Wannabe Martyrs? Zacarias Moussaoui and the Gitmo Five

The Obama Administration is reported to be “gravely concerned” that by permitting Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four accused 9/11 co-conspirators to plead guilty it could be fulfilling their “desire” for martyrdom. But is it in fact the aim of KSM and his co-conspirators to incur the death penalty and thus achieve “martyrdom”? Well, ever since the five men informed a military commission in December of their wish to confess to their involvement in the 9/11 plot, the American press has virtually in unison reported that it is.

Thus in a recent article on an Obama Administration proposal to let the men “plead guilty without a full trial, ” the em>New York Times tells us< that the proposal “could also allow the five detainees… to achieve their stated goal of pleading guilty to gain what they have called martyrdom.” This observation appears in turn to refer to the June 2008 arraignment of the five men, during which KSM is reported by both the Times and other news organizations to have expressed a wish to be martyred. KSM’s co-defendant Ramzi Binalshibh is reported to have made similar remarks.

But the problem is that we have no way of verifying the reporting of the Times and the other news organizations, since neither the transcript of the June 2008 hearing nor that of the December 2008 hearing have been made public. The page dedicated to the five accused co-conspirators on the Department of Defense website contains pleadings and motions and rulings, but no transcripts. Shortly after the December hearing, I contacted the Pentagon by both phone and e-mail to inquire about obtaining the transcripts. My queries went unanswered. Debra Burlingame, the co-founder of 9/11 Families for a Safe and Strong America, likewise inquired about the transcripts. Ms. Burlingame was told that transcripts were not being published due to cost considerations. It should be noted that detailed Records of Trial, including session transcripts, have been published for other Military Commission cases. Similarly, extensive transcripts and even audio of Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) hearings were published on the Department of Defense website as a matter of course. (For an archive of transcripts, see here; for audio files, see here. The CSRT was established by the Bush administration to review the cases of Guantanamo detainees and determine on a case by case basis whether they should continue to be classified as enemy combatants.)

But if virtually all the media concur that KSM and Ramzi Binalshibh expressed the “wish” to be put to death and that this indeed was the “story” of the hearings, can we not simply believe them? Well, the answer is “no” and the proof is the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui: the only 9/11 co-conspirator thus far to be judged by an American court.

In 2007, I conducted a study of the media coverage of the Moussaoui trial as compared to the verbatim transcripts of the trial and pre-trial hearings. The result of that study was my December 2007 article in Policy Review magazine “Doing Justice to Zacarias Moussaoui”. The comparison demonstrates that with only one or two exceptions, the reporting of the major American news media in fact systematically distorted what was transpiring in the courtroom. The most glaring of such distortions has become in turn the single most abiding myth of the Moussaoui trial: namely, the notion that Zacarias Moussaoui wanted to be put to death in order to achieve martyrdom. This supposition has been used to discount both Moussaoui’s guilty pleas and his dramatic March 2006 confession on the witness stand.

As a matter of fact, from the time of his arraignment in January 2002 until the day he left the courtroom shouting “America lost, I won!” over four years later, the leitmotif of virtually all Moussaoui’s motions and statements before the court was precisely his efforts to save his life: or, as he put it, “the defense of the life that Allah, the most masterful, has granted to me.” Even when he first tried to plead guilty in July 2002, Moussaoui made unmistakably clear that he wanted to do so not in order to end his life, but rather:

…because this will ensure to save my life. ... It’s much more complicated than what you want to make people to believe, because even if I plead guilty, I will be able to prove that I have certain knowledge about September 11, and I know exactly who done it. … [I]t will ensure me to save my life, because the jury ... will be able to evaluate how much responsibility I have in this. ... You know perfectly that there is a guilt phase and there is a penalty phase, okay? ... So now I’m saying that for the guilt phase, I’m guilty. … But for the death penalty, we will see.

When the presiding Judge Leonie Brinkema refused to accept his guilty plea, Moussaoui reacted with a series of angry pro se motions, including one sarcastically titled “PROLIFE Motion to Stipulate my RIGHT AND DUTY TO LIVE ON THIS EARTH A LONG HAPPY LIFE (with four wives) and to stop this Judge misrepresenting my fight for life. ” In his “pro-life motion,” Moussaoui accused Brinkema of “trying to reinforce prejudice and the stereotype of the fanatical Muslim. Brain wash to kill himself and go to paradise to have 72 pure virgin.” “Leonie Brinkema does not understand anything about Islam or Jihad,” he continued, alluding to the Quranic prohibition on suicide, “or she will have understood that to plead guilt for your execution will bring a Muslim to hellfire (Allah know best).”

On the witness stand four years later, Moussaoui dropped the sarcasm and instead offered the jury a well-nigh scholarly exposition of the Islamic notion of the martyr or shaheed:

For us a shaheed mean martyr at war. And you do not aim to be a shaheed. You fight, and if you meant to come, you come [if your time has come, your time has come]. You don’t decide, okay, I’m going to be a shaheed. For a suicide operation, it is only valid when you do this for Allah and also when you couldn’t do anything else. For example, you couldn’t achieve the result of 9/11 without having suicide operation, so you are a shaheed.

“You do not aim to be a shaheed.” Moussaoui’s explanation rendered the standard narrative of his trial being peddled by the major media an obvious absurdity. Hence, it was simply ignored. The consensus narrative took precedence over the facts.

Of course, it is possible that in the June 2008 arraignment hearing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said something like the words that have been attributed to him. KSM does not speak English well – nowhere near as well as Moussaoui – and, as his rambling March 2007 performance before a Combatant Status Review Tribunal makes clear, he is highly prone to verbosity. Moreover, it is equally clear from his statements that KSM manages to follow the American media and he frequently, in effect, plays to the gallery by adopting what he knows are popular “winning” themes (Abu Ghraib, Israeli “war crimes,” even apparently the “extremism” of evangelical Christians).

In any case, when confronted by an American judge with the prospect of the death penalty, far be it from the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Ramzi Binalshibh to let on that they might cherish life greater than death. It is notable, however, that in the five defendants’ “9/11 Shura Council” statement from March of this year, there is no obvious sign of their supposed thirst for martyrdom. The statement is titled “The Islamic Response to the Government’s Nine Accusations”. The impression that the “Shura Council” statement gives is not that the five men want to die, but rather that they are eager to kill. In this respect, it is entirely of a piece with the testimony of Zacarias Moussaoui at his 2006 trial. “With regards to these nine accusations that you are putting us on trial for,” the five defendants write,

to us, they are not accusations. To us they are badges of honor, which we carry with pride. Many thanks to God, for his kind gesture, and choosing us to perform the act of Jihad for his cause and to defend Islam and Muslims. Therefore, killing you and fighting you, destroying you and terrorizing you, responding back to your attacks, are all considered to be great legitimate duty in our religion. These actions are our offerings to God.

The principal moral to be drawn from the Moussaoui trial as concerns the trial of KSM and his co-defendants is that the trial must be made accessible to the public. At the very least, all session transcripts must be published. Only Al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers can benefit from the American public being misinformed and the established news media cannot be trusted to report the proceedings accurately.

But readers do not have to take my word for it. As a public service, Frum Forum today publishes for the first time the complete transcripts of Zacarias Moussaoui’s testimony at his 2006 trial, as well as the transcripts of three other crucial hearings connected to the trial. See “The Moussaoui Transcripts” span>here<.