Peggy Noonan has it exactly right, I think:

I happen, as most adults do, to feel a general ambivalence toward the death penalty. But I know why it exists. It is the expression of a certitude, of a shared national conviction, about the value of a human life. It says the deliberate and planned taking of a human life is so serious, such a wound to justice, such a tearing at the human fabric, that there is only one price that is justly paid for it, and that is the forfeiting of the life of the perpetrator. It is society’s way of saying that murder is serious, dreadfully serious, the most serious of all human transgressions.

It is not a matter of vengeance. Murder can never be avenged, it can only be answered.

If Moussaoui didn’t deserve the death penalty, who does? Who ever did?

And if he didn’t receive it, do we still have it?

As with the (once and former) crime of treason, we most certainly do not, or so it would seem. Or, at least, not for helping to plan ferocious acts of terrorism against the US, and withholding your knowledge of said plan so that it may proceed successfully.

I don’t want to end with an air of hopelessness, so here’s some hope, offered to the bureau of prisons. I hope he doesn’t get cable TV in his cell. I hope he doesn’t get to use his hour a day in general population getting buff and converting prisoners to jihad. I hope he isn’t allowed visitors with whom he can do impolite things like plot against our country. I hope he isn’t allowed anniversary interviews. I hope his jolly colleagues don’t take captives whom they threaten to kill unless Moussaoui is released.

I hope he doesn’t do any more damage. I hope this is the last we hear of him. But I’m not hopeful about my hopes.

Nor should you be, because each and every last one of them is vain, and will be proved so in the fulness of time. How could we possibly deny him any of these “rights”? We’ve already acknowledged that he is for all practical purposes a US citizen and is a mere common criminal rather than an enemy combatant, and therefore those rights are all his to claim as he wishes. There’s not one damned thing any of us can do about it. He summed it up yesterday: “You lost. I won.” 2,700 Americans are dead, and he’s going to sit back and live a life of ease at the taxpayers’ expense until he dies. A book deal won’t be long in coming, and probably several. That pretty much sums it all up, I think.

As for converting prisoners to jihad, he needn’t trouble himself; that’s been going on for decades already, as anyone who knows the first thing about prison life will be glad to inform you. Moussaoui will be welcomed as a hero, and live out the rest of his life basking in the respect and goodwill of his fellow inmates. And God help the prison guard who should accidentally “desecrate” his special-edition gold-bound Koran; he’ll have his life ruined by a series of ACLU/CAIR lawsuits.

Welcome to Justice.

Update! Will Collier says it far better than I ever could:

The one and only good thing to come out of this fiasco is that it reveals once again the pointlessness of treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue. It’s not about crime. It’s about war. This waste of oxygen never should have set foot in a civilian court. He is an agent of a hostile foreign power, (albeit not a nation-state, but that’s hardly exculpatory) caught red-handed in the act of planning violent attacks on American civilian, military, and government targets. There is no doubt of his guilt; he himself proclaims it with a pathetic sneer.

Several commentors have opined that a life imprisonment sentence is not “getting off lightly,” and/or that since Moussaoui stated he wanted to become a martyr, executing him wouldn’t have been appropriate in any case.

Two points. One, for a guy who wants to become a martyr, Moussaoui fought awfully hard to avoid a death sentence; at one of his early court appearances, he stated explicitly that he would fight against receiving the death penalty with (if I recall correctly), ‘all his strength.’

Second, and far more important, is the message this verdict sends to Moussaoui’s fellow Islamofascists. It tells them that America is weak. It tells them Americans don’t have the stomach to do what must be done to achieve victory. It tells them our civilian culture doesn’t have the fibre to deal seriously with terrorism (and they will, by now, ignore the contradictory lesson of United flight 93). It tells them they can be captured on our soil in the act of committing barbarism, and they will receive not just mercy, but actual succor from a considerable swath of our legal establishment.

It is a bad verdict, and those are very, very bad messages.

Bingo. But it hardly matters. As the WoT grinds to a slow and ignominious halt after the next elections usher in more America-hating pacifists and appeasers, those few of us who still think of 9/11 as a turning point will remember this as another one. The rest of us will get on with the business of forgetting, and Moussaoui’s name will only come up every five years, when his parole hearings are held. He’ll be like Charles Manson: a link to a forgotten era, one that we’ll see dimly through the haze of the smoke from the occasional car bomb going off in Manhattan or LA. Why, we’ll barely even notice at all.

Updated update! Ace:

In 1988, Michael Dukakis pretty much lost the election when he offered a bloodless, technocratic response to a question about what penalty he would like as a personal matter were his wife to be raped and murdered.

That’s sort of a nasty question, isn’t it? But still: His failure to say emphatically that, even if opposing the death penalty as policy matter, he would, as a human being, want the murderer of his wife to be killed — and not necessarily through the orderly procedures of state-administered justice — separated him from most of America, who had no question at all what sort of justice they’d want for someone who stole away a loved one.

But that was 1988.

Today, America would apparently agree with him.

And soon, we’ll no doubt be electing a kinder, gentler Dukakis to the Presidency, just to complete the cycle.