"Chilling Testimony"

Chilling Testimony, that's the headline I looked at on whatever morning MSM "news"show I watched while I ate my breakfast. It seems that they are in the sentencing phase of Zacharias Moussaui's trial. What did they expect?

I expected none of the "inflammatory" footage of Septermber 11th to ever be shown on tv again. They showed the impact of the second plane and other footage of one of the towers collapsing.

I have a friend who says we must pursue the War on Terrorism because of 3000 people, dead, in New York. While I agree that agressive Fundamentalist Islam must be fought, since it is bent on our destruction. There are also 1000 dead, still, in the Arizona, laying on the bottom of Pearl Harbor. How's that any different if we are simply out for vengeance?

That's just it. We, as a nation, are not out for vengeance. The Japanese are no longer a threat. The Fundamentalist Muslims, they are a threat. They still wish our destruction and have (or are developing) the means to deliver it and we are responding to it.

It's not often that I feel my emotions swamp my thought processes, but Sept 11, 2001 still gets me. Stalin said "that a 1000 dead children are a statistic, one dead child is a tragedy" or something very similar. I want to say that watching the towers fall was witness to a disaster, but seeing the pictures of individual people jumping to their deaths, rather than be burnt alive, made it personal, but I'd be dishonest. Why do I want to parrot Stalin? At first I though he was correct with this one statement, but now I think he was wrong.

I remember watching the first Tower fall. The universe stopped. Only the image on the tv moved. I watched myself watch the collapse, not believing that it was happening, knowing that once started, the collapse wouldn't stop. It still gets me, not at much at the people jumping, but it still gets me.

Why does anyone expect the retelling to be any less chilling than watching it for the first time, live? Is anyone suprised that Zacharias Moussaui was prosecuted any less agressively than a Jihadi in Tikrit and that the full extents of his crime were covered in all phases of the trial? Is there any mass murder that doesn't have "Chilling Testimony"?