No martyrdom for you!

There are few things as consistently entertaining as the Zacharias Moussaoui terrorism trial. Not even on the Food Network.\nThat dude is a walking anti-American soundbite. "No pain, no gain, America," while watching a video montage of the 9-11 attacks. "Gorgeous," when describing seeing video of the towers falling for the first time. He even channels Springsteen. "Burn in the USA," he says, to a courtroom full of victims' families. \nMoussaoui has ushered along the prosecution's case. First, he begged the jury to declare him eligible for the death penalty by accepting he was responsible for at least one dead American during the attacks. Now, he wants to be executed. All the while, his court-appointed defense attorneys have had to wrestle both the prosecution and him, which has, in essence, made a mockery of the American legal system. It kind of collapses when the accused isn't trying to get free of the charges set against him like an animal cornered by fire. Since he isn't, the Moussaoui terrorism trial (the only trial of its kind stemming from 9-11) has been an exercise in absurdity.\nSo I'm really puzzled by the rush to kill him.\nBear with me. The man is odious, no doubt. But he's many things, and one of those things is not worthy of execution.\nNo, wrong word. "Worthy" would imply that I think he should be held up to a standard before killing him. I don't. I'm not going to dehumanize him, jump through the usual hoops, call him a monster. Everyone else does that already, so I'll just stick to the point; which is, there's no point in killing him. No point. None.\nFirst, when he's on the stand, frothing and screaming invective like a jackass, he's not exactly credible. He lied to the federal agents who arrested him in Minnesota in August 2001. Later, he pulled a 180 and claimed he and shoe-bombin' Richard Reid were going to hijack a fifth plane and fly it into the White House, which is as aimed at exciting American opinion as saying Hitler and Lex Luthor were going to team up to kill Jesus (oh, and Reid wasn't in the States at the time). Like his attorneys say, a lot of what Moussaoui has said is "a tall tale, a whopper, even for a convicted felon, an admitted liar and an al-Qaida member who believes that he is obligated to lie to you because he's at war." \nSecondly, consider the voices calling for his execution. There's the government, desperate to cover its own ass by blaming all of this on one guy's fibs to FBI agents a few weeks before the attacks. Because, of course, he knew exactly what was planned, and the government didn't have any other indications of what was going to happen. \nAnd you've got the victims' families. Now, I didn't lose family and friends in the 9-11 attacks, so I don't pretend to identify with their personal suffering. But now that my obligatory acknowledgement of the home team is out of the way, I've got to ask: is martyring someone defense attorneys have called an "al-Qaida hanger-on" really going to help anybody cope? I don't get legal bloodlust. Does it help anyone sleep at night?\nReally?\nGive him a prayer mat, visitation hours, a culturally sensitive diet and access to a bookmobile. Throw him in a supermax for the rest of eternity, but don't kill Zacharias Moussaoui. There's no point.