Doing Justice to Zacarias Moussaoui

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

And who can forget the poignant testimony of Jan Vogelsang, the clinical social worker from Greenville, South Carolina, who described the allegedly traumatic circumstances of Moussaoui's childhood in France? As was brought out by the prosecution on cross-examination - but went unexplained by the news media - Vogelsang regularly serves in capital cases as a paid "mitigation expert": i.e., a witness who is called by the defense during the sentencing phase of trials in order to persuade jurors that convicted murderers should be spared the death penalty. As likewise came out in court, she speaks no French and based her account upon interviews conducted via interpreters. She had never spoken with Moussaoui himself.

The media reports dwelt particularly attentively upon the allegedly violent, abusive behavior of Moussaoui's father, Omar, repeating in lurid detail Vogelsang's descriptions of the horrors inflicted by him upon his wife Aicha. According to one widely cited story, for instance, Omar Moussaoui is supposed to have asked his wife to put her ear to a keyhole and then shoved a "long skewer-type metal rod" through it in an evidently unsuccessful attempt to pierce her cranium (April 17, 2006; 3741). It did not seem to bother journalists reporting on the testimony that Vogelsang's sole source for the bulk of such bizarre stories was Aicha Moussaoui herself, nor that the allegations amounted to hearsay. The fact that medical reports cited by Vogelsang did not appear to bear out the extreme degree of brutality she depicted similarly was not deemed worthy of mention. Referring, for example, to a report that spoke of traces of "light violence," Vogelsang gamely offered that "light violence" in French forensic notation was, on her understanding, just one level below being left in a coma (3743).

In keeping with the intended "mitigating" effect of Vogelsang's testimony, the media coverage almost invariably created the impression that Zacarias Moussaoui - or "Zac" as he was repeatedly called by the clearly empathetic Vogelsang - had himself suffered from beatings administered by his father: at least emotionally, if not indeed as their direct victim. "It was unclear if or how often Mr. Moussaoui was beaten," Neil Lewis noted prudently in the New York Times (April 17, 2006), before adding - as if the one thing were somehow related to the other - "but Ms. Vogelsang said that he was unprepared to deal with the racism he encountered at French schools and orphanages." As came out on cross-examination, however, Aicha Moussaoui left her husband, with children in tow, when Zacarias Moussaoui was merely three years old. Omar Moussaoui would thus have had remarkably little time to have the pervasive effect on Zacarias's "childhood" that the reporting of Lewis and virtually all his colleagues implied the elder Moussaoui had had. "I do not have many memories of my father [from this period]," writes Zacarias Moussaoui's brother Abd Samad Moussaoui in his memoir, Zacarias Moussaoui, mon frère (Zacarias Moussaoui, My Brother), "but Zacarias must have none at all. . . ."8 Confronted with the evidence of the memoir in court, Vogelsang admitted that Abd Samad - who refused to speak with her, but whose book she said she had read - claimed to have no recollection of witnessing any domestic violence from the period of Zacarias Moussaoui's infancy and that the only beatings he received as a child were in fact administered by his mother or elder sisters, not by his father.