Captain Ed notes that we escaped a predictable propaganda snare by the French when the jury denied Zacharias Moussaoui his death penalty. The French government is requesting his transfer to their custody, ostensibly to be near his poor mother. Had he received a capital sentence, an international campaign would have been launched against the barbarity of America killing a Muslim.

Now that it is a life term, if they ever got ahold of him. they would release him after a few years, of course. It is hard to imagine trusting them this way.

With any luck Chirac and Villepin will be swept out of office by Clearstream  soon after the ink dries on this, their latest bit of perfidia.

Captain Ed explains in Captains Quarters:

The French show the minimum respect for American sensibilities by announcing they will wait until after the formal sentencing today to request this extradition. Moussaoui's mother has publicly pressed the Chirac government to allow the erstwhile terrorist to serve his sentence nearby, and to do so as soon as possible.

This is a small taste of what would have occurred if the jury had given Moussaoui the death penalty. The French government would have given this much more visibility even today had that occurred, and it would have continued for years until we executed the supposedly mentally ill terrorist. As it is, if the French want to confirm American opinion of their nation, then they should by all means pursue this diplomatic effort. It will give us plenty of opportunity to remind the Chirac government of its lack of fidelity in its pledge to support us if we went back to the Security Council just once more on Iraq. We can also talk about all of the bilateral efforts between Paris and Baghdad that undermined the sanctions regime, sent military arms to Saddam Hussein, and paid bribes and kickbacks to the Ba'athist regime that Oil—For—Food specifically sought to sideline.

If the French get their hands on Moussaoui, we will only wake up a few years later to French pronouncements of miracle cures and rehabilitation, and watch the video of the AQ terrorist gleefully leaving the French prison over the protests of the American government. We do not wish to rely on French tenacity in the war on terror; we learned that lesson a long time ago. Let the French try to invoke whatever treaties they want to request Moussaoui's extradition, and let them stomp their feet when we tell them to pound sand

Clarice  Feldman   5 04 06