Germany today asked President Bush to drop the death penalty charge against Zacarias Moussaoui. Interior Minister Otto Schily "suggested that the move might be the only way to end the dispute over Germany's failure to provide the United States with its intelligence files on the terror suspect."

"The principle is we can't provide information which would lead to the death penalty," Mr. Schily said. "We have to stick to our Constitution. You have to stick to your laws."

Both German and U.S. officials described Germany's intelligence file on Moussaoui as "extensive."

So what is more important, getting as much information as we can on Al Qaeda and the terrorists so we can learn how to better prevent future attacks, or insisting on the final retribution for Moussoui and being denied the information? What if Germany's information would help us discover the nature or location of the next attacks that the Government keeps telling us are going to occur? What do we lose by letting Moussaoui spend the rest of his days in virtual isolation in a maxium security federal penitentiary like Admax in Florence, Colorado rather than die quickly by lethal injection?

Our insistence on killing Moussaoui at the expense of receiving Germany's information seems to us like the proverbial cutting off our nose to spite our face. As we typed that, we wondered about the exact meaning of that expression. We looked it up, and here is the meaning we found: "It means harming oneself, perhaps much more than the person one is trying to hurt." The phrase fits perfectly.