The Lichfield Group

Zacarias Moussaoui is on trial for terrorism conspiracies linked to the 9/11 abominations. The Constitution ordains rules that strongly favor acquittal: proof beyond a reasonable doubt; jury unanimity; the privilege against self-incrimination; the exclusion of reliable but illegally seized evidence; and, the right to confront adverse witnesses, the greatest engine every invented for the discovery of truth. But according to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, that fortress of protections against convicting the innocent requires further buttressing. Last week in United States v. Moussaoui (September 13, 2004), the appellate court held that Moussaoui also enjoys a Sixth Amendment right of access to three Al Qaeda enemy combatant detainees captured in the war on global terrorism (Witnesses A, B, and C) who might provide exculpatory testimony. The decision seems a wrongheaded interference with the President’s constitutional power to wage war.

Education is out of joint. It examines nature more than life, mathematics more than justice. It assumes that we are placed here to watch the growth of plants or to marvel at the speed of the Internet, not to learn how to do good, and avoid evil, as Socrates understood. Man is elevated only to the extent of his morality and moral wisdom. Education should take that precept as its North star.

The great business of the human mind is not external nature, but the discovery of a higher purpose between ashes to ashes and dust to dust. As unsurpassed philosopher Sam Johnson elaborated: “Whether we provide for action or conversation, whether we wish to be pleasing or useful, the first requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong; the next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those examples which may be said to embody truth, and prove by events the reasonableness of opinions. Prudence and justice are virtues and excellencies of all times and of all places…Those authors, therefore, are to be read at schools that supply most axioms of prudence, most principles of moral truth, and most materials for conversation; and these purposes are best served by poets, orators, and historians.”