AS HE WAS led on Wednesday from the Virginia courtroom he has variously tormented and bemused for the past four years, Zacarias Moussaoui had a final taunt for his audience.

“America: You lost. I won,” he shouted in response to the jury’s verdict that he should serve life in prison rather than the death penalty for his part in the September 11 plot that killed 3,000 people.

It was an odd boast for a man who embraced death, who craved martyrdom, whose fantasies were filled with visions of burning infidels on earth and pliant virgins in heaven.

But over the next 30 years or more I suspect that Moussaoui will have time to reconsider his hasty judgment. Not just because life in the Florence Federal Correctional Complex in Colorado will be several virgins short of a good time for this eager jihadi; but because in fact America won something quite big this week in Alexandria. It won back something it has lost a little of in the past few years. It reminded a world that has grown a bit doubtful that the United States still represents the very highest ideals of humanity — freedom, fairness, compassion and above all, justice.

The prosecutors lost, for sure. They had assembled a case with a powerful narrative whose end-point was always intended to be a syringe and an unmarked grave for the anti-hero. But they never persuaded enough jurors that Moussaoui’s guilt warranted the ultimate penalty.

The Government in a broader sense lost too. It had gambled on a jury trial rather than a military tribunal for the defendant. Having failed to act when it had held Moussaoui in custody for those critical three weeks before September 11, it had hoped to cover its embarrassment by making him pay in arrears. Instead, his life will remain forever a rebuke to bureaucratic bungling and missed opportunities, a tale of a prisoner in custody who held all the clues that could have thwarted 9/11 but who sat unquestioned in a remote prison cell.

Understandably, some of those bereaved family members of September 11 victims feel they lost as well; that the suffering that will haunt them to the ends of their lives should have been matched at least by the satisfaction of seeing an end to the life of the only man who has ever had to answer directly for his part in the infamy.

But justice was surely done this week and it should send a signal to the world that American’s value are the right ones. This is not because, as some of America’s critics believe, the death penalty is necessarily wrong and that this week’s sentence somehow represents a rare moment of civilisation in American justice. You can oppose capital punishment — as I do — and yet not necessarily believe its existence makes America a fundamentally barbaric country.

What mattered about the Moussaoui trial, what was so impressive about it, was not the sentence itself, but the process. In a narrow legal sense, the jury’s verdict was the right one. Moussaoui plotted to murder thousands of people, but he actually seized no innocent flight attendants that day, slit no throats, piloted no planes. The gap between conspiracy and commission has always been an important one in measuring the punishment against the crime.

It is this ability of the jurors to weigh the law and the evidence in a sober way and to set aside the claims of rightful vengeance that is most impressive and most uplifting about the verdict. It was especially impressive that the jury decided a month ago that the defendant Moussaoui was eligible for the death penalty, but then subsequently decided that he should not actually receive it, a pair of decisions that reflects an almost philosophical sensitivity to the niceties of the law.

And it is precisely this respect for niceties, as frustrating as they may be to prosecutors and those who would have preferred summary justice, that marks out America, and its friends in the civilised world, from the brutes and tyrants who are trying to destroy it.

The spectacle of a government forced to make its case before a jury, of a defendant backed by taxpayer-funded lawyers, of a four-year long trial that methodically, almost ploddingly, sought the truth about the worst crime committed on American soil, even if that truth embarrassed the Government as it indicted the criminals — all of that represents the ideals of American justice.

The world has seen too little of this America in the past four years, and too much of the other America — the anxious nation at war, imprisoning its enemies (and, yes, perhaps, mistakenly imprisoning a few innocents) at Guantanamo Bay. In the process, some of the injustices the US has committed have led many to believe that America is not really any different from its enemies.

Yesterday Moussaoui was back in court one last time for his formal sentencing. As I read the reports of his last, defiant shrieks, his condemnations of the judge, the jury and the 9/11 family members whose lives he helped to ruin five years ago, another image of another sort of justice came to mind — that of the last moments of Nick Berg, the young American contractor, beheaded in Iraq by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda terrorist and associate of Moussaoui’s. Before his sentencing Berg was allowed no trial, no defence, no final observations, no condemnations, no compassionate consideration of extenuating circumstances. They just sawed his head off because he was an American.

Consider the contrast: civilisation’s enemies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere summarily and routinely execute innocent men and women — humanitarian workers, contractors, those who are deemed to have insulted their religion. America, confronted with the boastful confession of a man who conspired to kill thousands of its innocents, and who would, given the chance, willingly have liquidated every single American, chose to spare his life.

Zacarias Moussaoui’s fate, and that of Nick Berg, remind us that we should never forget whose side we are on.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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