?You?re allowed to lie for jihad. You?re allowed any technique to defeat your enemy,? Zacarias Moussaoui told the Virginia court room, trying to explain why he had changed his story about not being directly involved in the 9/11 plot. Now he wants to die a martyr, not rot in an American prison for the rest of his life. So now he claims that he and the pathetically incompetent British shoe-bomber, Richard Reid, were scheduled to fly a fifth hijacked plane into the White House on 11 September, 2001. That?s not what he said before, but you?re allowed to lie for jihad.
Moussaoui initially denied knowledge of the 9/11 plot, but subsequently signed a confession that he was the missing ?20th hijacker?. Then he repudiated his confession, explaining that it was only a joke, and now he has repudiated that repudiation, insisting that he was indeed part of the plot. You have to lie a lot for jihad.
The main reason Moussaoui keeps changing his story is that he is a seriously disturbed individual: his court appearances have been incoherent, abusive and even hysterical. To qualify for the death penalty, he must show that he had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and deliberately withheld it. Otherwise he wasn?t responsible for any deaths, and cannot be executed under US law.
Pulp fiction
Moussaoui?s testimony is worthless. Yet, his trial does tell us some important things about 9/11. It reminds us of the spectacular incompetence of the FBI: they did not seriously interrogate Moussaoui for almost a month after his arrest on immigration charges in August 2001, so he was under minimal pressure to spill the beans about 9/11. It also reminds us that the White House wasn?t paying attention to intelligence about terrorist threats, so focussed was it on building a case for invading Iraq.
Above all, it reminds us of what sad sacks the terrorists were. Over the past four and a half years, the Bush administration has constructed its entire foreign policy on a ?war against terror? which presupposes a serious opponent on the other side. The imagery is straight out of an old James Bond movie: super-villains in caves with plans for world conquest sending out legions of fanatical, high-tech Islamist terrorists to murder innocent Americans. The reality, as Moussaoui amply demonstrates, is a bit less impressive.
In an alternate universe where they had not come under the influence of Osama bin Laden, Moussaoui and his colleagues could have been the subjects of an Arabic-language sitcom about hopeless losers adrift in the West. The only reason they managed to pull off the 9/11 attacks, despite scattering clues around like confetti, was that nobody was looking.
Not dark yet
Nobody has been killed by terrorists in North America since 9/11, the longest completely terrorism-free period since the Sixties. And none of the terrorist attacks elsewhere during this time were at all innovative or high-tech. It?s back to truck-bombs and backpacks stuffed with explosives.
In all the terrorist attacks since 9/11 by people who are in some way linked with al-Qaeda and its various clones and affiliates, the total fatalities all around the world are well under a thousand people. Less than one person a day worldwide is being killed in so-called Islamist terrorist attacks. More people than that are dying of dogbites.
This is not a global crisis, however much President Bush strives to define it as such. From the start, the ?war on terror? has served as a cover for various plans for asserting US military and political hegemony around the world that were already on the agenda of the neo-conservatives for years. It has been one of the longest and most successful hoaxes in history, but the strategies that hide behind it are still doomed to end in failure.
