March 8, 2006
Radical Says Moussaoui Deamed of Plane Attack
By NEIL A. LEWIS
ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 8 — Prosecutors seeking the death penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui played a videotaped statement today in which a member of an Islamic radical group testified that Mr. Moussaoui had visited him in Malaysia in 2000 and said he had a dream to fly an airplane into the White House.

In the four-hour videotape, Fauzi bin Abu Bakar Bafana, the former treasurer of Jemaah Islamiyah, a southeast Asian group linked to Al Qaeda, said that the man who introduced himself as "John" and stayed at his home in Kuala Lumpur also asked for materials to make explosives and help in arranging flight training.

Prosecutors are laying out evidence in the sentencing trial of Mr. Moussaoui, a 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan heritage who is the only person to be charged in an American court with involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Because Mr. Moussaoui has already pleaded guilty to six felony counts, three of which expose him to the death penalty, the sole issue before the jury is whether he should be sentenced to death by lethal injection or kept in prison for life.

Mr. Moussaoui did not participate in the Sept. 11 attacks, as he had been arrested three weeks earlier on immigration violations in Minnesota, where he was taking flight lessons. Nonetheless, prosecutors have argued that he deserves to die because he was an integral part of Al Qaeda's plans to fly planes into buildings. They say his willful concealment of his knowledge of such Al Qaeda plans when he was arrested contributed to the nearly 3,000 deaths on the day of the attacks.

The videotaped deposition played for the jury today was taken in 2002 after Mr. Bafana's arrest in Singapore in November 2001 for plotting to blow up United States military facilities there. He said that the man known to him as John visited him and came with references noting that he had been sent by Osama bin Laden, the head of Al Qaeda.

One night in the bedroom he had offered to his guest, he said, John told him of a dream he had to fly an airplane into the White House as part of his jihad. Mr. Bafana did not, in his testimony, explicitly say that John was Mr. Moussaoui but said he recognized him from photos he was shown by investigators.

Mr. Moussaoui himself made it plain that he was John when he cross-examined Mr. Bafana. At the time of the deposition, Mr. Moussaoui was acting as his own lawyer, a situation that no longer exists, since Judge Leonie M. Brinkema revoked that privilege because of his frequent courtroom outbursts. Although he has been in courtroom since Monday's opening arguments, the videotape was the first opportunity for the jury to see and hear Mr. Moussaoui in action.

In his cross-examination, conducted via a satellite hookup to Singapore, Mr. Moussaoui offered dozens of objections to the questions asked of Mr. Bafana by a prosecutor during the direct examination. While Judge Brinkema, sitting in the Virginia courtroom with Mr. Moussaoui, rejected most of his objections, she did agree that several were valid and occasionally required the prosecutor to change his questions.

The account given by Mr. Bafana has largely been disclosed in previous documents and reports about Mr. Moussaoui's time in Malaysia. But it nonetheless provided a vivid portrayal for the jury of Mr. Moussaoui's activities and sympathies before the Sept. 11 attacks.

When it was his turn to cross-examine Mr. Bafana, Mr. Moussaoui asked pointedly if the witness was cooperating with the United States investigation of him because he had been promised leniency by Singaporean authorities in whose custody he remains. The witness, whose English was as halting as Mr. Moussaoui's, replied that he had not been promised anything but chose to cooperate because he was so opposed to killing innocent civilians.



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March 8, 2006
Moussaoui Jury Watches Video Testimony
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:26 p.m. ET

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) -- Al-Qaida adherent Zacarias Moussaoui told an Islamic radical in Malaysia that he had a dream about flying a plane into the White House, according to court testimony Wednesday.

He also asked the group for $10,000 to bankroll his flight training in the United States, but the group's leaders agreed to give him only a small fraction of that, according to the testimony.

The jury at Moussaoui's sentencing trial for terrorist conspiracy watched videotaped testimony from Fauzi bin Abu Bakar Bafana, acknowledged treasurer of the Southeast Asian Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist network, a group linked to al-Qaida.

Moussaoui is the only man charged in the U.S. in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Ironically, it was only through Moussaoui's own cross-examination of the witness during a 2002 deposition that Moussaoui was positively identified as the man with the dream. The witness, Bafana, had initially only given a description that matched Moussaoui. Bafana said he knew the man only by the name John.

On cross-examination, Moussaoui -- who at the time was acting as his own attorney -- asked Bafana what John looked like. Bafana responded, ''He looks exactly like you.''

''Are you certain? Is it me?'' Moussaoui asked. Bafana answered, ''Certain.''

Then Moussaoui said that ''maybe somebody looks exactly like me.''

''I confirm it's you,'' Bafana said.

The Singapore-born Bafana said he was asked to host the man known to him as John at his home in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1999 and John talked to him about dreams he had in his sleep, including one to attack the White House with an airliner.

The deposition was taken in 2002, after Bafana was taken into custody in Singapore. On the videotape, Moussaoui frequently objects to prosecutors' questions -- nearly all of his objections were overruled.

During cross-examination, Moussaoui asked Bafana, ''Why are you cooperating with the United States? What is the reason?''

Bafana responded that the Singapore authorities ordered him to cooperate, and he added, ''I believe killing of innocent civilians is not in accordance with Islam.''

Moussaoui also tried to raise doubts about Bafana's testimony, quizzing him about details of his trips to Afghanistan.

In the deposition, Bafana does not identify John as Moussaoui but gives a general description that fits him. The testimony also is consistent with Moussaoui's previous admission in court that Osama bin Laden had once told him to ''remember your dream.'' Moussaoui did not deny being John.

Bafana testified that he wrote proposals to attack U.S. military interests in Singapore and shared them with al-Qaida. He also said he took John to a flying club in Kuala Lumpur but John did not join because it was too expensive.

Bafana said that when John asked for $10,000 in U.S. dollars to help pay for flight training in the United States, he was instructed to give him $2,000 in Singapore dollars -- about $1,200 in U.S. currency -- instead. He said the instruction came from his superior in the terrorist network, Indonesian Riduan Isamuddin, known as Hambali.

The testimony on the third day of the trial was part of the prosecution's case that Moussaoui deserves the death penalty instead of life in prison. The government argues that if Moussaoui had not lied about his terrorist links and the flight training he eventually took in the U.S., the government would have unraveled the Sept. 11 plot.

Defense attorneys argue the FBI's incompetence and bureaucratic gridlock kept authorities from stopping the attacks, and a confession from Moussaoui would have changed nothing.

FBI agents acknowledged under cross-examination that the bureau knew years before Sept. 11 that al-Qaida had plans to use planes as missiles to destroy prominent buildings.

They also acknowledged numerous missed opportunities in the months before Sept. 11 to catch two of the hijackers with terrorist links known to the government, even though the pair frequently used their own names in the U.S. to rent cars, buy plane tickets and even, once, to file a police report after one got mugged.

^------

EDITOR'S NOTE: Associated Press Writer Michael J. Sniffen contributed to this report.



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Update 10: Judge Warns Prosecutors in Moussaoui Trial
By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN , 03.09.2006, 07:40 PM


The judge in the death-penalty trial of confessed al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui warned prosecutors Thursday that they were moving their case into shaky legal territory.

"I must warn the government it is treading on delicate legal ground here," U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said at the conclusion of the day's testimony, after the jury had left the courtroom. "I don't know of any case where a failure to act is sufficient for the death penalty as a matter of law."

The key issue in Moussaoui's sentencing trial has been his failure to disclose his terrorist ties to federal agents when he was arrested in August 2001 on immigration violations. He is the only person ever charged in this country in connection with al-Qaida's attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Both sides agree Moussaoui lied to the FBI, but they differ on what Moussaoui was legally obliged to do given the Fifth Amendment's guarantee against self-incrimination. Prosecutors argue that once Moussaoui agreed to talk to federal agents, he was required to tell the truth - to confess his ties to al-Qaida and his plans to fly an airplane into the White House.

The defense argues Moussaoui was not required to confess.

The issue is crucial because, to obtain the death penalty, prosecutors must prove that federal agents would have prevented at least one death on Sept. 11 if Moussaoui had not lied. Their case would be much easier if that means Moussaoui also was obligated to disclose his al-Qaida membership and terrorist training.

Brinkema made her comments as she rejected a defense motion for a mistrial. Moussaoui's lawyers were angry because they believed a question from prosecutor David Novak implied to the jury that Moussaoui had an obligation to speak to FBI agents even after Moussaoui had invoked his right to a lawyer two days into questioning by the FBI. Agents immediately stopped questioning him at that point.

Brinkema said she did not feel a mistrial was warranted because she struck Novak's question from the record as soon as he asked it.

The issue developed as the FBI agent who arrested Moussaoui testified he suspected the student pilot from France was a terrorist, but that Moussaoui's lies sent agents on "wild goose chases" away from his links to al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden.

Harry Samit testified the lies sent agents futilely searching London - the home listed on Moussaoui's passport - for associates he claimed had given him money, but that Moussaoui never mentioned the alias used by Ramzi Binalshibh, an al-Qaida operative, to wire him cash from Germany.

The 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent did not admit getting money from that operative for almost four years - not until he pleaded guilty last April to conspiring with al-Qaida to fly planes into U.S. buildings.

The jury here will decide whether that guilty plea will put Moussaoui to death or imprison him for life.

Over objections by court-appointed defense lawyer Edward MacMahon, prosecutor Novak asked Samit one by one about Moussaoui's admissions last April and whether he gave any hint of them in 2001. Each time the answer was no.

What if Moussaoui had admitted in 2001 that he was an al-Qaida member who had pledged obedience to bin Laden?

"I would have asked additional questions about his role in al-Qaida and his relation to Osama bin Laden. It would have opened up a whole world of questions," replied Samit, a counterterrorism specialist.

"The answers dictate the logical course of the interview," said Samit, who arrested Moussaoui in Minnesota on Aug. 16, 2001, for immigration violations. "You can't ask logical follow-up questions if he provides misleading answers. It takes you down all sorts of alleys - wild goose chases, essentially."

Samit said that during his initial 90-minute interview of Moussaoui, Moussaoui claimed he was taking commercial flight training lessons in Minnesota "for enjoyment and his own personal ego." Moussaoui claimed the more than $32,000 in cash he brought into the United States was savings from work in an export-import business and from friends and associates.

Agents pressed Moussaoui for the names of the friends and associates who supplied the cash and for a day he supplied only a single name, "Taleal." When Moussaoui a day later said Taleal was Akhmed Atef, Samit immediately asked bureau agents in London to search for that man because the only foreign address they had for Moussaoui was in London.

Samit immediately became suspicious of Moussaoui when executives of a flight school in suburban Minneapolis reported a foreign student training to fly a Boeing 747-400 despite having almost no pilot experience.

One of the flight school's instructors testified he urged his bosses to call the FBI after his new student responded angrily to innocent questions about his religion and paid for his training in $100 bills.

Instructor Clarence Prevost told the jury he first assumed Moussaoui was a rich guy "just fulfilling a dream."

But on the first day of class, when Moussaoui, asked whether he was a Muslim, responded with a terse "I am nothing," Prevost became suspicious.

"I said, 'Should we be doing this?'" Prevost told the court. "'We don't know anything about this guy and we're teaching him to throw the switches on a (Boeing) 747.'"



Associated Press writer Matthew Barakat contributed to this report.

March 13, 2006
Judge Recesses Moussaoui Trial Amid Alleged Prosecutorial Misconduct
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- An angry federal judge unexpectedly recessed the death penalty trial of confessed al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui to consider whether government violations of her rules against coaching witnesses should remove the death penalty as an option.

The stunning development came at the opening of the fifth day of the trial as the government had informed the judge and the defense over the weekend that a lawyer for the Federal Aviation Administration had coached four government FAA witnesses in violation of the rule set by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema. The rule was that no witness should hear trial testimony in advance.

"This is the second significant error by the government affecting the constitutional rights of the defendant and the criminal justice system in this country in the context of a death case," Brinkema told lawyers in the case outside the presence of the jury.

Defense attorney Edward MacMahon moved to have the judge dismiss the death penalty as a possible outcome, saying "this is not going to be a fair trial." In the alternative, he said, at least she should excuse the government's FAA witnesses from the case.

Prosecutor David Novak replied that removing the FAA witnesses would "exclude half the government's case." Novak suggested instead that the problem could be fixed by a vigorous cross-examination by the defense.

But Brinkema said she would need time to study what to do.

"In all the years I've been on the bench, I have never seen such an egregious violation of a rule on witnesses," she said.

Brinkema noted that last Thursday, Novak asked a question that she ruled out of order after the defense said the question should result in a mistrial. In that question, Novak suggested that Moussaoui might have had some responsibility to go back to the FBI, after he got a lawyer, and then confess his terrorist ties.

Brinkema warned the government at that point that it was treading on shaky legal ground because she said she knew of no case where a failure to act resulted in a death penalty as a matter of law.

Even prosecutor Novak conceded that the witness coaching was "horrendously wrong."

According to descriptions by the lawyers in court, it appeared that a female FAA attorney who had attended closed hearings in the case went over with four upcoming witnesses from her agency the opening statements at the trial, the government's strategy and even the transcript of the questioning of an FBI agent on the first day.

"She was at the Classified Information Act procedures hearing and she should have known it was wrong," Novak said.

MacMahon said the government had told the defense she had wanted the witnesses to be very careful in discussing the FBI agent's acknowledgment that the FBI knew long before Sept. 11, 2001 that al-Qaida terrorists in the Philippines were working on a plan to fly an airplane into CIA headquarters.

