The above title (from an anonymous reader) is a play on The Manchurian Candidate -- the chilling 1962 John Frankenheimer film about a brainwashed Korean War hero programmed by Chinese and Russian communists to assassinate a US presidential candidate on command. Today, 42 years after the film’s release, two years after its remake by Jonathan Demme, we have the lone patsy for the 9/11 deaths and destruction turning out to be a star witness for the prosecution against himself.

This is beyond a misguided braggadocio. Describing Zacarias Moussaoui, the chief strategist for a South Asian terror group, Nurjaman Riduan Isamuddin (short-named Hambali), who worked with ‘al-Qaeda’ and Moussaoui, called him ‘very troubled, not right in the head.” I would go beyond that and elevate him to Manchurian Candidate status, programmed however we define it: drugged, hypnotized, sleep-deprived, mind-screwed, even beset with the misguided Muslim call (inner and outer) to martyrdom, in this case a call to self-destruct to preserve the 9/11 mythology.

Past Candidates

Moussaoui reminds one of the Palestinian buzz boy Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, who confessed to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy shortly after the event, which took place on the evening of June 5, 1968, at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel, recently demolished like most of the evidence. Kennedy, a presidential candidate, had just come off the podium and was taken in the opposite direction he was supposed to go, to the “pantry” of the ballroom in which he had just spoken.

In the crowded “pantry,” Sirhan was said to have called to Kennedy then fired his 8-shot .22 pistol at a distance of two to five feet, killing RFK. The only trouble was that the LA Coroner Naguchi described the death from a wound to the back of the head, under the right ear, from one or two inches distance. There were several other shots to RFK’s back, from behind. Standing inches behind RFK was one of three Ace Security Guards hired to protect him that evening, Thane Eugene Cesar, the shooter dressed as a waiter, a .22 caliber pistol in hand.

In fact, as RFK fell he pulled off Cesar’s bowtie, most likely to point to him as the killer. Cesar may be still alive, out there somewhere, while Sirhan’s parole from life imprisonment was denied on March 16 after serving 37 years. Of course, not too long after his swift confession, Sirhan recanted it and has ever since. He can’t even recall the sequence of events of that night. What’s more, the total number of shots and bullet holes made in the pantry far exceeded the eight bullets of Sirhan’s .22. Nor did they match the bullet that killed RFK, the one from Cesar’s gun.

The story is a book unto itself, notably the suppressed “Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy -- The Conspiracy and Coverup, 1968-1978" (Random House, 1978; and Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993), by William Turner and Jonn Christian. Google to find a bookseller and/or find one of many shorter stories of the suppression of this colossal truth; for instance: “Sirhan Sirhan: A True “Manchurian Candidate” by Sirhan’s present attorney Lawrence Teeter. Of course, the cover-up has been aided and abetted by an obfuscating LAPD, FBI, and CIA for decades.

Then we have Mark Chapman, still rotting in prison, confessing “on the spot” after his “so-called” assassination of John Lennon. He, too, is considered a Manchurian Candidate by many, including myself in my OJ article, On the 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s assassination, imagine. Also, Chapman like Sirhan was a victim of the CIA’s MKULTRA program and Operation Artichoke, dedicated to turning certain people into vegetable patsies.

If this all seems like a conspiracy theorist’s holiday, let me tell you that it’s no stranger than the claim that 9/11 was committed by 19 Mid Eastern fanatics with box-cutters and plastic knives. In fact, 9/11 “Mastermind” Khalid Shaikh Mohammed has upped the number to 34 participants, including a mysterious Jordanian who prepared 10 of the hijackers for their task by training them to butcher camels and sheep with Swiss Army Knives. This plum comes from the 3/29/06 LA Times’ A New Name in 9/11 Plot Surfaces by Josh Meyer.

It’s more fodder for the myth that includes the illusive former CIA operative Osama bin Laden, in his cave with his laptop, directing it all like a maestro in absentia.

“That is correct,” Mr. Moussaoui Replied

This was Moussaoui’s robotic answer to question after question from chief prosecutor Robert J. Spencer, frustrating his attorneys to whom he would not speak. This climaxed in Moussaoui describing the joy he took at a tape recording of a female flight attendant pleading for her life aboard one of the planes as “gorgeous,” if indeed such a tape exists and has been validated not forged by voice cloning, a new toy from Los Alamos that requires only a voice sample to have it say anything that needs be said by anyone.

That aside, this was all happening a week after US District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema was threatening to throw out the Moussaoui case because of “egregious” witness coaching by an overzealous Transportation Security Administration lawyer, Carla J. Martin, who now faces a criminal investigation for coaching multiple witnesses on their testimony and lying to defense lawyers.

