Doing Justice to Zacarias Moussaoui

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

As a consequence, the part of the record of the Moussaoui case that is readily accessible to the public is disastrously skewed. Courtesy of the court, the bizarre ramblings in Moussaoui's pretrial motions have been freely available on the Internet for over five years now, during which time they have irrigated the fevered mental landscapes in which anti-American phantasms prosper the world over. On the other hand, and also courtesy of the court, Moussaoui's remarkably lucid and coherent testimony has, for all intents and purposes, been as inaccessible to the public as it would have been had Moussaoui testified before a Star Chamber. In this testimony, Moussaoui, among other things, explicitly repudiated his pretrial motions, dismissing them as, in his own words, "propaganda." "I knew that my pleadings were being put on the Internet," he explained. ". . . I carry on my propaganda war. You might not understand it, I know that some people Muslim around the world have read my pleading and have been probably motivated or happy to see that I don't give in. I fight on" (March 27, 2006; 237s).6

A comparison of the Moussaoui trial transcripts with the contemporaneous coverage of the trial in the media makes abundantly clear that Judge Brinkema's confident assurances were mistaken: The public was not "fully advised" as to what was going on in the courtroom, and the potential for inaccurate reporting of which the petitioners warned was far from being "minimized." The public was in fact persistently misled about what was going on in the courtroom. An Italian Communist politician is supposed once to have observed that it is a "constant" of Soviet-style communist regimes that "the leadership lies even when it does not have to." What is so remarkable about the coverage of the Moussaoui case, when compared to the official record, is that the major media, with the rare and usual exceptions, misled the public not only on the broad contours of what was transpiring in the trial, but even on minor details: even, so to say, "when it did not have to."

Media inventions

WHO CAN FORGET, for example, the drama surrounding the llwl revelation that a "government" attorney, Carla Martin, had r r sent trial transcripts and leading commentary on the case to upcoming witnesses, thus violating a court order? Martin was not, in fact, part of the prosecution team. She was a lawyer for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) who counseled aviation security witnesses for both the prosecution and the defense. But the media's vague description of her as a "government" attorney served to associate her with the prosecution, thus creating the false impression that the episode was proof of prosecutorial misconduct. The fact that it was the prosecution itself that had brought the violation to the Court's attention was not permitted to dissipate this impression. The fact that Martin's commentary largely consisted of dismissive remarks on the prosecution's theory of the case was, as a rule, not mentioned at all. Instead, the major media transformed the false impression into the "story" itself, pronouncing the case to be threatened by what CBS News, for example, unequivocally labeled "a blatant violation by the prosecution."7 Judge Brinkema's censorious observation that she had "never seen such an egregious violation of court's rule on witnesses" (March 13, 2006; 1002) was widely quoted in this connection. All her statements praising the prosecution's conduct in the matter and making clear that it bore no responsibility for the violation were, on the other hand, passed over in silence. "I certainly credit the prosecutors for bringing this to my attention immediately," the Judge remarked only moments after her comment on Martin's "egregious violation" (1003). "It was brought to the prosecutors' attention - and they get great credit for having immediately alerted the Court," she interjected for the benefit of the jury (1024). Dismissing the jury for the day, she instructed them: "Again, I want to make sure you understand neither our prosecutors who brought this to my attention immediately, nor the defense counsel, had anything to do with this" (1025). But what percentage of the public can be said ever to have understood that or to have been given the opportunity to understand it by the major news organizations?