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RUSH: I?m going to the United 93 screening today. Yeah, I can’t wait for that. They released the tape yesterday at the Moussaoui trial. The cockpit tape. You know, there’s an interesting piece, Bill Tucker, William Tucker has a piece in the American Spectator today that says, (paraphrasing) “I don’t like what we’re doing here in this Moussaoui trial. We’re basically going to try to put this guy to death because he advanced his Fifth Amendment argument in not to self-incriminate himself.” I’ve made this point on this program. I couldn’t believe it, by the way, when the government made this charge just in the strict sense of things. Moussaoui is actually on trial because he didn’t tell anybody that 9/11 was going to happen.
Now, take Moussaoui out of it. This is a pure domestic case, if it was, any kind of crime, you’re not obligated to tell anybody you’ve committed a crime. That has to be proven. And you cannot be punished for not telling somebody you committed a crime. You can be punished if you lie about it, but he didn’t tell them, and they didn’t ask him specifically. Well, now, forget this is terrorism — it points out why you can’t try these guys. It points out why it’s a lousy thing to do to bring terrorists and acts of war into the courtroom. But beyond all that, the notion that the government can come along and fry you because you didn’t tell them what was going to happen, well, go to the Constitution and find you’re not required to. It’s not a punishable offense. There’s the Fifth Amendment. You don’t have to incriminate yourself. It’s a fundamental bedrock. Don’t tell me I don’t get it. I find it above and beyond that, and I’m not defending Moussaoui here, don’t go off half crazy in there.
I’m not defending Moussaoui at all, but from the moment I heard that the foundational building blocks of the prosecution against Moussaoui were, “Well, if he would have told us we could have stopped 9/11.” Well, screw you. It’s your job to find out. You’re the CIA, you’re the FBI, you’re the government, find out about it! You had it on his computer but you wouldn’t look at it because you couldn’t get a warrant — FISA — because he hadn’t committed crime. All he was doing was taking flight lessons. He had gone in there and said, “I don’t want to know how to land it and I don’t care about taking off. I just want to fly it once it’s up there.” It raised a red flag but it wasn’t enough of a crime, probable cause to open his computer. If we’d have opened his computer in August of 2001, all the contact that he’d had with the 19 other hijackers was there. So now because he didn’t tell us, because he didn’t make us competent in our ability to investigate something, we’re going to fry the guy. I think the guy ought to be fried, don’t misunderstand, on general principles, but I’ve had some experience with all this.


RUSH: Jack in Alpharetta, Georgia, welcome to the EIB Network. Nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Thank you. How are you, Rush?
RUSH: Good, sir.
CALLER: Good. My comment had to do with your observation that there was some indefinite nature to the charges that were filed against Moussaoui. I believe that he was clearly a conspirator to commit murder, he was an accessory before the fact, he possessed knowledge of veritable certainty of the act occurring, and I do not know the actual indictments placed against him, but it seems to me that if the prosecutor had been properly motivated, this would have been his course of action. I do agree with you, however, that this should never have gone to a criminal court system. It should have been handled by a military tribunal. Your thoughts?
RUSH: Yeah, you know, this is pre-9/11 when all this discovery of Moussaoui is taking place. And I’m convinced we knew about these 19 other hijackers pre-9/11 because the day after 9/11 we were able to put their pictures up on the television. We knew who they were, and we knew how they had bought their plane tickets that day. We knew everything about them, where they had lived where, were they had taken flight lessons and all that. I think of all the data that was on Moussaoui’s computer when they finally looked at it, the one thing he didn’t know was the date. He didn’t know the date. But he knew something. He knew the targets. He knew it was the White House and he said that his target was either the Capitol or the White House. Now, William Tucker today in the American Spectator, said, “I hate to spoil the fun, but I really don’t see the point of the courtroom ritual being conducted right now around the 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui. Moussaoui is facing the death penalty for his role in Sept. 11. What was his role? He was the only hijacker that didn’t make it. He was picked up by the FBI in Minneapolis in August 2001 for an expired visa after arousing the suspicions of flight instructors…


“So what was his crime? Moussaoui is charged with being responsible for Sept. 11 because he didn’t tell anybody it was going to happen. His silence led to the murder of 3,000 people, is the prosecution argument. If he had told the FBI, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon wouldn’t have happened. Maybe so, but that’s not the point. The point is, why didn’t anybody ask him?” What do you mean, we sit around, we wait for criminals to turn themselves in? When does this happen? It doesn’t happen. Certainly not enough to make it worthy of an official policy. Yeah, we’re going to solve crime because we’re going to wait for the bad guys to report before they do it. No, the FBI and the CIA is supposed to find this stuff out and they didn’t ask him.
“The answer is simple. Moussaoui was under no obligation to tell anybody anything. Once he was arrested, he was protected by his Fifth Amendment rights, which say: ‘nor shall [anyone] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.’ Ah, but that’s not the same thing, you may respond. He wasn’t being asked to testify against himself in court. He was only talking to the FBI. Sorry, makes no difference. The U.S. Supreme Court decided in Miranda v. Arizona (1966) that suspects in a criminal case are under no obligation to talk to the police about anything. ‘You have the right to remain silent,’ as the saying goes.” So, you know, the end result here is favorable, but the guy is on trial because he didn’t tell us what he and his buddies had planned. I just find it amazing.


