ABSTRACT
In January 2002, Zacarias Moussaoui, a French national of Moroccan descent, pleaded not guilty in Virginia federal court to six counts of conspiring to commit acts of international ter rorism in connection with the Septem ber 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade C enter.1 In o ther times, itwould have seemed unrem arkable for som eone charged with con spiring to m urder American citizens and destroy American property on American soil to be tried in a U.S. civilian court. More than two centuries ago, Article I, Section 8, Clause 10 of the U nited States Constitution granted Congress the power to “define and punish Piracies, Felonies committed on the High Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations,” a power that Congress immediately exercised by criminalizing piracy, the eighteenth-century version of m odern terrorism.2 Since then, Congress has criminalized num erous o ther international of fenses.3 In recent decades, United States courts have decided criminal cases convicting inter national hijackers, terrorists, and drug smugglers,4 as well as a string of well-publicized civil lawsuits adjudicating gross hum an rights violations.5 Most pertinent, federal prosecutors have successfully tried and convicted in U.S. courts num erous members of Al Qaeda, the very ter rorist group charged with planning the September 11 attacks, for earlier attacks on the World Trade Center and the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.6