The FAA attorney also apparently told the witnesses, erroneously Novak said, that the government was planning to say that magnetometers at airport check-ins are 100 percent effective.

Novak claimed there was no harm in that disclosure because the government is not going to make that argument.



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March 13, 2006
Judge Raises Possibility of Mistrial in Moussaoui Sentencing
By NEIL A. LEWIS
ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 13 — The sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui teetered on the brink of a mistrial today, as the judge in the case angrily said she might spare him the death penalty following the disclosure that a government lawyer had improperly coached some witnesses.

"In all my years on the bench, I've never seen a more egregious violation of the rule about witnesses," Judge Leonie M. Brinkema said.

The judge recessed the trial until Wednesday. She said she would rule then on a request from Mr. Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers that she end the sentencing trial, now in its second week, and order that he be imprisoned for life instead of executed, as the government has urged.

She also scheduled a hearing for Tuesday to look into the improper sharing of information with seven witnesses — some of whom were scheduled to testify for the prosecution and some for the defense. The lawyer involved in the incident was identified by a federal official as Carla J. Martin of the Transportation Security Administration. Judge Brinkema had earlier ordered that people scheduled to testify not be given access to transcripts by prior witnesses, a common order in such cases.

But Ms. Martin gave the witnesses transcripts of opening statements and of testimony last week by an F.B.I. agent, Michael Anticev.

Two of the witnesses scheduled to appear for the government were identified as Lynne A. Osmus and Claudio Manno of the Federal Aviation Administration.

The testimony of aviation officials could be crucial because of the unusual nature of the hearing.

Mr. Moussaoui, a 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan heritage, has already pleaded guilty to six felony counts, three of which expose him to the death penalty. The only question before the jury is whether he should be executed or sentenced to life in prison.

When the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were carried out, Mr. Moussaoui was in jail, having been arrested three weeks earlier in Minnesota, where he was taking flying lessons. The government has argued that he deserves to be executed because he lied to investigators after his arrest about his knowledge of Al Qaeda plans to fly airplanes into buildings.

The aviation officials were expected to testify as to what steps might have been taken if Mr. Moussaoui had told the truth.

At the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, Ms. Osmus was the deputy associate administrator of the agency's Civil Aviation Security Program, and Mr. Manno was the director of the Office of Intelligence in that office. After the attacks, Congress transferred the job of aviation security to a new agency, the Transportation Security Administration, but Ms. Osmus and Mr. Manno are still with the F.A.A.

Edward J. MacMahon, Mr. Moussaoui's chief defense lawyer, said Ms. Martin had been engaged in "an obvious effort to shape the testimony of the witnesses."

David Novak, a prosecutor, agreed that the disclosures had been wrong. But he argued that the case should go forward and that any problems caused by Ms. Martin's actions could be remedied during cross-examination by Mr. Moussaoui's lawyers.

It was not clear why Ms. Martin had shared materials with defense witnesses, who are expected to testify about earlier warnings about terrorist threats to hijack airplanes. Judge Brinkema said that she would question all the witnesses for both sides on Tuesday before making a decision on the motion for a mistrial.

Judge Brinkema, who said she had been informed of the coaching by the prosecutors, recalled that on Thursday, she had denied a defense motion for a mistrial because of a separate mistake, although she had admonished prosecutors at that time.

"This is the second significant error of the government affecting the constitutional rights of this defendant," she said. "More importantly, it affects the integrity of the criminal justice system in the United States."

David Novak, a prosecutor, argued that the case should go forward and that any problems caused by Ms. Martin's actions could be remedied during cross-examination by Mr. Moussaoui's lawyers.

Last week, the jury heard testimony from the F.B.I. agent who arrested Mr. Moussaoui on immigration charges three weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The agent, Harry Samit, testified that he was convinced that Mr. Moussaoui was an Islamic extremist who knew about some terrorist plan involving airplane hijackings, but that Mr. Moussaoui's lies sent him off on "wild goose chases" up to the day of the attacks.

Mr. Samit testified that he had tried to obtain warrants to search Mr. Moussaoui's belongings but had been hampered because Mr. Moussaoui had concealed that he was a member of Al Qaeda and that the group was plotting to crash planes into buildings.

If Mr. Moussaoui had not concealed that information, Mr. Samit said, that would have led to an intense investigation, but he did not flatly assert that it would have prevented the attacks.

In questioning Mr. Samit, Mr. Novak asked loudly whether Mr. Moussaoui had reached out from the local jail to tell him what he knew about Al Qaeda in the immediate days before the attack. By that time, Mr. Moussaoui had said he would not speak to investigators without a lawyer.

Judge Brinkema, who had warned prosecutors not to go too far in talking of Mr. Moussaoui's responsibility to confess fully, ruled the question improper, but said it did not rise to a mistrial.

Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and John O'Neil from New York.



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--------------------
Judge May Throw Out Death Penalty in Moussaoui Trial
--------------------

By Richard Serrano
Times Staff Writer

March 13 2006, 11:21 AM PST

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- The judge in the sentencing phase of the government's case against confessed Sept. 11 co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui today threatened to throw out the government's motion for the death penalty after prosecutors told her that a government lawyer had coached seven prospective witnesses.

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...-home-headlines

http://news.findlaw.com/nytimes/docs/mouss...2206ctordw.html

Order Prohibiting Non-Victim Witnesses
From Following Trial Proceedings
U.S. v. Zacarias Moussaoui Email This

March 15, 2006
Lawyer Thrust Into Spotlight After Misstep in Terror Case
By STEPHEN LABATON
and MATTHEW L. WALD
WASHINGTON, March 14 — In a city of lawyers, Carla J. Martin has become the most talked-about lawyer in town.

Ms. Martin, an obscure official in the counsel's office at the Transportation Security Administration, now appears to bear responsibility for undercutting the government's long-running effort to execute the only man tried in an American courtroom for involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Known among her peers as an aggressive, largely behind-the-scenes courtroom strategist, she is said by the judge in the case to have committed a potentially devastating blunder of the sort that law students are routinely warned about: coaching witnesses.

Dealing a major setback to the government's prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, Judge Leonie M. Brinkema ruled on Tuesday that because of three significant instances of misbehavior by government lawyers during the trial, most notably the missteps by Ms. Martin, she was barring the prosecutors from using any testimony or evidence from a handful of government aviation officials.

Ms. Martin has declined to explain her actions in court or to reporters, and Judge Brinkema said Ms. Martin's lawyer expected his client to invoke her right against self-incrimination. But e-mail messages made public in the Moussaoui case this week, along with accounts from colleagues and supervisors, paint a picture of a lawyer who was often well regarded but also had a reputation for sometimes pushing too hard.

Ms. Martin, 51, is a former flight attendant at World Airways, where she often flew between the United States and Germany because she spoke German. She began working at the Federal Aviation Administration before she completed law school at American University's Washington College of Law in 1989.

Ms. Martin has almost no experience in criminal prosecutions because most of her work has involved defending the government in civil lawsuits. She moved to the Transportation Security Administration when it was created in 2002.

Some lawyers who have worked with Ms. Martin in other cases said they were stunned by the events in the Moussaoui case.

"She's articulate and forceful and aggressive and smart," said Thomas J. Whalen, an aviation lawyer at Condon & Forsyth who has worked on her side in some cases and against her in others. "I'm really surprised about what's happened. It's more than being tough and aggressive."

In the Moussaoui case, her communications with witnesses, and new evidence that surfaced Tuesday that she told some witnesses not to cooperate with defense lawyers, puts the prosecution in the position of having to investigate and sharply criticize a government lawyer who has worked on the case.

In a different case, in which Ms. Martin tried to keep vital evidence out of the hands of a lawyer on the ground that he had been associated with a civil rights group, she was accused by the other side of overstepping court boundaries and running roughshod over standard courtroom procedure in a zeal to protect national security.

Ms. Martin's mother, Jean Martin Lay, said she spoke to her daughter Monday night.

"She was so devastated," Ms. Lay said in a telephone interview from her home in Knoxville, Tenn. "She said she just didn't hear the judge."

Ms. Lay said her daughter was in the courtroom when Judge Brinkema issued the order on handling witnesses, but was probably concentrating on something else "instead of being mindful."

The judge's written order was issued last month, and Ms. Martin's contact with the witnesses occurred last week, according to e-mail messages made public by the court. The order was meant to sequester witnesses so their testimony would not be corrupted. It barred the witnesses from receiving the testimony of other witnesses or receiving any news accounts of the trial. The e-mail messages and the recent testimony show that Ms. Martin provided testimony and advice to seven witnesses.

Ms. Martin's mother said her impression was that her daughter found her work at the Transportation Security Administration "not the most satisfying or rewarding type job" because it did not involve any big cases. Her current salary, according to a government employee database, is about $120,000 a year.

Others, some speaking for attribution and others not, said they could see why Ms. Martin would find herself in trouble.

Claudio Manno, who at the time of the Sept. 11 attack was the assistant administrator for security at the F.A.A., testified Tuesday that Ms. Martin had taken up too much time second-guessing him and bombarding him with e-mail messages and requests.

"She tended to go off target and wasted our time," Mr. Manno said. "We didn't think it was pertinent."

A. P. Pishevar, a Maryland lawyer who tangled with Ms. Martin in another case, said her conduct in that case "sticks out like a sore thumb."

According to court records, she led an effort on behalf of the government to try to intervene in a defamation, discrimination and malicious prosecution lawsuit brought against Lufthansa by one of Mr. Pishevar's clients. The client was Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh, an Iranian-born doctor, now an American citizen and associate professor of medicine at U.C.L.A. who was arrested and spent a night in jail after complaining about discriminatory treatment by Lufthansa officials at Dulles International Airport.

Lufthansa tried to have the case dismissed by filing a secret motion that said it had detained Mr. Kalantar to follow a secret F.A.A. security directive. According to court records, Ms. Martin urged Lufthansa to withhold the summary judgment motion and the security directive from both Mr. Kalantar and his lawyer, Mr. Pishevar.

Court records show that Ms. Martin said to one Lufthansa lawyer that ordinarily much of the evidence would be available to lawyers for a plaintiff. But she said the government sought to keep all the material from Mr. Pishevar, an American citizen and member of the bar in Washington, Maryland and the United States Supreme Court, because he had worked for an organization that fights discrimination in the United States against Iranians.

Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. of the Federal District Court in Washington ultimately denied the effort to dismiss the case and directed the government to turn over the material, which remains under seal, Mr. Pishevar said. The case has not yet been set for trial.

Mr. Pishevar said he still felt numb from his experience with Ms. Martin, who he said was "from behind the scenes, trying to pull many of the strings."

Told about the latest developments in the Moussaoui case, Mr. Pishevar paused, then said, "Res ipsa loquitur," a Latin legal term meaning, "The thing speaks for itself."

Others describe a more positive experience with Ms. Martin.

One of her earliest assignments was to monitor the trial brought by the survivors of those who died when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. Her main job, according to a news account at the time and a lawyer involved in the case, was to get the judge to close the courtroom any time sensitive information was to come out.

James P. Kreindler, an aviation lawyer representing the survivors, said he could not account for what had happened in the Moussaoui trial. "When one is caught up in a massive bureaucracy, you may lose part of your perspective," Mr. Kreindler said. "She may have lost a proper perspective on the proper role for any attorney involved in either the criminal or the civil justice system."

"Carla is in my experience certainly not a bad person," he added, "and this is a very, very unfortunate thing to see happen."



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March 15, 2006
Judge Penalizes Moussaoui Prosecutors by Barring Major Witnesses
By NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON, March 14 — A federal district judge dealt a serious, perhaps crippling, blow on Tuesday to the government's effort to execute Zacarias Moussaoui for the deaths that occurred in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The judge, Leonie M. Brinkema, ruled that because of three major instances of misbehavior by government lawyers in the trial, she was barring prosecutors from using any testimony or evidence from a handful of government aviation officials.

The officials were to provide a pillar of the Justice Department's argument as to why Mr. Moussaoui deserved to die: that had he told investigators when he was arrested three weeks before the attacks on immigration violations about Al Qaeda's plans to fly planes into buildings, the Federal Aviation Administration would have put in place security measures that could have prevented the attacks.

Prosecutors seemed dispirited by the ruling and indicated that they might seek an immediate review before a federal circuit court in Richmond, Va. Judge Brinkema granted their request to postpone the trial until at least Monday while they decide what to do.

Judge Brinkema said the prosecution of Mr. Moussaoui was "too riddled with errors" to proceed without some sanction against the government.

She directed her wrath most strongly against Carla J. Martin, a lawyer for the Transportation Security Administration, who was assisting prosecutors in arranging for the testimony of aviation security officials. When Judge Brinkema learned on Monday that Ms. Martin had coached seven witnesses on how to testify and respond during cross-examination, she called it the most striking example of witness tampering by a lawyer she had experienced in her years on the bench.

On Tuesday, Judge Brinkema's anger grew as she learned of another problem apparently created by Ms. Martin. During an extraordinary special hearing in the middle of the trial to determine if the witnesses had been "tainted" by the coaching, Judge Brinkema said it became apparent that Ms. Martin had violated Mr. Moussaoui's constitutional rights to a fair trial by telling prosecutors that four government officials had refused requests by defense lawyers to speak with them.

"That was a bald-faced lie," Judge Brinkema declared after some of the witnesses testified that they had not said that to Ms. Martin.

