Have you seen the reports that 60 Minutes will air a story including details that Ramzi Yousef, “the mastermind of the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, claims he converted from Islam to Christianity”. That news comes courtesy of drudgereport.com, that bastion of “report first, fact-check later” journalism.
On two occasions I wrote Meester Drudge to correct a couple of glaring errors in fact with regards to stories on the U.S. Military (I’m a 13-year Air Force veteran and former reporter for Air Force News and, more indirectly, the Pentagon Channel). My corrections were ignored, so I dismissed Matt Drudge for what he seems to be; an Internet schlub hungry for clicks, just like the rest of us. (As oppposed to an actual journalist.) But I digress.
The Drudge story, complete with headline in flaming red text, claims that Ramzi Yousef is no longer an Islamic fundamentalist. Now, he’s a Christian fundamentalist. If Yousef ever escapes from prison, he’ll blow up abortion clinics in the name of Jesus instead of blowing up skyscrapers in the name of radical Islam. I bet Randall Terry (remember him? Operation Rescue?
Prepare to die for right-to-life issues? Yeah.) is wetting himself with glee.
Too bad nobody will speak up about what happens in prison. See, when you are locked down with nothing at all to do be stew in your own juices day in and out, you begin looking for any kind of entertainment to pass the time. I know one writer who found a prison pen pal who sent pictures of a beautiful woman, saying “that’s me, I’m down on my luck and I wrote a lot of bad checks. They caught me and I’m really sorry.”
The model-pretty inmate turned out to be some hairy boffin type of man serving time for god knows what. Ever seen any of the Hannibal Lecter movies? In them, the insane cannibal doctor always finds a way to contact someone from the outside world, giving them advice or instructions on carrying out heinous deeds. The Lecter character is doing this for his own amusement, and while that is a work of fiction, it’s a classic example of what some prisoners get up to out of sheer boredom.
Yousef is undoubtedly playing the same sort of games. Converting from Islam to Christianity? So what? He’s still locked down in Supermax as one of the most dangerous ding-dongs we’ve ever had running around loose. What I fail to understand is why anyone is allowing this guy press from the inside of the prison. How do these people manage to waste our time with their behind-bars media circus acts? Why does Manson still get news coverage every time there is a parole hearing?
I keep coming back to the Hannibal Lecter movies, where Anthony Hopkins utters a line that makes so much sense I can hardly stand it. “A sane society would either kill me, or put me to some use.” Too true. Why do we let Yousef continue to suck wind? I personally don’t believe in the death penalty, but I do wonder why we don’t make some kind of use of these people in a non-slave-labor sort of way.
There are no good answers. Kill ’em does no good, they are gone and don’t have anything more to worry about. Making them slaves is just as bad because the very idea is primitive and a poor substitute for justice. But why keep someone alive so you can make them pace in a 5×8 cell for 23 hours a day? Can’t we have them folding the world’s laundry or deboning salmon or something? What about making them erase all the idiotic graffiti that appears overnight, everywhere? Something?
So Yousef converted to a different kind of belief. So what? The sad part of all this is, he’s even got ME commenting about it, giving him more press. Being part of the problem. To answer this, I can’t offer anything remotely adult, intelligent, or helpful. The best I can do is offer my humble curse:
I hope he catches poison oak on his man parts.
