Why the Gitmo Tribunals are a Bad Idea - Exhibit A: the Moussaoui Trial

What the government did in the Moussaoui case was try to undermine a defendant's fundamental right to a fair trial by secretly coaching prosecution and defense witnesses in how to testify.

This was the government's star terrorism case. Not only has Moussaoui admitted that he was working with Al Qaeda--he admitted he was trying to learn how to fly large passenger planes into buildings. The government's argument for having him executed is that "if only" he had admitted to FBI investigators, after his arrest, that he was learning to fly so he could participate in the suicide crashing of airplanes into tall buildings, Washington would not have been so clueless about the approach of the 9-11 attacks.

It's not so much about killing Moussaoui, then, as providing a cover for the administration's incredible ineptness, or worse, in the weeks leading up to 9-11, when all kinds of warnings about a major terror attack were coming into intelligence offices, and nothing was being done about them.

The trouble is, the government's case is worse than weak. First of all, there is no indication that even if Moussaoui had laid it all out that the FBI would have done anything differently (after all, the agency's bureau in Minnesota had the information that he was learning to fly and had shown no interest in take-offs or landings, and that had gone nowhere in the FBI bureaucracy). The prosecution attorney who coached government witnesses, all from the Federal Aviation Administration and the Transportation Security Administration, felt the need to provide them with detailed transcripts of what had transpired earlier at the trial, and to tell them what to and what not to say, because, as she put it, the prosecution's case for a death penalty had holes in it so big that "the defense can drive a truck through."

So this is how the Bush/Gonzales Justice Department operates, and how it views our vaunted legal system. In order to win a case, it is willing to lie, cheat, coach witnesses--whatever it takes to get its way.

Fortunately, Federal District Judge Leonie Brinkema has stood up for the Constitution, even for a man as demented and bent on evil as Moussaoui, and has threatened to abort the trial--actually a penalty phase hearing since Moussaoui has already admitted his guilt on the charges. Given the level of passion involved in this case, which is being attended by relatives of some of the victims of 9-11--it took a lot of courage for Judge Brinkema to act as she did.

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