi government carried out both public and private executions. In 2005, Iran carried out the execution of 159 souls, for crimes as great and as petty as murder, rape, sodomy and apostasy. Mutiny and sodomy will get you killed in Pakistan. Saudi Arabia performs executions for witchcraft, drug offences and sexual misconduct. Moussaoui's sins are far greater than sodomy, yes, but it behooves us, as a reasoning, Western power, to not impose the death penalty in this case.

Make no mistake, this isn’t a attack on the evils of capital punishment, though that argument could be made. But Government-sanctioned execution has a long history of killing individuals to impose fear and dissuade dissent. This is the idiom of the culture of violence, carried out through a governing body. We need to break off from that tradition of bloodshed, and show the fundamentalist world that we’re better than them: we can reason, we can abstain, and we can impose justice in a firm yet compassionate way. Kill Moussaoui, and we’re par for the course. Let him live, and we send a message to the fundamentalist world that they can’t (but will probably still try to) ignore: The Great Satan stayed its hand.

Speaking in practical terms, the greatest punishment one can impose on a man like Moussaoui would be to keep his as a prisoner forever, denying him the opportunity to ever fly into the white house, to ever martyr himself; he will never enjoy the company of 1,000 virgins. He will not get the death that he does not fear.