On Monday, would-be 9-11 terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui said he lied under oath about his al Quaeda membership and asked a federal judge to allow him to withdraw his guilty plea and be tried on his original charges. Mr. Moussaoui essentially asked the court for a do-over. Judge Leonie Brinkema turned him down.
It’s difficult to know what goes on in Mr. Moussaoui’s head, but it seems he indeed wants to be killed and claim his 70 virgins. Perhaps he thought if he got a trial he could act even more bizarre than before (no mean feat) and convince a jury to hand him a death sentence. No such luck; now Mr. Moussaoui will spend years sealed in a living tomb at the federal administrative maximum penitentiary in Colorado.
Was Mr. Moussaoui crazy to think he could get a second crack at the justice system, or has he been influenced by his long stay in the Alexandria, Virginia jail, inside the Washington beltway? He should be excused for thinking rules are easily bent in DC; he doesn’t realize the bending doesn’t apply to everyone equally.
For instance, consider the nominated director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael Hayden. During his tenure as director of the National Security Agency, Gen. Hayden authorized illegal wiretaps on behalf of the Bush White House, violating statutory and Constitutional law.
In Associated Press reports on his meetings with senators to discuss his new job, Gen. Hayden says he thinks the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act should be modified to allow the kind of wiretaps the NSA illegally conducted. That’s two do-overs – one for the guys who broke the law, one for the law that was broken.
(Gen. Hayden’s CIA predecessor, Porter Goss, abruptly quit the agency after a year-and-a-half tenure amid rumors of gambling and whoring with defense contractors, reminding us once again that we can’t have gays in the military because they’re a security risk. Mr. Goss did not get a do-over.)
Today’s Washington Post reports that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson told a business group in Dallas a story about a man who finally landed a HUD contract after a decade of trying. In an aside, the man told Mr. Jackson he disagrees with George Bush’s policies.
“He didn’t get the contract,” Mr. Jackson said. “Why should I reward someone who doesn’t like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don’t get the contract. That’s the way I believe.”
Outed in the press, Mr. Jackson now denies the vindictive event ever took place and that the story he told the Dallas businesspeople was a lie. “I’m not a thug – I’m a liar! Honest!”
Reading the Post these days can be truly vexing experience, because the same issue carries a story about Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. It seems that during Mr. Roberts’s confirmation hearing last year, White House staffers descended on the Ronald Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley, CA and demanded access to 70,000 pages of documents pertaining to Mr. Roberts’s time in the Reagan White House counsel’s office.
During that period, archivists at the library bent the rules for the president’s staffers, allowing them unsupervised access to the documents and allowing them to bring bags and briefcases into the rooms where the documents were examined.
Wouldn’t you know it, but a 64-page file containing Mr. Roberts’s work product on affirmative action disappeared. The Post reports that it has still not turned up. The Senate Judiciary Committee did not have access to the folder, so it could not ask Mr. Roberts intelligent questions about his affirmative action work in the 1980s. The committee and the Senate confirmed Mr. Roberts’s appointment without knowing what he wrote about race relations, arguably the most important theme in American history. Mr. Roberts got the seat at the top of the Supreme Court, a life appointment.
Do-Overs
On Monday, would-be 9-11 terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui said he lied under oath about his al Quaeda membership and asked a federal judge to allow him to withdraw his guilty plea and be tried on his original charges. Mr. Moussaoui essentially asked the court for a do-over. Judge Leonie Brinkema turned him down.
It’s difficult to know what goes on in Mr. Moussaoui’s head, but it seems he indeed wants to be killed and claim his 70 virgins. Perhaps he thought if he got a trial he could act even more bizarre than before (no mean feat) and convince a jury to hand him a death sentence. No such luck; now Mr. Moussaoui will spend years sealed in a living tomb at the federal administrative maximum penitentiary in Colorado.
Was Mr. Moussaoui crazy to think he could get a second crack at the justice system, or has he been influenced by his long stay in the Alexandria, Virginia jail, inside the Washington beltway? He should be excused for thinking rules are easily bent in DC; he doesn’t realize the bending doesn’t apply to everyone equally.
For instance, consider the nominated director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael Hayden. During his tenure as director of the National Security Agency, Gen. Hayden authorized illegal wiretaps on behalf of the Bush White House, violating statutory and Constitutional law.
In Associated Press reports on his meetings with senators to discuss his new job, Gen. Hayden says he thinks the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act should be modified to allow the kind of wiretaps the NSA illegally conducted. That’s two do-overs – one for the guys who broke the law, one for the law that was broken.
(Gen. Hayden’s CIA predecessor, Porter Goss, abruptly quit the agency after a year-and-a-half tenure amid rumors of gambling and whoring with defense contractors, reminding us once again that we can’t have gays in the military because they’re a security risk. Mr. Goss did not get a do-over.)
Today’s Washington Post reports that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson told a business group in Dallas a story about a man who finally landed a HUD contract after a decade of trying. In an aside, the man told Mr. Jackson he disagrees with George Bush’s policies.
“He didn’t get the contract,” Mr. Jackson said. “Why should I reward someone who doesn’t like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don’t get the contract. That’s the way I believe.”
Outed in the press, Mr. Jackson now denies the vindictive event ever took place and that the story he told the Dallas businesspeople was a lie. “I’m not a thug – I’m a liar! Honest!”
Reading the Post these days can be truly vexing experience, because the same issue carries a story about Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. It seems that during Mr. Roberts’s confirmation hearing last year, White House staffers descended on the Ronald Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley, CA and demanded access to 70,000 pages of documents pertaining to Mr. Roberts’s time in the Reagan White House counsel’s office.
During that period, archivists at the library bent the rules for the president’s staffers, allowing them unsupervised access to the documents and allowing them to bring bags and briefcases into the rooms where the documents were examined.
Wouldn’t you know it, but a 64-page file containing Mr. Roberts’s work product on affirmative action disappeared. The Post reports that it has still not turned up. The Senate Judiciary Committee did not have access to the folder, so it could not ask Mr. Roberts intelligent questions about his affirmative action work in the 1980s. The committee and the Senate confirmed Mr. Roberts’s appointment without knowing what he wrote about race relations, arguably the most important theme in American history. Mr. Roberts got the seat at the top of the Supreme Court, a life appointment.
No do-overs there.
© Mark Floegel, 2006