The third misstep cited by the judge was a question by a prosecutor in front of the jury last Thursday that she ruled improper. But she said the question, by David J. Novak, was not significant enough by itself to order any sanctions on the government.

"A trial, particularly a death penalty case, simply cannot go forward with this many errors," Judge Brinkema said.

Ms. Martin appeared briefly in court Tuesday after being hurriedly summoned the evening before by the judge. Ms. Martin, dressed all in black, looked as stricken as someone at a funeral as she struggled to maintain her composure.

After Judge Brinkema told her she could face criminal charges, Ms. Martin said she did not want to be questioned without a lawyer. Judge Brinkema said later that she had just concluded a telephone call with Roscoe Brown, a lawyer who said he represented Ms. Martin, and that he had advised her to invoke her constitutional rights against possible self-incrimination and not to testify.

In fashioning a remedy for the violations she cited, the judge stopped short of granting the request of Mr. Moussaoui's lawyers that she rule out the death penalty.

Because Mr. Moussaoui has pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, the sole question before the jury is whether he is to be executed or spend the rest of his life in prison.

Prosecutors had tried to salvage the case by arguing that Ms. Martin was not really part of the Justice Department team that had worked on the case. "We've worked hard on this case for four and a half years," Robert J. Spencer, the chief prosecutor argued. But Judge Brinkema said that Ms. Martin was "an attorney for the United States and you all represent the United States."

She added, "It's not the Justice Department against Mr. Moussaoui, it's the United States" that is trying to have him executed.

David Raskin, a prosecutor, argued that Ms. Martin's coaching did not affect the witnesses' testimony because they were to talk about aviation security procedures that were fact-based and indisputable. "As egregious as it was," Mr. Raskin said of the coaching, "it simply did not affect those witnesses."

But Judge Brinkema said that even after hearing from six of the government witnesses that they were unaffected by Ms. Martin's suggestions, she still could not be sure that the testimony was untainted.

The order Ms. Martin violated, issued by the judge to prevent potential witnesses from learning of previous testimony, was not unusual. "It's pretty basic," said Peter Margulies, a visiting law professor at St. John's Law School in Queens. "Lawyers know you've got to sequester witnesses."

If the elimination of the aviation security witnesses is upheld, prosecutors will have to rely on testimony from investigators about how they may have foiled the plot. Prosecutors described the logic of their case as showing that if Mr. Moussaoui had told the truth, the government would have taken both offensive steps, like having the Federal Bureau of Investigation intensify its investigation of Al Qaeda, and defensive steps, like having the aviation agency increase airport security.

Ms. Martin coached potential witnesses in e-mail messages and personal conversations. In most of the e-mail messages, Ms. Martin included the transcript of the opening trial statements along with her criticism that prosecutors had, in her view, "created a credibility gap that the defense can drive a truck through."

She also included portions of a transcript of the testimony of an F.B.I. agent, who first said last Tuesday that before Sept. 11 the bureau was not looking at the possibility that terrorists might use airplanes as weapons. But the agent, Michael Anticev, acknowledged under cross-examination that the bureau had indeed known of earlier Qaeda plans to fly planes into the C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., and the Eiffel Tower. Ms. Martin suggested ways that the witnesses not repeat that mistake.



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March 16, 2006
News Analysis
Crossing a Fine Line on Witness Coaching
By ADAM LIPTAK
The terrorism trial of Zacarias Moussaoui is teetering on collapse, thanks in large part to a government lawyer's efforts to shape the accounts of federal aviation officials set to testify in the case.

The lawyer, Carla J. Martin, provided trial transcripts and gave pointed advice to seven witnesses, in apparent violation of a court order that flatly forbade witnesses from attending the trial or reading transcripts of it.

Trial lawyers and law professors said yesterday that Ms. Martin's conduct was a flagrant violation of the order and of the federal rule of evidence on which it was based. But they added that Ms. Martin could have achieved much of what she had set out to accomplish through more subtle, quite common and perfectly lawful techniques.

"What Martin did in this case is completely out of bounds," said James A. Cohen, a trial lawyer and a law professor at Fordham University. "You don't coach with a capital C the way she did."

But the line between what is permissible and what is not, Professor Cohen continued, can be "like the difference between dusk and twilight."

He gave an example: "I might say, 'What if you learned A, B and C?' I would not say, 'What if you learned an F.B.I. agent said A, B and C?' "

The practice of barring witnesses from the courtroom during trial, known as sequestration, is, according to a classic treatise on evidence by John Henry Wigmore, "one of the greatest engines that the skill of man has ever invented for the detection of liars in a court of justice."

Sequestration has two aims: to frustrate efforts by witnesses to conform their testimony to that of earlier ones and to help the jury detect false testimony by considering varying accounts of the same events.

Yet lawyers often spend hours preparing witnesses to testify, a practice that is not only accepted but also generally considered necessary. Lawyers have been punished for incompetent representation for failing to interview and prepare witnesses.

The judge in the Moussaoui case, Leonie M. Brinkema, has barred the government from using testimony or evidence from the aviation officials as a sanction for its misconduct in the case. Lawyers for the government have indicated that they are considering an appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va.

Should they appeal, they may rely on a 2000 decision of that court reversing a trial court ruling somewhat similar to the one issued by Judge Brinkema. In the 2000 case, a defense lawyer had described an earlier witness's testimony to a witness about to testify. As punishment, the trial judge barred the testimony of the witness.

The appeals court ruled that the lawyer had not violated the sequestration order in that case. The order did not mention lawyers, the appeals court said, and lawyers are generally be free to prepare their witnesses as they see fit. The appeals court went on to say that the sanction of excluding the affected witness's testimony was, in any event, too harsh.

A dissenting appellate judge protested that the majority had created an exception for lawyers that "is contrary to precedent and common sense."

Judge Brinkema's order similarly did not specifically mention lawyers. It said only that "witnesses may not attend or otherwise follow trial proceedings (e.g., may not read transcripts) before being called to testify."

Prosecutors in the Moussaoui case called Ms. Martin's conduct reprehensible and notified the judge soon after they learned of it.

Paul W. Butler, a former federal prosecutor who helped try and convict four men for the 1998 terrorist bombings of American embassies in East Africa, said that the difference between acceptable preparation and unethical coaching should not be hard to discern.

"Your obligation as a prosecutor is to bring out the truth," said Mr. Butler, now in private practice at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington. "You can't shape it around what other people have to say."

But he, too, drew some distinctions. "It's proper to share the questions you're going to ask them but not to tell them what answers they should give," Mr. Butler said. "It's O.K. to point out additional facts or show them documents that would refresh their recollection. It's entirely proper for someone to come in and do a mock cross-examination to draw out what might be vulnerabilities in the witness's testimony."

What is not proper, he said, is to recite, much less transmit wholesale the testimony of an earlier witness.

"You would never say so-and-so said such-and-such on the stand," Mr. Butler said.

Professor Cohen, who has litigated many cases against federal prosecutors, said they can spend "unbelievable amounts of time with their witnesses." But he said he had never suspected improper coaching.

Yale Kamisar, who teaches criminal procedure at the University of San Diego, said Ms. Martin's crucial mistake was writing her advice in e-mail messages and handing over transcripts to witnesses.

"That's not the way you coach," Professor Kamisar said. "In the real world, it's more of just, 'Let's go over your testimony.' Here, there was not even a pretense, not even a cover."



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Prosecutors Scramble to Salvage 9/11 Case After Ruling

By Jerry Markon

Federal prosecutors yesterday implored a judge to reverse her decision banning key witnesses from testifying at the death penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, saying the misconduct of a government lawyer they labeled a "lone miscreant" should not imperil the case.

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

Embattled Lawyer Had Limited Role in 9/11 Trial

By Jerry Markon and Carol Morello

The government lawyer who has thrown the death penalty trial of Sept. 11, 2001, conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui into turmoil by improperly contacting witnesses was supposed to be playing a limited role and was never to be involved with legal strategy or litigating the case.

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

Terrorist Trial on Brink of Collapse

WASHINGTON-Prosecutors in Zacarias Moussaoui's case ask that a ban
on aviation security witnesses be lifted, or 'there's no point for
us to go forward.' By Richard A. Serrano and Johanna Neuman.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/ezb...Io30G2B0HNPa0Eg

March 16, 2006
Prosecutors Seek to Revive Moussaoui Case
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:01 a.m. ET

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) -- Fighting for a death penalty in a 9/11 case, prosecutors are beseeching a federal judge to reconsider her decision to exclude half the government's case against confessed al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.

They acknowledge their only hope of obtaining the death penalty for the 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent is to persuade U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema she punished the government too harshly for tampering with trial witnesses and lying to defense attorneys.

Brinkema did not immediately respond to the motion for reconsideration that prosecutors filed Wednesday evening. But she had indicated earlier she had time available Thursday to hear such a motion if it were filed.

The jury has been sent home until Monday to give prosecutors time for their next step.

Brinkema barred prosecutors from submitting any witnesses or exhibits about aviation security. Prosecutors responded in their motion that this evidence ''goes to the very core of our theory of the case.''

At the very least, the prosecutors argued, they should be allowed to present a newly designated aviation security witness who had no contact with Carla J. Martin, the Transportation Security Administration lawyer responsible for the government's misconduct. This would ''allow us to present our complete theory of the case, albeit in imperfect form.''

''The public has a strong interest in seeing and hearing it (aviation security evidence), and the court should not eliminate it from the case, particularly not ... where other remedies are available,'' they wrote Brinkema.

Brinkema ruled Tuesday that Martin violated federal rules when she sent trial transcripts to seven aviation witnesses, coached them on how to deflect defense attacks and lied to defense lawyers to prevent them from interviewing witnesses they wanted to call. The judge said Martin's actions and other government missteps had left the aviation evidence ''irremediably contaminated.''

The only person charged in this country in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Moussaoui pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with al-Qaida to fly airplanes into U.S. buildings. But he denies any involvement in 9/11, saying he was training for a possible future attack.

This trial is to decide whether he is executed or spends life behind bars.

Prosecutors said the excluded evidence ''is one of the two essential and interconnected components of our case.''

The prosecution's case is based on offensive and defensive measures they argue the government would have taken if Moussaoui had not lied to FBI agents about his terrorist connections when arrested in Minnesota three weeks before al-Qaida flew jetliners into New York's World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field on 9/11.

They say offensive steps by the FBI to locate 9/11 hijackers in advance and defensive airport security measures by federal aviation officials would have combined to prevent at least one death that day. To get a death penalty, prosecutors must show beyond a reasonable doubt that an action of Moussaoui's -- his lies, in this case -- led directly to at least one 9/11 death.

As a compromise, prosecutors offered to drop arguments that the Federal Aviation Administration would have barred small knives, like those used by the hijackers, from planes and would have altered its terrorist screening profiles to catch the attackers.

Instead, they would call one witness, whom they did not identify, who worked at the FAA in August 2001 and could discuss the government's use of ''no-fly'' lists to bar named terrorists from planes and how those lists evolved. They said Martin had no contact with this witness.

''We don't know whether it is worth us proceeding at all, candidly, under the ruling you made today,'' Assistant U.S. Attorney Rob Spencer said in an unusually blunt assessment during a conference call Tuesday. Spencer added that continuing under these conditions would ''waste the jury's time and the court's time, and we're all mindful of the expense of this proceeding.''

If Brinkema refuses to budge, it's not clear what appeals remain open. Defense attorney Edward MacMahon said the government can't appeal Brinkema's ruling to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond now that the trial is under way.

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said prosecutors might ask the appeals court for a rarely used common law relief order called a writ of mandamus, but such orders are granted only in extraordinary circumstances.

------

On the Net:

Court's Moussaoui site: http://www.vaed.uscourts.gov/notablecases/...aoui/index.html



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http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0316/dailyUpdate.html?s=mesdu

Moussaoui case may become latest 'flub'

US record has not been good in high profile terror cases.

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

This week's discovery of potential witness tampering in the Zacarias Moussaoui trial, which may strip the prosecution of its one chance to get the death penalty for him, is just the latest in a series of mistakes that have marked terrorist trials in the US.
The Los Angeles Times reported this week that juries have rejected the government's arguments in high-profile cases, convictions have been thrown out because of mistakes by US prosecutors, and at least one individual has been falsely accused of participating in terrorist events. And top Bush administration officials have often promised "more than they can deliver" in the prosecutions.

"There have been a lot of flubs," said George Washington University law professor Stephen A. Saltzburg. "I think most observers would say they were underwhelmed by the prosecutions brought so far."
Some of the government's problems include:

A computer science student in Idaho was accused of aiding terrorists when he designed a website that included information on terrorists in Chechnya and Israel. A jury in Boise acquitted Sami Omar Al-Hussayen of the charges in June 2004.

A Florida college professor was indicted on charges of supporting terrorists by promoting the cause of Palestinian groups. A jury in Tampa acquitted Sami Al-Arian in December.

Two Detroit men arrested a week after the Sept. 11 attacks were believed to be plotting a terrorist incident, in part on the basis of sketches found in their apartment. A judge overturned the convictions of Karim Koubriti and Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi after he learned that the prosecutor's key witness had admitted lying to the FBI, a fact the prosecutor had kept hidden. The Detroit News reported in February that a special grand jury was "nearing the end of its probe into whether three government officials conspired to obstruct justice and induce perjury in the 2003 Detroit terrorism trial."

