The soul of our nation was tested this week and happily, we passed.

Zacarias Moussaoui, the probably vile but unquestionably unbalanced man on trial for 9/11, was sentenced to life in prison. There was no question about his guilt. (More on that later.) The only question was whether he would be executed or not.

The man is a foul lunatic, and if it is because he is mentally unstable, then I apologize. It is unkind to characterize mentally unbalanced people as "crazy." But he never missed an opportunity to insult America and egg on the jury to execute him just because he was so mean and unrepentant. The jury, to my way of thinking, is to be commended on judging the case according to the facts and not giving in to emotion. Because God knows they were lambasted from all directions. If Moussaoui wasn't being an asshole, then the prosecution was doing everything but passing around burned pieces of dead babies and laying the fault at Moussaoui's feet.

And that is why I am relieved that the jury made the right choise. The entire trial was a travesty of justice. Moussaoui was on trial for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but he did not participate. He did not do anything. He might have liked to do something, but wanting to do something and actually doing it are two completely different things.

Moussaoui was on trial because he didn't rat out his fellow conspirators, if in fact he was a part of the conspiracy. To me, he came across more as a terrorist wannabe who was perversely reaching for the glory of the 9/11 attacks after the fact. And frankly, I have to laugh at the prosecution's claims that if Moussaoui had told them something, they could have prevented 9/11 from happening. The FBI had investigators who put together the whole flight school angle well ahead of time and the knowledge was ignored. Moussaoui sounds like a lunatic now. What credence would the FBI have placed in his wannabe terrorist rantings back then? Don't you KNOW they get crank calls all the time? And if this guy doesn't sound like a crank, I don't know who does.

Realistically, I somehow doubt anyone would have paid attention to his rants back then anyway.

But more disturbing to me is that he was put on trial for all the deaths on 9/11 when he did not commit a single one. He was being tried for murder because he didn't tell investigators all he knew. That is so much bullshit. The Vice President of the United States--and probably the President--knew before we invaded Iraq that Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction, but didn't tell anyone. Over 2,400 American men and women in the Armed Forces have died in Iraq. Using the "Moussaoui Logic" we should be able to prosecute the president and vice president for those deaths because if they had told the truth back then, we wouldn't have gone to war.