Doing Justice to Zacarias Moussaoui

Policy Review, Dec 2007/Jan 2008 by Rosenthal, John

THE DEFENDANT: I will testify. I will take the stand and tell the truth.

THE COURT: For the diird time, Mr. Moussaoui

THEDEFENDANT: Everybody know now that I will testify of the entire truth that I know.

THE COURT: Mr. Moussaoui, you have been asked by the Court before not to speak. This is not your opportunity. Now, would you please sit down?

THE DEFENDANT: For four years, I have no opportunity to oppose.

THE COURT: I will ask the marshals to remove Mr. Moussaoui from the court yet again.

THE DEFENDANT: This is pure tyranny. I will take the stand

THE COURT: Mr. Moussaoui

THE DEFENDANT: - and I will testify of the entire truth. Nobody can not say now that they don't know that I want to testify. I will take the stand, and I will say the truth that I know. And this defense is a fraud. This is not my defense. It is an entire fraud. They are lying from top to end.

- Zacarias Moussaoui and Judge Leonie Brinkema, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, February 6,20061

Q[uestion]: Does anything that happens here make a difference?

A[nswer]: Yes, that I should speak the truth.

Q: Well, the question was does it make a difference? Does anything that happens here, the witnesses' testimony, the questions the counsel asked, what the government puts up on the screen, the evidence, does any of that make a difference in terms of your belief as to what will happen to you?

A: I believe in destiny.

Q: You believe in what?

A: Destiny.

Q: In destiny?

A: That's correct. I believe that God will give life and death, and just to be sure that what I'm doing now, is diat I just have to speak the truth and God will take care of the rest.

- Testimony of Zacarias Moussaoui, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, March 27, 2006(2)

On January 18, zoo 2, barely four months after the September 11 attacks, U.S. District Court judge Leonie Brinkema made a fateful ruling that would profoundly impact the public's ability to understand the nature of these attacks and of the enemy that carried them out. Rejecting motions by the television networks Court TV and c-Span, Judge Brinkema ruled that court proceedings in the case of the United States vs. suspected 9/11 co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui could not be broadcast in any form. The judge thereby upheld the mandatory character of a federal rule against the broadcast of judicial proceedings. She insisted, moreover, that she would have banned cameras and audio broadcasting even if the rule had not been mandatory. In a hearing on the motions, the judge pondered the petitioners' argument that the rule violated the public's constitutional right to access:

Well, you know, this courthouse and the court reporters who will be handling this case have realtime court reporting. Which means that practically simultaneous . . . transcripts will be available of the trial proceedings. Now, that, of course, is the official record. . . . Why is that not more than sufficient to fully advise the public at large as to what is going on in the courtroom?3

In her ruling, the Judge then made clear that she had determined that it was. "An audio-visual feed of the proceedings to a nearby courtroom has increased seating capacity to 200 seats," she wrote. "Daily transcripts will be electronically available within three hours of the close of each day's court session. . . . These arrangements fully satisfy the constitutional requirements for openness and accessibility. Moreover, the immediate availability of the transcripts will avoid the concerns expressed by the intervenors about minimizing inaccurate reporting."

The judge did not mention, and apparently did not factor into her determination, that while transcripts would indeed be electronically available after each court session, they would only be so at a price: namely, $1 per page, with a typical trial session running into the hundreds of pages. Just how she could have imagined such an arrangement to be functionally equivalent to members of the public being able to watch the proceedings for free on cable is anybody's guess. Perhaps the judge somehow believed that print media outlets would fill the gap, purchasing transcripts and making them available to their readerships. In fact, the established media rarely published any material from the transcripts, let alone the thousands of pages comprising the complete record of the trial and pre-trial proceedings.

Instead, the investment involved in purchasing and publishing transcripts was borne by a conspiracy-mongering, anti-government website named Cryptome, which specializes in the publication of "prohibited" documents, "cryptology" (apparently the study of "secret messages"), and the exposure of "secret governance." Cryptome has also come to the attention of American law enforcement officials for publishing maps and photographs of sensitive government installations, apparently in full cognizance of the fact that the material would be of interest to terror organizations. That it would be left to a site like Cryptome to perform the obvious public service involved in making available transcripts of the Moussaoui trial is in and of itself a gauge of how thoroughly the established media failed the American public in their coverage of the case. Moussaoui had undoubtedly whetted the appetite of the Cryptome enthusiasts with his often wildly incoherent handwritten pretrial motions, wherein he managed simultaneously to sing the praises of the 9/11 attacks and to insinuate that the attacks were, nonetheless, somehow part of a broader U.S. government "conspiracy." Although the originals of Moussaoui's motions were already available on the website of the court, a selection of them was painstakingly and with evident devotion retyped by Cryptome contributor "jm" for publication on Cryptome. (Referring to spelling and grammar mistakes in the motions, and apparently not appreciating the difficulties the French-born Moussaoui might face writing in a foreign language, jm explains: "these were reproduced faithfully to zm's original and not marked or corrected in any way. I think they show an intense emotion and urgency that zm was writing with. When one is fighting for one's life there are more important things than spelling and grammar."4) But as the nuts-and-bolts testimony of the actual trial failed to provide any titillating revelations to support the government conspiracy thesis, the Cryptome readership apparently grew tired of the Moussaoui case. Roughly halfway through the trial proceedings, Cryptome, citing "surprisingly low reader interest and cost," ceased publication of the transcripts.5 Curiously - despite having already purchased well over $1,000 in Moussaoui transcripts and published tens of thousands of dollars' worth of transcripts from other terrorism-related trials - the site owner did not even see fit to reverse course two weeks later when the Cryptomites' hero, Zacarias Moussaoui, made good on his vows and dramatically took the stand in his own defense.