In 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the US had arrested an American citizen, Jose Padilla, and said he had been trying to find a way to build a dirty bomb to use against the US. Mr. Padilla was held in a US military brig for four years, and when charged with conspiring to aid terrorists abroad in early 2006 in Miami, there was no mention of any "dirty bomb."

In early 2004, the FBI arrested Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer and Muslim convert in Portland, Ore. The agency said that they had found his fingerprints on a knapsack used by one of the bombers in the Madrid train attacks of March 2004. Mr. Mayfield was held for in custody for over two weeks, even though the Spanish police told the FBI the evidence was inconclusive. When finally released, the FBI apologized and blamed the problem on a bad digital image. Mayfield is suing the federal government.

The Washington Post reported that a Justice Department report released on March 10 said that while the FBI did not misuse its powers in the case, "the Patriot Act anti-terrorism law 'amplified the consequences' of the FBI's misidentification of a fingerprint by allowing numerous agencies to share flawed information." One good thing that came out of the Mayfield case, reports the Chicago Tribune, is that the botched fingerprinting led to "improved fingerprint identification."

Capt. James Yee, a Muslim chaplain at the Guantánamo prison camp where many terrorist detainees are held, was arrested and accused of espionage. Wikipedia.com writes that, "When returning from duty at the Guantanamo Bay naval base, he was arrested on September 10, 2003, in Jacksonville, Florida and charged with five offenses: sedition, aiding the enemy, spying, espionage, and failure to obey a general order. He was then transferred to a United States Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina." CNN reported at the time that he might also be charged with treason.

The military never said what country Yee was supposed to have been spying for. He was held for 76 days in detention. All court-martial charges against him were "quietly" dropped in March 2004. The US military has never offered an explanation for its actions, or an apology to Yee.

The LA Weekly reported on March 1 that there are now doubts about the FBI case against a father and son accused of terrorism in Lodi, Calif. That case went to trial in February. The Los Angeles Times also reported Wednesday "terrorism experts and even federal officials" are expressing serious doubts about the testimony from the government's key informant in the case, who said he saw Al Qaeda's number two, Ayman Zawahiri, in 1999 in Lodi. Government sources say that while Zawahiri was in the US in the early 90s, he had not returned to the US since 1995 at the latest.

The Bush administration says that more than 400 people have been charged with terrorism-related crimes and that 228 have been convicted. But LA Weekly points out that "the vast majority of these cases have involved minor crimes not directly related to terrorism, such as immigration violations." In June 2005, The Washington Post looked at 361 "terrorism-related" cases, as identified by the Justice Department, and found that only 39 convictions for crimes related to national security or terrorism.

David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor, told the Los Angeles Times that pressure from the top may have led to many of the errors.

"The government in the war on terrorism has generally swept broadly and put a high premium on convictions at any cost," he said. "That puts pressures on prosecutors — to overcharge, to coach witnesses, to fail to disclose exculpatory evidence."
In the Moussaoui case, USAToday.com reports the prosecutors Wednesday asked US District Judge Leonie Brinkema to reconsider her ruling that would prohibit testimony from key witnesses because of witness tampering. "The sanction is simply too severe, making it impossible for us to present our theory of the case to the jury," the prosecutors said in their appeal. Judge Brinkema will hear their appeal Thursday.

March 16, 2006
Prosecution Lawyer in Moussaoui Case Placed on Leave
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:16 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The lawyer accused by a judge of coaching witnesses in the death penalty case of Zacarias Moussaoui was placed on paid administrative leave from her job Thursday as the trial remained in recess.

The move was confirmed by Yolanda Clark, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration.

The TSA lawyer, Carla Martin, violated federal witness rules when she sent trial transcripts to seven aviation witnesses, coached them on how to deflect defense attacks and lied to defense lawyers to prevent them from interviewing witnesses they wanted to call, a federal judge said Tuesday.

Martin's attorney, Roscoe Howard, did not immediately return calls seeking his comment on his client being placed on leave.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said that Martin's actions and other government missteps had left the aviation evidence ''irremediably contaminated,'' and the judge has excluded virtually half of the prosecution's case against the confessed al-Qaida conspirator.

Prosecutors now say their only hope of obtaining the death penalty for Moussaoui is to persuade the judge that she punished them too harshly for Martin's alleged witness tampering and lying.

The only person charged in this country in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Moussaoui pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with al-Qaida to fly airplanes into U.S. buildings. But he denies any involvement in 9/11, saying he was training for a possible future attack.

The trial in Alexandria, Va., is to decide whether he is executed or spends life behind bars.

Now Martin is facing charges. Brinkema told her she could be charged with civil or criminal contempt, and later said she appeared to have violated rules of legal ethics. That means she could be fined, disbarred or imprisoned, or some combination of those.

Martin, whose formal title is attorney-adviser, earns about $120,000 a year, according to TSA officials. She came to the agency from the Federal Aviation Administration in April 2002.

^------

On the Net:

Transportation Security Administration: http://www.tsa.gov



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March 17, 2006
French: Moussaoui Trial About Death Penalty
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:03 p.m. ET

PARIS (AP) -- In Zacarias Moussaoui's native France, his trial is less about terrorism than about what Europeans consider the perplexing American attachment to the death penalty.

In the Arab world, the trial is just another news story -- one that reflects little of the rage, fear and sorrow that it has conjured up for relatives of Sept. 11 victims.

While the world's media has converged on the Alexandria, Va., courtroom for the trial, not all regard it the way their American counterparts do: as a watershed, the first time anyone has been put on trial in the United States for the worst attacks on the U.S. in peacetime.

No one is portraying Moussaoui -- who has pleaded guilty to conspiring with al-Qaida to fly planes into U.S. buildings -- as a victim. But some French and Arab commentators see him as a scapegoat for a U.S. administration eager to produce results in its increasingly discredited anti-terror war.

Most French coverage of the trial has focused on what sentence the judge will hand Moussaoui, the French-born son of Moroccan immigrants: life in prison or execution.

France, which abolished capital punishment in 1981, has demanded that none of the information it provided for the U.S. case against Moussaoui be used to seek the death penalty.

''Al-Qaida is the best propagandist for the electric chair,'' wrote the daily Liberation in an editorial. But the paper went on to urge the U.S. jurors to avoid letting emotions guide their decision.

''In putting Moussaoui on trial, American justice is putting itself on trial before the entire world,'' Liberation wrote. ''The majesty of the rule of law should be so great that a murderous explosion like the one at the World Trade Center should not make it bat an eyelash.''

While France has had its own battle with terrorists, the death penalty is long forgotten here. Europeans -- who require that prospective entrants into the European Union abolish capital punishment -- are often puzzled by America's continued use of executions.

Moussaoui says he was not involved in the terrorist group's Sept. 11, 2001, plot. To obtain a death sentence, prosecutors must prove his actions led directly to at least one death.

''For American public opinion, still traumatized by the 3,000 deaths of 2001, this man presents the ideal profile of a guilty party,'' wrote the Christian weekly newsmagazine Temoignage Chretien.

''For the federal authorities, this process could provide a diversion helping them avoid explaining the memorable failures of the anti-terrorist policy,'' it said.

French and Arab television have aired interviews with Moussaoui's mother, Aicha, who accuses the United States of making an example of her son.

The Pan-Arab television station Al-Jazeera has been largely straightforward in covering the trial, avoiding commentary.

Other Arab media have given it cursory attention -- less attention, even, than the trial of Tayssir Alouni, an Al-Jazeera correspondent convicted in Spain last year of collaboration with a terrorist organization and sentenced to seven years in prison.

In Morocco, coverage of the trial has been minimal. Moussaoui's Moroccan heritage has pulled few heartstrings -- and the government's anti-terrorist stance and cooperation with Washington has cooled anti-American commentary in recent years.

European media, though, have paid closer attention to this than most American courtroom dramas.

''There's an awareness that this is the only guy that's been convicted in connection with 9/11,'' said BBC Washington correspondent James Coomarasamy, who is covering the trial. ''And if you're talking about Europe, he's a Frenchman.''

France's Le Monde newspaper, Radio France International, Agence France Presse and Al-Jazeera are among the 25 news organizations -- most of the others are from the U.S. -- that reserved seats for the trial.

------

Associated Press reporters Paul Duke in Paris, Nadia Abou El-Magd in Cairo and Elizabeth White in Washington contributed to this report.



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March 17, 2006
Judge in Moussaoui Case Accepts Compromise on Testimony
By NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON, March 17 — The government salvaged part of its death penalty case against Zacarias Moussaoui today as a federal judge partly reversed herself and said prosecutors could call aviation officials as witnesses. But she barred those who had been tainted by the improper coaching of a government lawyer.

Judge Leonie M. Brinkema refused to reconsider her earlier ruling that the government cannot use aviation witnesses who had been subjected to the improper conduct of the lawyer, Carla J. Martin. But Judge Brinkema said that an alternative proposed by the government, namely that it be allowed to call witnesses unaffected by Ms. Martin, "has merit."

Accordingly, the judge said, those witnesses can be called to testify as to what the United States government "could" have done to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, had Mr. Moussaoui disclosed what he knew before that date. But she said the witness could not testify about what the government "would" have done, "as such testimony would be unduly speculative and misleading to the jury."

Judge Brinkema said prosecutors must provide the names of such witnesses to the defense at least three days before they are to appear.

Today's ruling was far from everything the federal prosecutors had sought, but had Judge Brinkema ruled against them entirely their case might have been fatally harmed.

Ms. Martin has been forced to take a leave from the Transportation Security Administration, a department spokeswoman said Thursday.

The actions of Ms. Martin threw into turmoil the case against Mr. Moussaoui, the only person charged in a United States courtroom with responsibility for the deaths from the Sept. 11 attacks. She has not yet offered an explanation for her behavior, disclosed over the last few days, but her lawyer, in a statement Thursday, said, "Ms. Martin has now been vilified by assertions from the prosecution and assorted media pundits."

Her lawyer, Roscoe C. Howard Jr., said Ms. Martin was preparing a response.

"When her opportunity comes," Mr. Howard said, "her response will show a very different, full picture of her intentions, her conduct and her tireless dedication to a full trial."

The disclosure Monday that Ms. Martin had sent trial transcripts and e-mail messages to seven government aviation officials listed as witnesses with suggestions as to how they should testify caused a furor. Judge Brinkema called it the worst case of a lawyer tampering with witnesses she had experienced on the bench. Judge Brinkema also said Ms. Martin had not told the truth when she told prosecutors that some of the government officials had refused to talk to Mr. Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers.

The judge ruled Tuesday that the government would not be permitted to call any of the witnesses who might have been tainted by Ms. Martin's conduct.

Even though Mr. Moussaoui was in jail at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, prosecutors have argued that he bears responsibility for the deaths that day because he lied to investigators who arrested him three weeks earlier.

Judge Brinkema recessed the trial until Monday. In asking her to reconsider her ruling, prosecutors argued that the sanction against the government was excessive.

In a response Thursday, Mr. Moussaoui's lawyers reminded Judge Brinkema that courts were obliged to be especially sensitive to problems that might deny a fair trial to someone facing a death penalty.

Because Mr. Moussaoui has pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, the sole question is whether he will be executed or imprisoned for life.



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March 17, 2006
Moussaoui Judge Allows Some Aviation Witnesses
By REUTERS
Filed at 2:29 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal judge in the sentencing trial of September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui on Friday refused to reconsider her decision barring witnesses who were improperly contacted by a government lawyer but said new witnesses may testify about crucial aviation-related evidence.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema gave new life to federal prosecutors who are seeking the death penalty in the government's only case involving the airliner hijackings that killed about 3,000 people.

Earlier this week, after discovering that government lawyer Carla Martin had violated a court order on contacting witnesses, Brinkema banned the testimony of six aviation witnesses and aviation-related evidence that Martin might have handled.

Prosecutors petitioned for Brinkema to reconsider, saying much of the aviation testimony was undisputed and they could find witnesses with whom Martin did not discuss trial proceedings. The aviation testimony affects about half the government's case against Moussaoui.

Aviation-related testimony was expected to deal with how much information the Federal Aviation Administration had about possible threats to airlines and also discuss pre-September 11 security measures.

In her ruling, Brinkema said the prosecution could call ''untainted'' aviation witnesses and produce ``untainted physical evidence.'' But she gave limited parameters for the testimony.

Prosecutors are trying to prove that if Moussaoui had not lied to the FBI when he was arrested three weeks before September 11, the attacks might have been thwarted in part due to heightened security efforts by the FAA.

Moussaoui, an al Qaeda member who has pleaded guilty to conspiracy in connection with the September 11 attacks, is on trial to see if he will be executed or get life in prison. His trial is scheduled to resume on Monday.



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March 18, 2006
Judge Gives Prosecutors New Chance in Terror Case
By NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON, March 17 — The judge in the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui said on Friday that prosecutors could try to find new, untainted aviation-security witnesses to replace those who were barred from testifying because they were improperly coached by a government lawyer.

The ruling effectively allows the government to try to salvage its effort to execute Mr. Moussaoui, the only person charged in a United States courtroom with responsibility for the deaths in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The judge, Leonie M. Brinkema of Federal District Court, declined to undo her earlier decision prohibiting the prosecutors from using any of the aviation officials they originally intended to call as witnesses because they had been coached by Carla J. Martin, a government lawyer who was assisting the prosecutors.

The trial, which is solely about whether Mr. Moussaoui should be executed or jailed for life, was on the brink of falling apart after the judge's ruling on Wednesday struck at the heart of the government's case. The chief prosecutor, Robert J. Spencer, had told the judge there would "be no point in going forward" unless she relented in some manner.

