Moussaoui Eligigble For Death Penalty

If you, like me, feel that a cover-up was involved in 911, what do you think of this recent news? Was Moussaoui involved? Was he a patsy? Is the death penalty deserved, even if he was a pawn?


Jury finds Moussaoui eligible for death penalty
CTV.ca News Staff

A federal jury has found Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person to be charged in the United States in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, to be eligible for the death penalty.

After some 17 hours of deliberation after receiving the case last Wednesday, the 12-person jury found that Moussaoui lied to FBI agents following his arrest three weeks before the terrorist attacks and that those lies led to at least one death.

In dramatic testimony during the trial, Moussaoui testified that he was supposed to hijack a fifth jetliner on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House on a suicide mission with convicted 'shoe-bomber' Richard Reid.

Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, was arrested Aug. 16, 2001 in Minnesota on immigration charges after raising suspicions at a flight school.

While he was in jail at the time of the attacks, prosecutors have argued federal agents would have been able to thwart or minimize the impact of the attacks had he revealed his membership in al Qaeda upon his arrest.

But defence lawyers have contended the U.S. government failed to prove Moussaoui caused a death.

Moussaoui pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with al Qaeda to hijack aircraft and other crimes.

Now that the jury has found that Moussaoui was responsible for at least one death on Sept. 11, a second phase of the trial will be scheduled to determine if he will receive the death penalty or life in prison.

The testimony will include families of Sept. 11 victims who will describe the impact of the mission that flew four jetliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

Court-appointed defence lawyers, whom Moussaoui has tried to reject, will summon experts to suggest he is schizophrenic and suffered an impoverished childhood during which he battled racism in France over his Moroccan ancestry.

CTV legal analyst Steven Skurka believes that the jury will decide Moussaoui should be executed.

"There can't be any question that the jury, having found this men eligible for the death penalty, in the view of that kind of overwhelming emotional evidence, will deem him a man who should be executed for his crimes," Skurka said, appearing on CTV Newsnet.

"And so we can expect, then, for the next few days and even into weeks that we'll be bombarded with these kinds of awful images of the effect of 9/11."

I have not been following this story in detail, so i can't make a educated comment here. However a few thoughts that have jumped to mind,
what hard evidence do they have against him?
Is'nt Richard Reid in jail?

If this guy gets executed for plotting the 9/11 attacks then shouldn't Bush and Cheney be up for execution aswell?