This is absolutely unbelievable. Thanks to the attorney's coaching the witnesses, a federal judge has recessed Moussaoui's trial for two days. More than that, there's a chance that now the death penalty will be taken off the table as a sentencing option. According to descriptions by the lawyers in court, it appeared that a female FAA attorney who had attended closed hearings in the case went over with four coming witnesses from her agency the opening statements at the trial, the government's strategy and even the transcript of the questioning of an FBI agent on the first day. All right, let's examine this one for a moment. I've expounded on my opinions about the Moussaoui trial in relation to 9/11, but I've also stressed that he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Considering the guy obviously committed some treason, to a level that would have resulted in a whole slew of deaths no less, I don't believe the death penalty would be at all out of line. That brings me to this incident. The guy has admitted that he conspired to fly an airplane into the White House. If he's sentenced to death for that, then really that's the most we can do to him, so I think trying to pin anything extra is unnecessary and won't amount to much other than looking good. Hell, you can even say "see? We got one" no matter what. Why am I stressing this point? Because, as I said, the man admitted to a crime that may be worthy of execution. So what does Lil Miss Moron do? Screws up the whole damn trial with a ridiculously illegal move. The judge herself said that in "all the years I've been on the bench, I have never seen such an egregious violation of a rule on witnesses" and the prosecutor called it "horrendously wrong". This is like the OJ trial with Mark Fuhrman. You take what should be an airtight (or at least fairly easy) case and one idiot throws the whole thing out the window by doing something stupid. Of course, the obvious observation: throwing out the death penalty just isn't right thanks to the severity of the case. So, how about we just throw out that testimony? Clearly it's unreliable, but the prosecution has a slight problem with that: Prosecutor David Novak replied that removing the FAA witnesses would "exclude half the government's case." Novak suggested instead that the problem could be fixed by a vigorous cross-examination by the defense. Fantastic. Half of the government's case is currently resting on the testimony of people who were illegally informed of trial proceedings, which is about as helpful as taking testimony from someone who used a teleprompter. I said earlier that it'd be pretty easy to pin some serious crimes against the nation on Moussaoui, particularly concerning his admitted involvement in other attacks that never came to fruition. Admittedly that does ignore this little tidbit at the end concerning this specific trial: Up to now the burden of proof was this: To obtain the death penalty, prosecutors must first prove that Moussaoui's actions — specifically, his lies_ were directly responsible for at least one death on Sept. 11. I'm sorry to say, that's almost impossible. For that to be proven, the prosecution would have to prove that the government was completely on top of things before 9/11, and that if Moussaoui had been honest then it would have been prevented. For that accusation to stick, somehow it would have to be proven that he was the only reason that the attacks happened. If all of the doors to your house are open, you can't blame the guy guarding the front door after someone robs you, even if he was sleeping on the job. We're trying to get this guy for the wrong thing, and the prosecution managed to even totally screw that up.