But even as Judge Brinkema denied the prosecutors' request that she reconsider her striking of those witnesses, she accepted a suggestion that they put forward in a court filing: that they be allowed to try to find someone new to present the same testimony.

"The government's proposed alternate remedy of allowing it to call untainted aviation witnesses or otherwise produce evidence not tainted by Ms. Martin has merit," Judge Brinkema wrote.

Tasia Scolinos, the Justice Department's spokeswoman, said in response, "We are pleased to be able to move forward with this important case on behalf of the thousands of victims and their families."

That means the trial, in its second week when it was thrown into turmoil by the disclosure of Ms. Martin's behavior, will resume Monday morning with the cross-examination of an F.B.I. agent who arrested and interviewed Mr. Moussaoui three weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.

But the question remains as to whether it is possible to find new witnesses who are not only untainted, as the judge has required, but familiar enough with the state of aviation security in August 2001 to help support the government's case.

Mr. Moussaoui was in jail at the time of the attacks after having been arrested for immigration violations in Minnesota, where he was learning to fly a jetliner. The Justice Department has asserted that he is nonetheless responsible for the Sept. 11 deaths because he had lied to investigators and concealed his membership in Al Qaeda and his knowledge of that group's plans to fly planes into buildings.

The government's main aviation-security witness, Lynne Osmus, a senior official of the Federal Aviation Administration in August 2001, was to testify about what steps the agency "could" have taken had Mr. Moussaoui told investigators what he knew about Al Qaeda's plans.

The prosecutors were prepared to have Ms. Osmus, in particular, assert that the agency could have issued a directive putting in place 10 security measures, including a ban on short-blade knives like those used by the Sept. 11 hijackers and also owned by Mr. Moussaoui. The judge has barred aviation witnesses from testifying as to what the government "would" have done, because that would be speculation.

Edward B. MacMahon Jr., the chief defense lawyer for Mr. Moussaoui, said in a court filing that he did not believe it was possible to find any new, untainted witnesses because anyone who had the expertise of Ms. Osmus would by now have been exposed to the coaching suggestions of Ms. Martin through news reports.

Mr. MacMahon said that it was possible that someone familiar with how the aviation agency operated in August 2001 might not have had contact with Ms. Martin, but that it was highly implausible that such people would not have read about her suggestions to the witnesses.

But Justice Department officials said they were confident they could find witnesses who would be deemed authoritative and untainted.

Ms. Martin's name came up in other court proceedings Friday as lawyers defending the airlines against Sept. 11 liability suits denied that they had communicated with her. Lawyers for family members of flight attendants killed in the attacks had raised questions about alleged contacts between Ms. Martin and the airlines' lawyers.



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March 20, 2006
F.B.I. Discounted Suspicions About Moussaoui, Agent Says
By NEIL A. LEWIS
ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 20 — The F.B.I. agent who arrested and interrogated Zacarias Moussaoui just weeks before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, told a jury today that his efforts to confirm his strong suspicions that Mr. Moussaoui was involved in a terrorist airline hijacking plot were thwarted by senior bureau officials in Washington who acted out of negligence and a need to protect their careers.

Harry Samit, under intense cross-examination by Mr. Moussaoui's chief court-appointed lawyer, detailed his frustration over the days before the hijacking as he made numerous requests to look into what Mr. Moussaoui had been up to at the time of his arrest. Mr. Moussaoui was arrested on immigration violations in Minnesota, where he was learning to fly a jetliner.

"I accused the people in F.B.I. headquarters of criminal negligence" in an interview after Sept. 11, Mr. Samit acknowledged under questioning by Edward B. MacMahon Jr. He said that the senior agents in Washington "took a calculated risk not to advance the investigation" by refusing to seek search warrants for Mr. Moussaoui's belongings and computer. "The wager was a national tragedy," Mr. Samit testified.

Mr. Samit said that two senior agents declined to provide help in getting a search warrant, either through a special panel of judges that considers applications for foreign intelligence cases or through a normal application to any federal court for a criminal investigation.

As a field agent in Minnesota, he said he required help and approval from headquarters to continue his investigation. He acknowledged that he had written that Michael Maltbie, an agent in the F.B.I.'s radical fundamentalist unit, told him that applications for the special intelligence court warrants had proved troublesome for the bureau and seeking one "was just the kind of thing that would get F.B.I. agents in trouble." He wrote that Mr. Maltbie had told him that "he was not about to let that happen to him." During that period, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, had complained about improper applications from the bureau.

Mr. Samit also acknowledged that he had written that David Frasca, a supervisor of the radical fundamentalist unit, had similarly blocked him from seeking a search warrant under the more common route in a criminal investigation. Some of the special court's complaints dealt with the idea that law-enforcement officials were sometimes using the lower standard required for warrants in intelligence investigations and then using the information they obtained in criminal cases.

Mr. Frasca, Mr. Samit explained, believed that once the Moussaoui investigation was opened as an intelligence investigation, it would arouse suspicion that agents had been trying to exploit the intelligence law to get information for an investigation they now believed was a criminal one.

(An F.B.I. spokesman, Bill Carter, said the agency did not comment on pending trials or litigation.)

The distinction between the two standards for obtaining warrants has since been eliminated following the Sept. 11 attacks.

The government is trying to prove to a jury that Mr. Moussaoui should be executed because he bears some responsibility for the deaths from Sept. 11. Prosecutors have argued that if Mr. Moussaoui had told Mr. Samit and other investigators what he knew about Al Qaeda plots to fly planes into buildings, the attacks might have been foiled.

Although Mr. Samit was a government witness who sought to bolster the government's case that he could have uncovered the plot had Mr. Moussaoui spoken to him truthfully, his responses to Mr. MacMahon today appeared to provide a lift for the defense. Mr. MacMahon sought to show that the problem was not with Mr. Moussaoui but with senior F.B.I. officials in Washington who would not budge no matter how hard Mr. Samit pressed them.

The F.B.I.'s handling of clues to the impending Sept. 11 attacks was sharply criticized in a report by the Justice Department's inspector general's office in 2004. Citing a memo from a Phoenix agent who had become suspicious of several students taking flying lessons in Arizona, the report said the agent's memo did not get the timely attention it deserved, not so much because of individual lapses within the F.B.I. but because of "critical systemic failings" that kept information from being effectively evaluated and shared.

The slow and incomplete attention given the memo from Phoenix was illustrative of a system "in which important information could easily 'fall through the cracks' and not be brought to the attention of the people who needed it, the inspector general's office concluded.



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March 20, 2006
FBI Agent: Warnings About Moussaoui Unheeded
By REUTERS
Filed at 6:31 p.m. ET

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (Reuters) - An FBI agent testified in the sentencing trial of September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui on Monday that agency superiors repeatedly blocked his efforts to warn of a possible terror attack.

Harry Samit, the FBI agent who arrested Moussaoui three weeks before the deadly airliner hijackings that killed 3,000 people, said he tried to tell his superiors that he thought a hijacking plan might be in the works.

``You tried to move heaven and earth to get a search warrant to search this man's belongings. You were obstructed,'' defense attorney Edward MacMahon said as the trial resumed after a week's delay over improper witness coaching.

``From a particular individual in the (FBI's) Radical Fundamentalist Unit, yes sir, I was obstructed,'' Samit said.

Moussaoui has already pleaded guilty to six charges of conspiracy. The trial -- the only one for anyone charged in connection with the September 11 attacks -- will determine if he is sentenced to death.

Moussaoui, an admitted al Qaeda member who regularly yells ''God curse America!'' when the jury and judge leave the courtroom, was arrested on August 16, 2001, after raising suspicions at a flight school.

Samit said after questioning Moussaoui he knew the Frenchman of Moroccan descent had ``radical Islamic fundamentalist beliefs'' and thought he was part of a bigger plot to attack the United States. In an message to his superiors on August 18, 2001, Samit said he believed Moussaoui was ``conspiring to commit a terrorist act.''

Samit also warned that Moussaoui, who did not have a pilot's license, had been taking simulator lessons to learn the basics of flying a jumbo jet. Samit expressed his concerns that Moussaoui was plotting a possible hijacking.

WARNINGS GO UNHEEDED

``You thought you had a terrorist who was planning a terrorist attack. And you wanted everyone in the government to know,'' MacMahon asked Samit.

``Yes,'' he replied.

Although he sent numerous e-mails and formal requests to agents and to his superiors warning of a potential hijacking attack, Samit said he was unable to get authority to seek a warrant in order to search Moussaoui's belongings.

He even sought assistance from FBI agents in France and Britain and consulted with people in different agencies.

``I am so desperate to get into his computer, I'll take anything,'' he wrote in an e-mail to Catherine Kiser, an intelligence official, one day before the deadly attacks.

Her response was ominous: ``You fought the good fight. God help us all if the next terrorist incident involves the same type of plane.''

Samit also drafted a memo to the Federal Aviation Administration warning that Moussaoui might have been part of a plot to seize a jumbo jet but it was not clear ``how far advanced were his plans to do so.'' Samit's bosses at FBI headquarters did not send the memo.

MacMahon quoted from a report in which Samit accused people at FBI headquarters of ``criminal negligence'' and said they were just trying to protect their own careers.

The trial resumed on Monday after a week's delay caused by the discovery that a Transportation Security Administration lawyer, Carla Martin, had improperly discussed the trial with aviation witnesses who were to testify for the defense and the prosecution.

After initially throwing out all aviation-related evidence and testimony, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema agreed to allow the government to bring forward new ``untainted'' witnesses and evidence, but limited the parameters for the questioning.



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March 21, 2006
F.B.I. Agent Testifies Superiors Didn't Pursue Moussaoui Case
By NEIL A. LEWIS
ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 20 — The F.B.I. agent who arrested and interrogated Zacarias Moussaoui just weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks told a jury on Monday how he had tried repeatedly to get his superiors in Washington to help confirm his certainty that Mr. Moussaoui was involved in an imminent terrorist airline hijacking plot.

But, said the agent, Harry Samit, he was regularly thwarted by senior bureau officials whose obstructionism he later described to Justice Department investigators as "criminally negligent" and who were, he believed, motivated principally by a need to protect their careers.

Mr. Samit's testimony added a wealth of detail to the notion that officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation played down, ignored and purposely mischaracterized the increasingly dire warnings from field agents in the Minneapolis office that they had a terrorist on their hands in Mr. Moussaoui.

"I accused the people in F.B.I. headquarters of criminal negligence" in an interview after Sept. 11, Mr. Samit acknowledged under intense questioning by Edward B. MacMahon Jr., Mr. Moussaoui's chief court-appointed lawyer.

Mr. Samit confirmed that he had told Justice Department investigators that the senior agents in Washington "took a calculated risk not to advance the investigation" by refusing to seek search warrants for Mr. Moussaoui's belongings and computer. He testified that he had come to believe that "the wager was a national tragedy."

Mr. Samit was a witness for the prosecution, which is trying to have Mr. Moussaoui executed for the deaths that occurred on Sept. 11. In his direct testimony more than a week ago, he bolstered the prosecutors' case by saying that had Mr. Moussaoui answered his questions honestly when he arrested him for immigration violations, it would have set off a chain of inquiries that could have foiled the Sept. 11 plot.

But under Mr. MacMahon's questions, Mr. Samit provided much new evidence and testimony suggesting strongly that the more significant factors in the failure to learn of the plot from Mr. Moussaoui involved the decisions of senior F.B.I. officials.

Mr. Samit's testimony paralleled the complaints of Coleen Rowley, an agent and lawyer in the Minneapolis office who sent a letter on May 21, 2002, to the bureau director, Robert S. Mueller III, bitterly criticizing the performance of F.B.I. headquarters agents in handling the Moussaoui case.

But unlike Ms. Rowley, who has since left the bureau, Mr. Samit remains an agent and tried on Monday to adopt a defensive posture on its behalf. Nonetheless, his testimony provided a vivid condemnation of the bureau, as he was obliged to confirm how he had told investigators of his belief that his superiors had tried to sidestep their responsibilities.

Mr. Samit said two senior agents had declined to provide help in obtaining a search warrant, either through a special panel of judges that considers applications for foreign intelligence cases or through a normal application to any federal court for a criminal investigation.

As a field agent in Minnesota, he said, he required help and approval from headquarters to continue his investigation. He acknowledged that he had asserted that Michael Maltbie, a supervisor in the bureau's Radical Fundamentalist Unit, had told him that applications for the special intelligence court warrants had proved troublesome for the bureau and that seeking one "was just the kind of thing that would get F.B.I. agents in trouble."

Mr. Samit wrote that Mr. Maltbie had told him that "he was not about to let that happen to him." During that period, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had complained about improper applications from the bureau.

Mr. Samit also acknowledged that he had asserted to investigators that David Frasca, Mr. Maltbie's superior, had similarly blocked him from seeking a search warrant under the more common route, a criminal investigation. Some of the special court's complaints dealt with the idea that law-enforcement officials were sometimes exploiting the lower standard required for warrants in intelligence investigations and then using the information that they obtained in criminal cases.

Mr. Frasca, Mr. Samit explained, believed that once the Moussaoui investigation was opened as an intelligence inquiry, it would arouse suspicion that agents had been trying to abuse the intelligence law to get information for a case they now believed was a criminal one.

Mr. Samit's comments, which were made to investigators for the Justice Department's inspector general and in a subsequent memorandum to the F.B.I., had not been made public before. The report by the inspector general on the bureau's Sept. 11 performance was released in June 2005 but had substantial deletions.