All of a sudden this past week, the momentum of the case in favor of Moussaoui turned abruptly when he began digging his own grave. What was that all about if not a Moussaouian Candidate? A look at Moussaoui’s news photos reveals a worn, disoriented, beaten man. Why was this happening?

Perhaps all this had to with the 9/11 myth and whether or not the planes were really flown by terrorists at all, those lap-dancer lackeys, coke-snorting boozers, bozo drop-outs from flight-schools, some of whom were brought here to establish their presence, and who trained actually at US military bases.

Leaving that on hold for a bit more realistic investigating, the jury pondered Moussaoui’s fate for more than 12 hours, after the case came to it Wednesday afternoon. On Thursday the jurors sought a definition of weapons of mass destruction, one of three raps for which Moussaoui could be executed.

The jurors were informed that an airliner used as a missile (how about internal controlled demolition used to bring down a Tower?) was considered a weapon of mass destruction. The fact that Moussaoui was in the slammer at the time of the attacks seems to make little difference to the prosecution. They claim they would have been able to stop, thwart, minimize, analyze, scrutinize the attack if he’d revealed his al Qaeda membership and terror plans when originally arrested by and questioned by federal agents.

The conflicting truth is that Minnesota FBI agent, Harry M. Samit, warned his superiors more than 70 times that Moussaoui was a “dangerous Islamic extremist whose study of how to fly a Boeing a 747-400 seemed part of a sinister plot,” as reported in the March 30 New York Times’ At Sept. 11 Trial, Tale of Missteps and Management by Scott Shane and Neil A. Lewis. Samit added on August 31, 2001, “As the details of this plan are not yet fully know, it cannot be determined if Moussaoui has sufficient knowledge of the 747-400 to attempt to execute the seizure of such an aircraft.”

Should the FBI Be Put on Trial as Well?

But the upper level officials thought the off-center, Moroccan-born, Frenchman in Minneapolis only one of many could-be would-be terrorists maybe worthy of checking out. Samit’s memos seeking a search warrant for Moussaoui’s goods and laptop brought a response that such searching could hurt an agent’s career, Samit testified. So why don’t we put the FBI on trial, particularly those superiors that thwarted Samit’s efforts? It sounds like either they already knew Moussaoui was a nobody or didn’t want the 9/11 plans foiled in any way with new information.

In the 58-page “Substitution for the Testimony of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” the so-called Mastermind of 9/11, Mohammed considered Moussaoui “less reliable because of time he had spent in the West.” Alas, he’d been infected with our decadent ways, perhaps the perfect qualifications for a “Manchurian Candidate,” the patsy for 9/11.

Returning to Samit, when he tried to provide a link between Moussaoui and some foreign power, a basis for a warrant from Foreign Intelligence Court, the two reports from them showing Moussaoui had recruited one person to fight in Chechnya for an Islamist group allied with bin Laden, proved to be inadequate.

Samit’s higher-up, Michael Maltbie, was said by Moussaoui’s legal team, to have undercut Samit’s effort to get the search warrant. Maltbie actually deleted some details from Samit’s request, telling Samit it was risky business for his [Maltbie’s] career. And he “was not about to let that happen.” Therefore I suggest we put Maltbie as well on trial along with Moussaoui as a co-conspirator, especially if we’re playing this loose with the law and justice. But then, one misguided Muslim patsy seems to serve the need for a goat well enough, just as the Palestinian anti-Israel Sirhan did with Kennedy, and the diagnosed paranoid Chapman did with Lennon.

Ironically, Mr. Mohammed Mastermind finally said that he “had no idea that the damage of the first attack [including NYC and DC] would be as catastrophic as it was.” Well, his surprise may reflect the fact that what was “his plan” was somebody else’s plan, much closer to home and much more formidable. And, therefore, he too has the smell of goat, as in a certain book about a goat, about him.

Yet, regardless of all this, this morning the jury returns to decide if Moussaoui was responsible for at least one death on 9/11 in order to qualify him for execution, and whether or not a second phase of the kangaroo court would be needed to mitigate the charge to life imprisonment. Who knows if Moussaoui would even accept the jury’s decision for life imprisonment and not, as if acting hypnotically, blindly blame himself for all the murders?

Certainly, it would be a major victory for the real killers, as was the case in both RFK and Lennon’s deaths, one 38 years ago, the other 26 years ago. And then there’s JFK and Oswald, 43 years ago. But that’s another long story in a long US tradition of lone patsy/assassins.