Seymour Hersh makes what should be an obvious point about Zacarias Moussaoui.
"The justification for this extraordinary
procedure of not letting his lawyers have
unfettered access to him is because, the
government says again and again he is
capable of passing a message—'By God, if we
let him have an unfettered exchange that we
don't monitor, even with a lawyer, the Sears
Tower will go down tomorrow.' You have to
understand what's driving this. What's driving
this is fear. Underneath all of this bluster,
this administration is in tremendous
fear because we really know nothing
about what happened on 9/11. They're
telling us that they've stopped all sorts of
things. They tell us, 'Don't worry, we're
stopping things.' You know, you can believe
it. I don't. I think we know nothing, because
we're not very good at it. It might get better
in five years, but we know nothing. We're the
kind of society in which terrorism, frankly, if
you wanna do it, you can do it, and all the
after-the-fact gesturing doesn't make much
difference. The real issue is to try and deal
with the real world, and not make more
terrorists. But that's another story, and go
tell that to the Israelis. But you know, the
bottom line is that we're making more
terrorists.
. . .
"So there was a hearing that you all read
about. When the hearing began, he raised his
hand and the judge let him speak, and for
50 minutes he buried himself. This is
what's interesting to me about it. This is a
man who the federal government says
cannot be allowed to communicate with
anybody unfettered in any way, because he's
gonna pass the message . . . .He spoke for
50 minutes. It was live on the Internet.
Hundreds of reporters were listening. The
court reporter had the transcript. And not
once did the government jump up and say,
'Your Honor, clear the court!' Not once did it
say, 'Your Honor, let's go into chambers with
this. He has a right to speak but we can't
have him speak publicly because we think
he's capable of doing something.'
"Which means to me, of course, it's cheating.
They're just doing it because they can do it.
They truly aren't worried about it, because
they would have stopped him. Here he had
his big chance, and for 50 minutes they let
him go on.
It is disgusting that they've justified the monitoring of attorney-client conversations, with government appointed laywers, on the grounds that this guy is gonna send evil voodoo messages through his nostrils.
Read the whole article. There's more there.
