Newspaper letter of the day

I'm glad someone remembered about this:

To the Editor:

Re "Final Struggles on 9/11 Plane Fill Courtroom" (front page, April 13):

The voices on the recording of the last moments of United Airlines Flight 93 were horrifying. Too bad the man on trial is not Osama bin Laden, the man responsible for these murders, rather than a pathetic, suicidal loser who had nothing to do with 9/11.

It could well have been Osama bin Laden in the dock, had George W. Bush made stopping and capturing the leader of Al Qaeda a higher priority, rather than conquering Iraq, which also had nothing to do with 9/11.

Mitchell Zimmerman
Palo Alto, Calif., April 13, 2006

Again, no one is saying that Moussaoui is a good guy. But the way the Administration has inflated him into The Guy Who Could Have Stopped 9/11 is just ridiculous. When people like FBI Agent Coleen Rowley were jumping up and down, trying to get someone to pay attention to the fact that guys were taking flying lessons but didn't want to learn how to take off or land and when the President was receiving a PDB saying "Al Qaeda Determined to Strike in U.S.", the idea that this sad, sick little guy could have stopped the attack if he'd just spilled the beans is ridiculous. The whole Moussaoui circus is designed to take attention away from the fact that Osama Bin Laden is not only still out there, but now the Bush Administration's attention has been taken even further away, to the shiny new bauble that is the prospect of nuking Iran.