Public Enemy: Moussaoui

This is chilling.

March 27 (Bloomberg) -- Zacarias Moussaoui testified that he and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid planned to hijack a jetliner and fly it into the White House on the day of the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Before your arrest, were you scheduled to be a pilot in an operation run on Sept. 11, 2001?" defense lawyer Gerald Zerkin asked Moussaoui at his sentencing trial in Alexandria, Virginia. Moussaoui was arrested on immigration charges a month before the attacks.

"Yes, I was supposed to pilot a plane to hit the White House," Moussaoui said. He also said, "I knew the towers would be hit," referring to the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

...Under questioning by Zerkin, Moussaoui said Reid was to be a member of his crew to fly a plane into the White House on Sept. 11. Reid is serving a life prison sentence for trying to use a shoe bomb to blow up a U.S. airliner flying from Paris to Miami in December 2001.

Moussaoui said that "in global terms, I didn't have an overall view" of the plan for the attacks or the exact date.

Prosecutor Rob Spencer asked if he had been looking forward to what would happen in the attacks.

"Yes, you can say that," Moussaoui said.

Afterward, "you were delighted, weren't you?" Spencer asked.

"Indeed," Moussaoui said.

He said he had bought a knife with a small blade and was prepared to use it to cut the throat of someone on the plane he planned to hijack.

Is Moussaoui lying now, or was he lying when he said he was not a part of the 9/11 plot?

Who knows?

What is certain is that Moussaoui is a proud member of al Qaeda. We know he intended to kill Americans.

What is also certain is that he was arrested on immigration charges.

If Moussaoui had not been arrested in August of 2001, would the innocents aboard a fifth hijacked plane and all those going about their business in the White House on September 11, 2001, have been murdered?

We'll never know that, but we do know that failing to enforce immigration laws has the potential to be deadly.

The government's failure to address the problem of illegal aliens in America is a failure to provide for the security of the nation.

The typical rebuttal to that is to say that the nineteen 9/11 hijackers entered the U.S. legally. Of the nineteen, just three of them were in the country beyond the legal limits of their visas.

That is no argument for lax enforcement of immigration laws. Had the three that were in the country illegally been arrested, it's possible that there would have been less carnage on 9/11.

Just as Moussaoui's arrest may have prevented death and destruction at the White House on 9/11, the timely arrest of other people in the country illegally may similarly result in saving the lives of innocents.