Mr. Samit said senior bureau officials had even been told he was trying to prevent someone from flying a plane into the World Trade Center.

William Carter, an F.B.I. spokesman, said that neither the bureau nor Mr. Maltbie nor Mr. Frasca, who are still employed there, would have any comment.

The cross-examination of Mr. Samit was delayed after his initial testimony when the trial was interrupted following disclosures that a government lawyer had improperly coached several aviation security officials who were to testify.

Judge Leonie M. Brinkema ruled that because of the coaching, the prosecution would be unable to use those witnesses to make the case that security could have been bolstered, possibly foiling the plot, if Mr. Moussaoui had told Mr. Samit about his knowledge of plans by Al Qaeda to fly planes into buildings.

Judge Brinkema's sanctions on the prosecution for Ms. Martin's behavior nearly wrecked the government's case. But on Friday, Judge Brinkema ruled that the government could try to find new untainted aviation security witnesses.



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FBI Was Warned About Moussaoui

By Jerry Markon and Timothy Dwyer

An FBI agent who interrogated Zacarias Moussaoui before Sept. 11, 2001, warned his supervisors more than 70 times that Moussaoui was a terrorist and spelled out his suspicions that the al-Qaeda operative was plotting to hijack an airplane, according to federal court testimony yesterday.

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March 21, 2006
F.B.I. Agent Testifies Superiors Didn't Pursue Moussaoui Case
By NEIL A. LEWIS
ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 20 — The F.B.I. agent who arrested and interrogated Zacarias Moussaoui just weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks told a jury on Monday how he had tried repeatedly to get his superiors in Washington to help confirm his certainty that Mr. Moussaoui was involved in an imminent terrorist airline hijacking plot.

But, said the agent, Harry Samit, he was regularly thwarted by senior bureau officials whose obstructionism he later described to Justice Department investigators as "criminally negligent" and who were, he believed, motivated principally by a need to protect their careers.

Mr. Samit's testimony added a wealth of detail to the notion that officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation played down, ignored and purposely mischaracterized the increasingly dire warnings from field agents in the Minneapolis office that they had a terrorist on their hands in Mr. Moussaoui.

"I accused the people in F.B.I. headquarters of criminal negligence" in an interview after Sept. 11, Mr. Samit acknowledged under intense questioning by Edward B. MacMahon Jr., Mr. Moussaoui's chief court-appointed lawyer.

Mr. Samit confirmed that he had told Justice Department investigators that the senior agents in Washington "took a calculated risk not to advance the investigation" by refusing to seek search warrants for Mr. Moussaoui's belongings and computer. He testified that he had come to believe that "the wager was a national tragedy."

Mr. Samit was a witness for the prosecution, which is trying to have Mr. Moussaoui executed for the deaths that occurred on Sept. 11. In his direct testimony more than a week ago, he bolstered the prosecutors' case by saying that had Mr. Moussaoui answered his questions honestly when he arrested him for immigration violations, it would have set off a chain of inquiries that could have foiled the Sept. 11 plot.

But under Mr. MacMahon's questions, Mr. Samit provided much new evidence and testimony suggesting strongly that the more significant factors in the failure to learn of the plot from Mr. Moussaoui involved the decisions of senior F.B.I. officials.

Mr. Samit's testimony paralleled the complaints of Coleen Rowley, an agent and lawyer in the Minneapolis office who sent a letter on May 21, 2002, to the bureau director, Robert S. Mueller III, bitterly criticizing the performance of F.B.I. headquarters agents in handling the Moussaoui case.

But unlike Ms. Rowley, who has since left the bureau, Mr. Samit remains an agent and tried on Monday to adopt a defensive posture on its behalf. Nonetheless, his testimony provided a vivid condemnation of the bureau, as he was obliged to confirm how he had told investigators of his belief that his superiors had tried to sidestep their responsibilities.

Mr. Samit said two senior agents had declined to provide help in obtaining a search warrant, either through a special panel of judges that considers applications for foreign intelligence cases or through a normal application to any federal court for a criminal investigation.

As a field agent in Minnesota, he said, he required help and approval from headquarters to continue his investigation. He acknowledged that he had asserted that Michael Maltbie, a supervisor in the bureau's Radical Fundamentalist Unit, had told him that applications for the special intelligence court warrants had proved troublesome for the bureau and that seeking one "was just the kind of thing that would get F.B.I. agents in trouble."

Mr. Samit wrote that Mr. Maltbie had told him that "he was not about to let that happen to him." During that period, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had complained about improper applications from the bureau.

Mr. Samit also acknowledged that he had asserted to investigators that David Frasca, Mr. Maltbie's superior, had similarly blocked him from seeking a search warrant under the more common route, a criminal investigation. Some of the special court's complaints dealt with the idea that law-enforcement officials were sometimes exploiting the lower standard required for warrants in intelligence investigations and then using the information that they obtained in criminal cases.

Mr. Frasca, Mr. Samit explained, believed that once the Moussaoui investigation was opened as an intelligence inquiry, it would arouse suspicion that agents had been trying to abuse the intelligence law to get information for a case they now believed was a criminal one.

Mr. Samit's comments, which were made to investigators for the Justice Department's inspector general and in a subsequent memorandum to the F.B.I., had not been made public before. The report by the inspector general on the bureau's Sept. 11 performance was released in June 2005 but had substantial deletions.

Mr. Samit said senior bureau officials had even been told he was trying to prevent someone from flying a plane into the World Trade Center.

William Carter, an F.B.I. spokesman, said that neither the bureau nor Mr. Maltbie nor Mr. Frasca, who are still employed there, would have any comment.

The cross-examination of Mr. Samit was delayed after his initial testimony when the trial was interrupted following disclosures that a government lawyer had improperly coached several aviation security officials who were to testify.

Judge Leonie M. Brinkema ruled that because of the coaching, the prosecution would be unable to use those witnesses to make the case that security could have been bolstered, possibly foiling the plot, if Mr. Moussaoui had told Mr. Samit about his knowledge of plans by Al Qaeda to fly planes into buildings.

Judge Brinkema's sanctions on the prosecution for Ms. Martin's behavior nearly wrecked the government's case. But on Friday, Judge Brinkema ruled that the government could try to find new untainted aviation security witnesses.



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DEBKAfile adds: Various intelligence and other informants encountered the same Washington unresponsiveness as did FBI agent Samit prior to 9/11

March 21, 2006, 4:09 PM (GMT+02:00)

From early 1997 up until mid-2000, certain intelligence agencies and private individuals, including Israelis, tried to bring relevant information of the coming al Qaeda attack in New York to the attention of security authorities in Washington. Most were general in nature, but in at least one instance, specific data was put before Clinton administration officials and the FBI of a possible air attack by hijacked airliners against the Twin Towers. They encountered a wall of resistance. At that time, the Clinton White House was deeply engaged in a bid for a breakthrough in Israel-Palestinian peacemaking. Washington then believed that an American strike against al Qaeda would provoke anti-US demonstrations across the Muslim world and disrupt the American mediation effort in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

The Bush administration took office in January 2001. Eight months later, FBI agent Harry Samit arrested Zacarias Moussaoui. He tried in vain to persuade his superiors to take seriously and investigate his findings about an Islamic fundamentalist who took flight training and was interested in Osama bin Laden. The new administration, which had no knowledge of the previous president’s motives in setting aside the al Qaeda inquiry, saw no reason to change standing directives for the CIA and FBI on the subject. So Samit’s warnings went unheeded by default.

The situation in Jerusalem today strongly recalls Washington’s heedlessness in the years before the Sept. 11, 2001 to attacks that cost more than 3,000 lives. Al Qaeda lurks on Israel’s doorstep in the Gaza Strip and more recently the West Bank, but the current Israeli government has no time to address the danger.

Copyright 2000-2006 DEBKAfile. All Rights Reserved.

March 21, 2006
Top FBI Official Unaware of Moussaoui Terror Ties
By REUTERS
Filed at 4:31 p.m. ET

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (Reuters) - The FBI official in charge of international terrorism before September 11 said on Tuesday he did not know an agent had warned three weeks before the hijackings that he suspected Zacarias Moussaoui was plotting a terrorist act.

Michael Rolince, the chief of the FBI's international terrorism operation section in 2001, testified at Moussaoui's sentencing trial that he was unaware of a long report written by the FBI agent spelling out his theories.

Harry Samit, the FBI agent who arrested Moussaoui three weeks before the deadly airliner hijackings that killed 3,000 people, testified on Monday that agency superiors repeatedly blocked his efforts to warn of a possible terror attack.

Moussaoui, an admitted al Qaeda member, has pleaded guilty to six charges of conspiracy in connection with the September 11 attacks. The trial -- the only one in the United States in connection with the attacks -- will determine if he is sentenced to death.

Samit said after questioning Moussaoui he knew the Frenchman of Moroccan descent had ``radical Islamic fundamentalist beliefs'' and thought he was part of a bigger plot to attack the United States. In an message to his superiors on August 18, 2001, Samit said he believed Moussaoui was ``conspiring to commit a terrorist act.''

But Rolince said although he knew of Moussaoui's arrest, he did not know that Samit had sent a long message to FBI headquarters.

Defense lawyer Edward MacMahon asked Rolince if was aware that Samit believed Moussaoui was a Muslim fundamentalist who was learning to fly a jumbo jet, and that the agent believed he was a terrorist who could be possibly planning a hijacking.

``No,'' Rolince said. ``Can I ask what document that's coming from?''

``Sure, that's Mr. Samit's communication to your office ... August 18, 2001,'' MacMahon replied.

Moussaoui was arrested in Minnesota on August 16, 2001, after raising suspicions at a flight school. He was held on immigration charges.

Rolince said the FBI did not have enough evidence to charge Moussaoui at the time.

``Agent Samit's suppositions and hunches were one thing,'' he said. ``What we actually knew was something else.''



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March 22, 2006
Superior Says He Didn't See Agent's Report on Moussaoui
By NEIL A. LEWIS
ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 21 — The F.B.I.'s top counterterrorism official at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks told a jury on Tuesday that he did not know that a bureau agent had filed a report three weeks earlier detailing his suspicions that Zacarias Moussaoui was involved in an imminent airline hijacking plot.

The official, Michael Rolince, who was the chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's international terrorism section until his retirement, testified that he had little knowledge of Mr. Moussaoui before the attacks.

Mr. Rolince said he was unaware that the agent, Harry Samit, who was working in Minneapolis, had filed a long report asking for a complete investigation of Mr. Moussaoui, whom he described as a radical Islamic fundamentalist who hated the United States and was learning to fly jetliners.

When Mr. Moussaoui's chief court-appointed lawyer, Edward B. MacMahon Jr., asked Mr. Rolince if he knew that when Mr. Moussaoui was arrested he was under suspicion of planning a hijacking, he replied, "No." Then, after a moment, he asked sharply, "Can I ask what document that's coming from?"

Mr. MacMahon offered a quick reply. "That's Mr. Samit's communication to your office," he said. "Aug. 18, 2001."

Mr. Rolince said Mr. Samit's "suppositions, hunches and suspicions were one thing, and what we knew" was a different matter.

Despite his efforts to recover, Mr. Rolince became the second witness for the prosecution in two consecutive days at the sentencing trial for Mr. Moussaoui to give testimony that appeared to provide clear benefits to the defense.

Mr. Samit, who was cross-examined by Mr. MacMahon on Monday, testified, albeit reluctantly, that he had told investigators after the attacks that he believed that his superiors at the bureau in Washington were guilty of "criminal negligence" and had ignored his increasingly dire requests to obtain a search warrant in order to protect their careers.

He said that they had taken a gamble that Mr. Moussaoui was not going to have any valuable information and that they had lost a wager that proved to be a national tragedy.

The government has argued that Mr. Moussaoui, the only person to go to trial in the United States in connection with the deaths of Sept. 11, should be executed because when he was arrested three weeks earlier on immigration charges, he lied to investigators about his knowledge of plans by Al Qaeda to fly planes into buildings.

Because Mr. Moussaoui has already pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, the sole question before the jury is whether he should be executed or spend the rest of his life in prison.

Mr. Samit and Mr. Rolince were called as witnesses by the government to press the argument that had Mr. Moussaoui told Mr. Samit and other investigators what he knew, the F.B.I. could have taken steps to foil the plot. Mr. Rolince testified as to how the government disrupted a plan to blow up Los Angeles International Airport when another man, Ahmed Ressam, was arrested at the Canadian border in 1999 and agreed to cooperate with the authorities.

But he seemed to unwittingly reinforce the defense's counterargument that Mr. Moussaoui's silence was not as important as the inability of law enforcement authorities to react to leads like those given by Mr. Samit.

Mr. Rolince also testified that he had a "hallway" conversation, lasting about 20 seconds, with one of the supervisors at headquarters whom Mr. Samit has identified as blocking his efforts. He said the supervisor, David Frasca, briefed him on an alternate plan to have Mr. Moussaoui's belongings searched by extraditing him to France and having French authorities do the search.

That plan, Mr. Samit has testified, was to go into effect on Sept. 11, 2001.



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FAA Reportedly Dismissed Moussaoui Concern

By Jerry Markon and William Branigin

In emotional testimony in the death penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui today, the former manager of an Arizona flight school that trained one of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers told a federal jury that she had expressed alarm about her student to the Federal Aviation Administration and cried when she...