Let me tell you why I brought up this Moussaoui business because there’s a larger lesson to learn here, and it is what I have been focused on. It is at his sentencing that the issue of whether he can be put to death for not telling us what he knew came up. That’s what some people are arguing. The real issue is whether he is responsible for the outcome of his conspiracy. The government is arguing to bolster their case that if he’d spoken up, if he’d have just told us, that this could have been stopped. Now, on the face of it, cool. But what does this stay about our government back then? Now, this is August of 2001 when all this is happening. We tracked this guy down, we found he was going to flight school, didn’t care about learning to take a plane off the ground or land one, only wanted to learn how to fly one.
Well, that caused red flags. The real issue to me is, we had this guy dead to rights, we had his computer. But we couldn’t search his computer. The probable cause requirement was not met. You see, the libs demand that we follow the FISA court. We followed the FISA court in this case, and look what happened. Now, before you start blaming Bush in all this, these are Clinton-era justice department rules. We’re back to this wall that Jamie Gorelick built. It was because of that wall we couldn’t share data from one agency, such as the FBI, to another agency, the CIA, because the Clintons were prosecuting all these sorts of things in court, grand jury testimony, that by law is secret, nobody can know what it is unless your reporters are for the San Francisco Chronicle, it’s a sports grand jury and they blab somewhere. But that’s not supposed to happen. We had the guy dead to rights, we had his computer. We have since looked at the computer.
He had the names of all the other hijackers, he had the name of the pay master, he had the e-mail address and the phone number of the pay master, he was part of it. The only thing I don’t think that was on his computer was the date, I’m not sure. I don’t think he knew what the date was, but he knew the targets. It was right at our fingertips, we couldn’t find it, we couldn’t legally go there because of the wall. The justice department under Clinton, before you say, “Well, Rush, this is 2001, this is Bush.” Yeah, this is Bush’s eighth month in office after this contentious recount. They still haven’t gotten all his cabinet members confirmed, they’re still arguing over Ashcroft. The place is a mess. It’s the same old thing. Whenever a Democrat ends up in the White House, a Republican has to be elected at some point to clean the mess up. And so Bush was cleaning the mess up after 9/11. The Patriot Act was established, it was voted into law and signed; the Patriot Act got rid of the wall. The NSA intercept program got rid of the bureaucratic and untimely process that prevented us from acting quickly with Moussaoui. And now Bush is attacked for fixing the problem. This is the larger issue here with this whole Moussaoui episode.


The idea that our government — this is embarrassing to me — that our government is going to say, “Well, he didn’t tell us.” Name for me one conspirator who comes forward before the act and says, “Hey, guess what’s going to happen?” It might happen if we find out who they are and find ways to pressure them and so forth. I’m sure it happens in rare cases, but to make it almost an act of the law and policy, “Well, he didn’t tell us.” Well, what are you doing? You’re sitting there, your hands are tied because you’ve got Clinton-era justice department rules that don’t let you look at the guy’s computer because the probable cause requirement wasn’t met. Coleen Rowley, the famed whistleblower from Minneapolis, TIME Magazine woman of the year I think she was or at least she ended up on the cover, she said, “I got this computer, I want to find out what’s on it.” You can’t. The FBI back in Washington said you can’t. What’s the crime? You’ve got a guy with a computer taking flying lessons. Where’s the crime? Well, what he’s doing in these flying lessons, plus the thing from Phoenix. We had a memo from Phoenix about things that were going on out there from another FBI office, but none of these could be used.
None of these could be used. And we had terrorist acts all during the nineties starting in ’93 with the World Trade Center, and we had the embassy bombings in Africa, we had a bunch of acts of terrorism against the United States. The Clinton administration was doing diddly-squat about it. The Clinton administration was offered bin Laden two or three times by Sudan, (doing Clinton impression) “I don’t think we have a reason to hold the guy. I don’t want to deal with this. I want to make people think I’m dealing with this, but I don’t want to deal it because I gotta keep my approval numbers up there at 65% for my legacy.” Okay, so we get hit on 9/11. We find out later that we had the guy in custody who knew exactly what was going to happen, just didn’t know when. We couldn’t do anything about it because he wouldn’t tell us. Now how embarrassing is that? In other words, the policy of our government was in order to prevent acts like this the people that are going to do it have to tell us in advance and play fair. Well, I’m sorry. In the world of crime and terrorism it simply doesn’t work that way.
Now, after it happens, Bush goes in, “We’ve got to get rid of this stupid wall. We’re going to do the Patriot Act. We’re going to be able to find these kind of things out now that we have had happen what happened, 9/11,” and the Democrats have been — they got on board the Patriot Act at first, you know, everybody was rah-rah. But for the past three years they’ve been trying to destroy Bush for fixing the problem. The NSA intelligence program, foreign surveillance, they try to portray it as domestic spying, these people literally folks cannot be trusted. The next time the Democrats are elected — it’s going to happen — next time a Democrat’s elected, the military is going to go to hell, we’re going to find ourselves in all kinds of problems around the world, and the Republicans are going to go in there and have to fix it, and the Democrats are going to try to destroy them for fixing it, and the cycle just ends up being repeated until enough of the American people — and this is happening — are educated and informed and understand exactly what this cycle is. When enough of them learn exactly who the Democratic Party is, what the Democratic Party is, who’s a member, and who they owe their allegiance to, then their permanent minority status will be achieved. But that’s going to take some time. But I still think it can happen. We’re in the process of making it happen. Yes, I’m optimistic. I’m always optimistic. You would be, too, if you were me.

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