We can all pat ourselves on the back about the greatness of our American justice system. But this guy hit the nail right on the head:

At Counterterrorism Blog, Walid Phares examines the lessons of the Zacarias Moussaoui trial: Wrong Court, Wrong Debate.

The debate on the Moussaoui case won’t stop, nationwide and beyond, in view of the progressive realization by most Americans and many citizens of other democracies that this case will be a benchmark in the history of the judicial front with Terror. Therefore, it is important to avoid Byzantine debates and reserve the energies to the center of the crisis, not its peripheries. Consider for example how the “martyrdom” affair plays in the Salafist chat rooms: “These Kuffars (infidels) are easy to dupe,” said a cadre in the al-Ansar Paltalk room few months ago. “All you have to do is to play their akhlaq (ethics) or lead them to believe that we are busat’a (simple minded).”

That’s what Zacarias was able to achieve, alone against the whole American political culture: First, he dramatized his personal life to the extreme, leading some to believe that his past was the root cause for his violent choices. While in fact the ideology that recruited him was responsible for the Jihad he chose to practice. Second, he dramatized his stance to the limits by threatening to throw himself into the death row and force the jury to retreat into psychological guilt. Indeed, one al Qaida man, initial member of the 9/11 Ghazwa (terror-raid) single handedly outmaneuvered the jury, the court and potentially the public. By transforming the judicial challenge into a debate about “death penalty” and all the American psychological consequences that follows, Zacharias Moussaoui deflected the attention from the real mammoth in the courtroom: The ideology of Salafi Jihadism. Instead of trying the “criminal ideology” he acted on behalf, America fell into the trap of struggling with itself as a merciful or revengeful society.

Moussaoui feels he won all the way, even if he got life in prison. He played the martyrdom card till his audience nauseated. He then played his personal life card till he obtained the mitigating factor. He played it tight, close, and smartly. His colleagues brought down towers five years ago, but Moussaoui administered another type of strike against his foes: Defeating them through their own system.

What the court room in Virginia missed in its trial of the decade was the factory that produced Moussaoui’s mind. A life sentence is not necessarily a bad choice in democracies, or the wrong message to send when needed, if the nation the jury came from is enabled to cast a death sentence on the ideologies of hatred.