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Moussaoui's Guilt: Less Profound Than the FBI's Own Negligence?:

FBI Special Agent Harry Samit's testimony yesterday at the Zacarias Moussaoui trial adds just one more piece of evidence to a growing list of incidents showing what Samit himself labeled "criminal negligence."
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/index.php...dgeway&id=72620

March 23, 2006
Case for Moussaoui Execution Seems Bolstered by 2 Witnesses
By NEIL A. LEWIS
ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 22 — The government's effort to have Zacarias Moussaoui executed for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which has been troubled by serious problems over the last two weeks, appeared to have been bolstered significantly on Wednesday by the testimony of its final two witnesses.

A senior aviation security official at the time of the attacks in 2001 told the jury that several measures could have been put in place that might have foiled the plot if Mr. Moussaoui had disclosed what he knew about Al Qaeda's plans when he was arrested three weeks earlier.

The security official, Robert J. Cammaroto, was followed on the witness stand by Aaron Zebley, an F.B.I. agent at the time of the attacks, whose testimony made similar points about law enforcement.

The detailed testimony of the two witnesses provided the prosecution's strongest presentation to date at the trial, which is being held solely to determine whether Mr. Moussaoui, who has already pleaded guilty, should be executed or remain in jail for the rest of his life. The testimony from the two followed several days of disarray in which the government's case nearly fell apart.

Two F.B.I. officials who testified this week for the prosecution seemed mainly to help the defense by reinforcing the notion that the bureau had dragged its feet in following up leads from agents in the field that Mr. Moussaoui had valuable information about an imminent hijacking plot.

The trial was disrupted last week after the disclosure that a lawyer for the Transportation Security Administration had improperly coached aviation security officials about how to testify. Judge Leonie M. Brinkema ruled that because of the actions of the lawyer, Carla J. Martin, the prosecution would be prohibited from calling those witnesses, a crippling blow to the government's case.

Judge Brinkema relented, however, and allowed prosecutors to try to find another, "untainted" aviation security witness to help make their argument. It was Mr. Cammaroto who appeared on the witness stand Wednesday afternoon as that substitute, and he briskly listed the steps the Federal Aviation Administration could have taken in the middle of August 2001 when Mr. Moussaoui was arrested on immigration charges in Minnesota, where he was learning to fly a jetliner.

At the time, Mr. Cammaroto was the F.A.A.'s official in charge of issuing security directives to United States airlines in response to the latest intelligence reports.

Under questioning by David J. Novak, a prosecutor, Mr. Cammaroto listed a half-dozen ways that airport security could have been increased if he had learned what Mr. Moussaoui acknowledged in his guilty plea last April: that he was an Al Qaeda member and that the group had discussed flying planes into buildings by disabling crews using short-bladed knives that were allowed on planes at the time.

"We could have taken several steps," Mr. Cammaroto said, listing among others the banning of all knives, shifting resources like air marshals to domestic flights, ordering physical "pat-downs" of passengers and making metal detectors more sensitive.

Gerald T. Zerkin, a public defender representing Mr. Moussaoui, suggested in his cross-examination that such security measures could not have been adopted quickly. Mr. Cammaroto acknowledged that the hiring of new air marshals would have taken months. But he said many of the steps could have been put in place within hours, and he cited the foiling of a multiple-plane hijack plot in the Philippines in 1995 as an example.

Mr. Zebley, the former F.B.I. agent, who has not yet been cross-examined, testified that information discovered after the attacks could have provided important leads beforehand. He noted that Mr. Moussaoui had received payments for his flight training from the same person who had sent money to some of the hijackers. He said that had Mr. Moussaoui told investigators at the time of his arrest about his paymaster and his intentions to commit a terrorist act, it would have been easy to trace the other payments made by the same man.

The prosecutors contend that even though Mr. Moussaoui was in jail at the time of the attacks, he is responsible because his lies allowed "his brothers to go forward." Mr. Moussaoui's lawyers, who are to begin making their case next week, have said in papers that the government should not be able to execute someone on the speculative theory that had he provided information, the attacks would not have occurred.



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FBI Agent Slams Bosses at Moussaoui Trial
By Michael J. Sniffen
The Associated Press

Monday 20 March 2006

Alexandria, Va. - The FBI agent who arrested Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001 testified Monday he spent almost four weeks trying to warn U.S. officials about the radical Islamic student pilot but "criminal negligence" by superiors in Washington thwarted a chance to stop the 9/11 attacks.

FBI agent Harry Samit of Minneapolis originally testified as a government witness, on March 9, but his daylong cross examination by defense attorney Edward MacMahon was the strongest moment so far for the court-appointed lawyers defending Moussaoui. The 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent is the only person charged in this country in connection with al-Qaida's Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

MacMahon displayed a communication addressed to Samit and FBI headquarters agent Mike Maltbie from a bureau agent in Paris relaying word from French intelligence that Moussaoui was "very dangerous," had been indoctrinated in radical Islamic Fundamentalism at London's Finnsbury Park mosque, was "completely devoted" to a variety of radical fundamentalism that Osama bin Laden espoused, and had been to Afghanistan.

Based on what he already knew, Samit suspected that meant Moussaoui had been to training camps there, although the communication did not say that.

The communication arrived Aug. 30, 2001. The Sept. 11 Commission reported that British intelligence told U.S. officials on Sept 13, 2001, that Moussaoui had attended an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan. "Had this information been available in late August 2001, the Moussaoui case would almost certainly have received intense, high-level attention," the commission concluded.

But Samit told MacMahon he couldn't persuade FBI headquarters or the Justice Department to take his fears seriously. No one from Washington called Samit to say this intelligence altered the picture the agent had been painting since Aug. 18 in a running battle with Maltbie and Maltbie's boss, David Frasca, chief of the radical fundamentalist unit at headquarters.

They fought over Samit's desire for a warrant to search Moussaoui's computer and belongings. Maltbie and Frasca said Samit had not established a link between Moussaoui and terrorists.

Samit testified that on Aug. 22 he had learned from the French that Moussaoui had recruited someone to go to Chechnya in 2000 to fight with Islamic radicals under Emir Ibn al-Khattab. He said a CIA official told him on Aug. 22 or 23 that al-Khattab had fought alongside bin Laden in the past. This, too, failed to sway Maltbie or Frasca.

Under questioning from MacMahon, Samit acknowledged that he had told the Justice Department inspector general that "obstructionism, criminal negligence and careerism" on the part of FBI headquarters officials had prevented him from getting a warrant that would have revealed more about Moussaoui's associates. He said that opposition blocked "a serious opportunity to stop the 9/11 attacks."

The FBI's actions between Moussaoui's arrest, in Minnesota on immigration violations on Aug. 16, 2001, and Sept. 11, 2001, are crucial to his trial because prosecutors allege that Moussaoui's lies prevented the FBI from discovering the identities of 9/11 hijackers and the Federal Aviation Administration from taking airport security steps.

But MacMahon made clear the Moussaoui's lies never fooled Samit. The agent sent a memo to FBI headquarters on Aug. 18 accusing Moussaoui of plotting international terrorism and air piracy over the United States, two of the six crimes he pleaded guilty to in 2005.

To obtain a death penalty, prosecutors must prove that Moussaoui's actions led directly to the death of at least one person on 9/11.

Moussaoui pleaded guilty last April to conspiring with al-Qaida to fly planes into U.S. buildings. But he says he had nothing to do with 9/11 and was training to fly a 747 jetliner into the White House as part of a possible later attack.

Samit's complaints echoed those raised in 2002 by Coleen Rowley, the bureau's agent-lawyer in the Minneapolis office, who tried to help get a warrant. Rowley went public with her frustrations, was named a Time magazine person of the year for whistleblowing and is now running for Congress.

Samit revealed far more than Rowley of the details of the investigation.

MacMahon walked Samit through e-mails and letters the agent sent seeking help from the FBI's London, Paris and Oklahoma City offices, FBI headquarters files, the CIA's counterterrorism center, the Secret Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Federal Aviation Administration, an intelligence agency not identified publicly by name in court (possibly the National Security Agency), and the FBI's Iran, Osama bin Laden, radical fundamentalist, and national security law units at headquarters.

Samit described useful information from French intelligence and the CIA before 9/11 but said he was not told that CIA Director George Tenet was briefed on the Moussaoui threat on Aug. 23 and never saw until after 9/11 a memo from an FBI agent in Phoenix about radical Islamists taking flight training there.

For each nugget of information, MacMahon asked Samit if Washington officials called to assess the implications. Time after time, Samit said no.

MacMahon introduced an Aug. 31 letter Samit drafted "to advise the FAA of a potential threat to security of commercial aircraft" from whomever Moussaoui was conspiring with.

But Maltbie barred him from sending it to FAA headquarters, saying he would handle that, Samit testified. The agent added that he did tell FAA officials in Minneapolis of his suspicions.

--------

Associated Press Writer Matthew Barakat contributed to this report.

March 23, 2006
Agent Says Moussaoui Could Have Helped FBI
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:54 a.m. ET

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) -- The confession given by al-Qaida terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui last year could have helped unravel the Sept. 11, 2001, plot if investigators had heard it when he was arrested in the month before the attacks, according to testimony Thursday by a former FBI agent.

In particular, Moussaoui's admission that he received more than $14,000 in wire transfers from a man using the name of Ahad Sabet could have allowed the FBI to backtrack through Western Union, cell phone and calling-card records to identify two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, former agent Aaron Zebley said in Moussaoui's death penalty trial.

Rulings by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema prevent Zebley from offering explicit speculation about what the FBI could have accomplished had it known this information when Moussaoui was arrested in August 2001. But the clear implication is that Moussaoui's refusal to give a timely confession thwarted some of the FBI's best opportunities to prevent or at least minimize the Sept. 11 attacks.

As it was, certain details came out when Moussaoui pleaded guilty in federal court in April.

Moussaoui is the only person in this country charged in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people when al-Qaida flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

He pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with al-Qaida to hijack aircraft and commit other crimes, but he denies a specific role in 9/11. The sentencing trial now under way will determine whether he is executed or imprisoned for life, the jury's only choices.

When Moussaoui pleaded guilty, he confessed his al-Qaida membership and divulged numerous details of his terrorist plans, including his flight training, his receipt of al-Qaida money from an individual in Germany, and al-Qaida's general plans to hijack aircraft and crash them into prominent U.S. targets.

Zebley testified that the details of Moussaoui's confession, had they been known before 9/11, could have provided multiple leads for the FBI, including tracking al-Qaida's money trail and assigning more agents to the case.

Earlier in the trial, the FBI agent who arrested Moussaoui said he spent four weeks warning his bosses about the radical Islamic student pilot. Harry Samit said bureaucratic resistance to his efforts to subject Moussaoui to a thorough investigation blocked ''a serious opportunity to stop the 9/11 attacks.''

Moussaoui was arrested Aug. 16, 2001, on immigration violations after he aroused suspicion at a Minnesota flight school. He lied to agents and insisted his flight training was for personal enjoyment.

To obtain the death penalty, prosecutors must prove that Moussaoui's actions caused the death of at least one person on 9/11. They argue that he could have prevented or at least minimized the attacks if he had confessed and alerted federal agents to the imminent threat posed by al-Qaida.

The defense argues that nothing Moussaoui said after his arrest would have made any difference to the FBI because its bureaucratic intransigence rendered it incapable of reacting swiftly to Moussaoui's arrest under any circumstances.

Prosecutors argue that Moussaoui was obliged to tell the truth once he decided to talk to federal agents, and that the jury can consider what might have happened if Moussaoui had confessed.

Meanwhile, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Brinkema to make public copies of certain documents, videos and photographs the day after they are introduced as evidence. Brinkema had been withholding them until the trial's end. The court acted in a lawsuit brought by nine news and reporters' organizations, including The Associated Press.

------

Associated Press Writer Michael J. Sniffen contributed to this report.



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Case History in
United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui aka Shaqil aka Abu Khalid al Sahraw

March 23, 2006
Prosecution Rests in Terror Case
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:27 p.m. ET

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) -- Prosecutors rested their death-penalty case against al-Qaida terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui on Thursday after a former FBI agent testified that investigators might have been able to hunt down Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers if the defendant had confessed before the attacks.

When Moussaoui pleaded guilty last year, he gave details that could have helped identify 11 of the 19 hijackers if he had been forthcoming when he was arrested in the month before the attacks, former agent Aaron Zebley said.

After Zebley's testimony, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema held a closed hearing and sent the jury on a half-hour break. Leaving the courtroom, Moussaoui made clear he intended to take the stand in his own defense.

''I will testify, Zerkin, whether you want it or not,'' he said, referring to one of his lawyers, Gerald Zerkin. Moussaoui has consistently refused to cooperate with his lawyers.

Zebley testified that Moussaoui's admission that he received more than $14,000 in wire transfers from a man using the name Ahad Sabet could have allowed the FBI to go through Western Union, cell phone, calling-card and motor vehicle records, as well as leases, to identify most of the hijackers.

Brinkema's rulings prevented Zebley from explicitly speculating what the FBI actually would have accomplished had it known this information when Moussaoui was arrested in August 2001. But the clear implication was that Moussaoui's refusal to give a timely confession thwarted some of the FBI's best opportunities to prevent or at least minimize the Sept. 11 attacks.

''We could have set about finding the hijackers,'' Zebley said.

As it was, certain details did not come out until Moussaoui pleaded guilty in federal court in April.

On cross-examination, defense lawyer Edward MacMahon asked why the urgent pleadings of the FBI agent who arrested Moussaoui for an all-out investigation were ignored.

