Editorial: Worse than a death penalty

Friday, May 5, 2006 | 7:39 a.m.

Thirty-seven-year-old Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person in the U.S. charged and convicted in the 9/11 attacks, will soon be on his way to a tough maximum-security prison in Colorado, where he will be in solitary confinement 23 hours a day. If he wants to again call Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, "the greatest American," he will have only the walls of his tiny cell or exercise room to address.

His life sentence without the possibility of parole was fitting. Moussaoui was rightly convicted of withholding some information that might have prevented 3,000 innocent Americans from dying on 9/11. But he wasn't a major figure in the plot, jurors decided. Rather, he was an extremist loosely associated with some of the terrorists who carried out the attack.

He was, essentially, a bit player who had some knowledge that could have been valuable. A sentence of death for this lowly hatemonger would have elevated his role and perhaps even turned him into a martyr in some parts of the world.

Now he will soon be largely forgotten by his fellow terrorists. He will simply be alone with his thoughts for the rest of his life, a sentence worse than death.