Bootleg Osama!

Well, blow me over with a feather. On a poorly recorded internet audio broadcast, Osama Bin Laden says Zacharias Moussaoui had nothing to do with 9/11.

Of course, Osama has a good reason to say this--by exposing the only person successfully tried for an Al Qaeda operation as a mentally ill fraud, he stands to really embarrass the United States in the world community, if that's still possible. Just because it benefits Bin Laden to say it, though, doesn't automatically make it untrue.

Sure, he's probably very willing to lie in order to do make us look bad, but if the truth works this well he'll use that, too.

It has seemed all along that despite extremely thin evidence, prosecutors were content use Moussaoui's courtroom outbursts and noxious, self-aggrandizing testimony to grab an emotionally satisfying but empty victory from a jury. When you read what the guy said on the stand, it's easy to understand why 11 members of the jury wanted him dead. But I never read a single thing besides his word that tied him directly to 9/11. Nothing that suggests that he was anything other than some sleeper cell's court jester, their village idiot.

As a member of Al Qaeda, he needed to be taken off the streets. There had to be a fair, transparent trial to demonstrate that we live by the rule of law. Instead, we used him to show that we were doing something after 9/11. That's all well and good--up to a point.

But what does it say about this administration that a man who has spent four years holed up in a cave is so capable of embarrassing us, just by talking? Just by living? Shouldn't we do something about that, as well?