Hugh (Spewitt) Hewitt & Christopher Hitchens

I don't often listen to right-wing radio, but on Wednesday night I was hanging out with my neighbor in his garage talking about this and that. While there I was able to catch the latter portion of the Hugh (Spewitt) Hewitt show. Hewitt was talking with Christopher Hitchens about Juan Cole in an effort to downplay Hitchens theft and publication of a private email. (You can read about it here, here, and here.)

After the Hitchens segment ended the show got a little more interesting. Hewitt started talking about the life sentence handed down to Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th(?) hijacker. As it turns out, Hewitt was angy that Moussaoui was even on trial. Apparently Hewitt believes that Moussaoui should have been hauled off to Guantanamo Bay without a trial to be held as a ghost detainee (despite the violation of the US Constitution) because the "war for on terror" cannot be fought and won through the application of US law, and the US criminal justice system. (Apparently Mr. Hewitt is unaware of the successful criminal prosecutions of al Qaeda affiliated terrorist in European nations. To say nothing of the weak foundation on which this nation was built.)

So, Hewitt rails at the failures of the criminal justice system because Moussaoui wasn't given the death penalty, while equally complaining about the futility of trying terrorists for their crimes in our courts of law. (And to think, this is supposed to be a nation of laws.) And just when I thought that it couldn't get any stranger, Hewitt's listeners started calling in. Many of the callers where sycophants echoing the host's complaints about the trial itself, and that Moussaoui wasn't sentenced to death. Somewhere along the lines his callers started expressing their fears that since Moussaoui was going to spend his life on death row that in the not so distant future Moussaoui's al Qaeda comrades in arms would take hostages knowing that they had an imprisoned Moussaoui to use as a bargaining chip.

At this point I started laughing at what I was hearing. The listeners of redundancy radio apparently have short attention spans and only remember those things that the host has mentioned during the days program. First off, Moussaoui was a wanna-be, hanger-on al Qaeda terrorists. Well, at least according to the testimony given by the al Qaeda members being held in Guantanamo Bay. Second, are not these devoted listeners even aware of the stated US policy not to negotiate with terrorists?

Then again, you can't really expect much from people who are arguing that by killing Moussaoui you would be sending a strong message to other terrorists, who it turns out are willing to die for their cause.