Dept of Injustice Strikes (Out) Again

Last week, US District Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that the Department of Injustice cannot call a handful of witnesses in the death-penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, because the gummint flat-out ignored her orders that the witnesses not be coached, as well as two other “major instances of misbehavior” by the prosecution.

The officials were to provide a pillar of the Injustice Department’s argument as to why Moussaoui deserved to die: that had he told investigators when he was arrested on immigration violations three weeks before the 9-11 attacks about al Qaeda’s plans to fly planes into buildings, the Federal Aviation Administration would have put in place security measures that could have prevented the attacks.

These would, presumably, be the same security measures preznit declined to put in place after the August PDB, and also the same measures that the FBI failed to take after being told of Arab flight students who didn’t want to learn landings and take-offs, only in-flight procedures.  As one novelist put it, “The first rule of aviation is to keep the number of take-offs equal to the number of landings.”  It shouldn’t take a Mensa member to maybe smell a rat when a “pilot” didn’t want to learn to land.

The surprising thing is that Judge Brinkema did not completely rule out the death penalty for Moussaoui, as some commentators thought she would.  Three major violations should have been enough to show a pattern of prosecutorial misconduct, but the judge seems to be willing to let the case continue, albeit without the “critical” FAA witnesses.  She did say, however, that the government’s case was “too riddled with errors” to proceed without some sanction against the government.

It’s getting harder and harder to decide which part of preznit’s assministration is the most corrupt and/or incompetent, but the Department of Injustice ranks right up, due in large part to Asscroft and Abu Al Gonzales.