Burn in the USA

I wish every American would have been in the courtroom when Rudy Giuliani testified at Zacarias Moussaoui's sentencing trial today, to hear him recount his experiences of September 11, 2001.


I wish every American had been sitting in that room to watch as the prosecutors played video of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center.


If only every American had been there to view the clips of people jumping to their deaths from the top floors of the burning towers.


If only every American was in the courtroom to see the footage of body parts in the streets and the towers collapsing.

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (Reuters) -- Some spectators, including anguished relatives of the September 11 victims, sobbed as they listened to graphic eyewitness accounts of the moments after hijacked planes plunged into the skyscrapers. Video clips of people jumping from the flaming towers and gruesome images of body parts drew audible gasps.

"I saw several people, I can't remember how many, jumping," Giuliani said. "There were two people right near each other. It appeared to me they were holding hands.

"Of the many memories, that's one that comes to me every day."

Relatives wiped tears from their eyes as they listened to a New York City fireman recount how his colleague and best friend, Danny Suhr, died after being hit by a falling body.

Some memories, especially painful ones, we allow to dull with time. We avoid the images.

We don't want to revisit the horror of that day, but I think we need to.

Moussaoui alternated between smiling and nodding as he watched the video clips. After the jury and judge were gone for the morning break he sang out "Burn in the USA!" -- an apparent takeoff of the Bruce Springsteen song "Born in the USA."

Isn't that cute?

I think Moussaoui wants to be a martyr. I think he's doing what any good al Qaeda member would do.

He's taunting us, doing and saying all that he can to hurt Americans. He seems to want to make us hate him.
Bloomberg reports that "Moussaoui said, 'No pain, no gain, America,' after the jury left the courtroom for the day."

Also from Bloomberg:

"As I looked up, my eyes caught on a man on the 100th floor of the north tower near the top," Giuliani told the jury today in Alexandria, Virginia, as the sentencing trial moved to its second stage. "I realized I was watching the man throwing himself out. I watched him go all the way down and hit."

...Giuliani said the World Trade Center site that day was "a scene of horror, the worst thing I ever saw in my life."

"There were places you would walk and see body parts, parts of human bodies, hands, legs," the former mayor said. "We recovered about 19,000 body parts, very small percentage of intact bodies." Giuliani said, "About half of the families got something they were able to bury and the other half got nothing."

It must have been surreal to be in that room and relive that terror.

The courtroom must have been like a torture chamber, where all those present were repeatedly slapped and whipped with the brutal reality of 9/11.

And Moussaoui was there as the embodiment of the hateful, demented ideology embraced by our enemies.

It makes me think of how truly insane it is when some Americans -- red, white, and blue patriotic Bush-haters -- call the President a terrorist.

It makes me sick, all of it.