''The FBI has to have a confession ... before anybody listens?'' MacMahon asked.

Zebley replied that the arresting agent, Harry Samit, did not know all the details that were later included in Moussaoui's confession.

The defense also argues that it's not relevant to look at what the results might have been if Moussaoui had confessed when arrested, because he had a right to remain silent in the face of interrogation.

Earlier in the trial, Samit said he spent four weeks warning his bosses about the radical Islamic student pilot. He said bureaucratic resistance to a thorough investigation blocked ''a serious opportunity to stop the 9/11 attacks.''

Moussaoui is the only person in this country charged in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people when al-Qaida flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

He pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with al-Qaida to hijack aircraft and commit other crimes, but he denies a specific role in 9/11. The sentencing trial now under way will determine whether he is executed or imprisoned for life, the jury's only choices.

When Moussaoui pleaded guilty, he confessed his al-Qaida membership and divulged numerous details of his terrorist plans, including his flight training, his receipt of al-Qaida money from an individual in Germany, and al-Qaida's general plans to hijack aircraft and crash them into prominent U.S. targets.

Moussaoui was arrested Aug. 16, 2001, on immigration violations after he aroused suspicion at a Minnesota flight school. He lied to agents and insisted his flight training was for personal enjoyment.

To obtain the death penalty, prosecutors must prove that Moussaoui's actions caused the death of at least one person on 9/11. They argue that he could have prevented or at least minimized the attacks if he had confessed and alerted federal agents to the imminent threat posed by al-Qaida.

The defense argues that nothing Moussaoui said after his arrest would have made any difference to the FBI because its bureaucratic intransigence rendered it incapable of reacting swiftly to Moussaoui's arrest under any circumstances.

Prosecutors argue that Moussaoui was obliged to tell the truth once he decided to talk to federal agents, and that the jury can consider what might have happened if Moussaoui had confessed.

Meanwhile, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Brinkema to make public copies of certain documents, videos and photographs the day after they are introduced as evidence. Brinkema had been withholding them until the trial's end. The court acted in a lawsuit brought by nine news and reporters' organizations, including The Associated Press.

------

Associated Press Writer Michael J. Sniffen contributed to this report.



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Moussaoui Shouts His Intention to Take the Stand

By Jerry Markon and Timothy Dwyer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 24, 2006; A04



Prosecutors concluded their argument yesterday that Zacarias Moussaoui is eligible for the death penalty, and the al-Qaeda operative made it clear in his typically theatrical style that he intends to take the stand.

"I will testify, whether you want it or not!" Moussaoui yelled as he was escorted from the courtroom by federal marshals. "I will testify!"

It was unclear whether he was addressing his attorneys, with whom he does not speak and who have been against his taking the stand. But what was clear was that the case against the only person convicted in the United States on charges stemming from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks could take yet another dramatic turn. Moussaoui is known for his courtroom outbursts, and even his attorneys don't know what he will say. Sources familiar with the case said Moussaoui is expected to testify, but he has been told he must adhere to courtroom decorum.

The courtroom theatrics came as Moussaoui's lawyers subpoenaed a government lawyer whose misconduct nearly derailed the death penalty trial, sources familiar with the case said yesterday. Carla J. Martin has been told to show up at U.S. District Court in Alexandria on Monday, the sources said.

Martin would risk being found in contempt of court if she ignored the order, but once there she could invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refuse to testify. She declined to testify at a hearing last week. Her attorney, Roscoe C. Howard Jr., did not return repeated telephone calls. Defense attorneys would not comment, but legal experts said that it is unlikely they could persuade U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema to allow the jury to hear about what she has called "egregious" conduct by Martin.

The actions of Martin, a Transportation Security Administration lawyer, halted the case last week after she violated a court order by sharing testimony and contacting witnesses. Brinkema initially reacted by barring all aviation witnesses and testimony, an action that severely damaged the prosecution's case. Testimony resumed Monday after Brinkema allowed testimony from aviation witnesses untainted by contact with Martin.

Moussaoui, 37, pleaded guilty last year to conspiring with al-Qaeda in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. His sentencing hearing is divided into two parts. Jurors first must vote on whether Moussaoui is eligible for the death penalty. If they find he is, a second phase would include testimony from family members of Sept. 11 victims. Jurors then would determine whether Moussaoui should be executed.

Prosecutors yesterday concluded their argument that Moussaoui is eligible for the death penalty because, even though he was in jail on Sept. 11, his lies to the FBI prevented agents from stopping the attacks.

The trial has been cloaked in secrecy at times because of extensive classified information, and yesterday was no different. Defense lawyers typically ask the judge to throw out a case when the prosecution completes its evidence, and Moussaoui's lawyers had prepared such a motion. It was not made in open court, however, and when prosecutors rested their case yesterday, Brinkema convened a sealed hearing in a separate courtroom.

Immediately after the hearing ended, the defense began its case. Sources said later that Brinkema had rejected a defense motion that the case not be allowed to go to the jury.

The two sides yesterday waged a battle of dueling PowerPoint presentations through testimony from two former FBI agents. The final prosecution witness, Aaron Zebley, portrayed the government as a precise investigative machine that immediately would have reacted to the knowledge that Moussaoui was a terrorist operative plotting an attack. Moussaoui was arrested in Minnesota in August 2001, and prosecutors say he lied to the FBI about his plan to fly a plane into the White House.

"Could you have done this in August of 2001?" Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert A. Spencer kept asking Zebley, as Zebley tried to demonstrate how a single cellphone number on a Western Union wire transfer to Moussaoui could have led to phone, bank and other records -- which would have enabled investigators to track down at least 11 of the 19 hijackers.

Zebley, who left the FBI last year to become an assistant U.S. attorney, each time answered, "Yes."

The first defense witness, retired FBI agent Eric Rigler, walked jurors through a Justice Department inspector general's report from 2004 that criticized the government for failing to detect two hijackers who entered the United States in 2000. Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi at one point lived with an FBI informant in San Diego. The inspector general found that the CIA had known the two were in the country and were al-Qaeda operatives but delayed telling the FBI for more than a year.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

March 25, 2006
Focus on F.B.I.'s 9/11 Signals
By NEIL A. LEWIS and DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON, March 24 — The sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui was supposed to have been the government's best opportunity to hold someone accountable for the deaths on Sept. 11, 2001.

But after federal prosecutors finished laying out their case this week, even those who strongly supported an aggressive prosecution may wonder whether the trial has shed as much light on Mr. Moussaoui's culpability as it has on the missteps and mistakes by law enforcement agencies.

The testimony of two prosecution witnesses, in particular, has brought renewed and unwelcome attention to how the Federal Bureau of Investigation dealt with early warning signs.

Mr. Moussaoui is the sole person to go to trial in an American courtroom for the attacks, making him a proxy for the 19 hijackers who were killed carrying out the attacks and the chief planners who are being held in secret C.I.A. prisons overseas.

Mr. Moussaoui in jail on Sept. 11, but prosecutors have argued that he deserves to be executed because he lied to investigators about what he knew of Al Qaeda plans to fly planes into buildings when he was arrested three weeks earlier on immigration violations.

On Monday, defense lawyers are expected to offer a set of extraordinary trial exhibits, statements about Mr. Moussaoui by a handful of senior Qaeda officials gathered somewhere in the secret overseas detention centers that the C.I.A. maintains.

The jury will be read the statements from detainees including Khalid Shaik Mohammed, the mastermind of Sept. 11, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, its paymaster. Officials expect the two to describe Mr. Moussaoui as an unreliable fringe figure in Al Qaeda.

The government presentation, which ended on Thursday, did not go smoothly. First, the prosecution nearly collapsed after the disclosure that a transportation lawyer working with the prosecutors had improperly coached aviation witnesses.

Although that occurred out of the jury's view, other problems surfaced when the prosecutors presented two witnesses supposed to bolster their case that Mr. Moussaoui's lies made him responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths. The two witnesses testified that if he had told the truth on Aug. 16, 2001, the bureau could have moved swiftly to foil the plot.

The first witness, Harry Samit, an F.B.I. agent in Minnesota who questioned Mr. Moussaoui at his arrest, firmly asserted that had he been given the truth "we would have several new leads to investigate," and the plot might have been thwarted. Instead, he said, Mr. Moussaoui's answers sent investigators on "wild goose chases."

Under cross-examination by Edward B. MacMahon Jr., a court-appointed lawyer for Mr. Moussaoui, Mr. Samit acknowledged that after the attacks he had written strongly worded reports saying his superiors had improperly blocked his efforts to investigate Mr. Moussaoui. He added that he was convinced that Mr. Moussaoui was a terrorist involved in an imminent hijacking plot.

That senior bureau officials dragged their feet on investigating Mr. Moussaoui by seeking search warrants from a special intelligence court or a more routine criminal search warrant was not new. But it had never been presented so vividly as a reluctant Mr. Samit was obliged to do under cross-examination.

He offered a devastating comment from a supervisor who said pressing too hard to obtain a warrant for Mr. Moussaoui would hurt his career. Mr. Samit also wrote that his superiors did not act because they were guilty of "criminal negligence" and they were gambling that Mr. Moussaoui had little to offer. The lost wager, Mr. Samit said, was paid in many lives.

Mr. Samit was followed to the witness stand by Michael Rolince, a retired F.B.I. counterterrorism supervisor who similarly recited a list of actions that the bureau could have taken if Mr. Moussaoui had told them about Qaeda plans to take over planes with knives and fly into buildings.

But when Mr. MacMahon began reading from a document detailing many suspicions about Mr. Moussaoui's intentions, Mr. Rolince interrupted, "Can I ask what document that's coming from?"

Mr. MacMahon obliged, noting that it was an urgent memorandum written by Mr. Samit on Aug. 18, 2001, hoping to attract the attention of headquarters. Mr. Rolince had inadvertently underlined that the agent's suspicions had never risen to his attention.

One problem for the bureau is that the backbone of the prosecution case, that the bureau could have disrupted the plot had Mr. Moussaoui admitted all he knew, represents a substantial revision of conventional wisdom at the law enforcement agency.

For years, agents have expressed the view that Mr. Moussaoui knew little about what his Qaeda superiors wanted of him and had said that it was highly speculative whether more information would have deterred the attacks.

A number of bureau officials have contended that even if the bureau had more clues about the hijackers, they might have been able only to put them under surveillance because they had not committed any crime.

Sally Regenhard of the Bronx, whose son, a probationary firefighter, was killed in the collapse of the World Trade Center, said she was upset by the reminders of the failure of law enforcement authorities to heed many leads before the attacks.

"It's dismaying, but there it is," said Ms. Regenhard, who has been one of the dozens of family members of Sept. 11 victims who have visited the Virginia courtroom to observe the trial. "There were discrete warnings known to the government. People don't realize this."

The most pivotal moment may occur next week, however, when Mr. Moussaoui is expected to take the stand. Under the federal death penalty law, the jurors have to consider first whether he is responsible for any of the Sept. 11 deaths before they consider several factors in deciding whether to order his execution. The jury would have to be unanimous in deciding he bore responsibility for the trial to go to the next phase.

In addition to the evidence, the jurors may respond viscerally and decide that Mr. Moussaoui is an odious figure undeserving of sympathy. They have heard some of his outbursts in pretrial proceedings in which he proclaimed in their presence his membership in Al Qaeda. He has said that he was indeed training to fly a plane into a building but that he was not involved in the Sept. 11 plot and should not be executed for it.

His testimony will give the jurors another opportunity to take his measure.



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Moussaoui's fate a matter of 'What if?'
U.S. insists truth could have thwarted 9/11 plot
By Phil Hirschkorn
CNN



Friday, March 24, 2006; Posted: 5:56 p.m. EST (22:56 GMT)

Prosecutor Rob Spencer questions former FBI agent Aaron Zebley while attorney Edward MacMahon listens.
ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (CNN) -- Whether Zacarias Moussaoui lives or dies boils down to one question: "What if?"

Prosecutors laid out their case this week: Had Moussaoui told the truth when he was questioned 25 days before the attacks of September 11, 2001, FBI agents might have tracked down the terrorists before they were able to execute their plan.

Moussaoui has admitted being an al Qaeda agent but denied that he was to have taken part in the September 11 plot. He was arrested on immigration charges in August 2001. The government is seeking the death penalty against him.

For three hours this week, jurors saw a dazzling interactive display showing how the FBI quickly figured out the connections between the terrorist pilots of the four hijacked passenger jets, and at least seven of their "muscle" hijackers who attacked the flight crews.

It was a tour de force of investigative skill -- tracing records of telephone calls between the U.S.-based operatives and their overseas paymasters, tracking those numbers to addresses where the hijackers lived, obtaining bank and shopping records of the men, and discovering what flight schools they attended to train for their mission.

But however rapid the detective work was, it all unfolded after the fact -- with the help of all 11,000 FBI agents. Could the same web of al Qaeda terrorism in America have been unraveled in the days between Moussaoui's arrest and the attacks?

The premise of the testimony and presentation by Aaron Zebley, the last government witness, was that if Moussaoui had admitted to being a would-be hijacker, FBI agents might have tracked down the terrorists who were then days away from buying their plane tickets.

U.S.: Lies protected 9/11 plot
Instead, Moussaoui told a series of lies, which prosecutors contend protected the plot. His lies, they claim, make Moussaoui liable for at least one of the 2,793 deaths that occurred when jets slammed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

The defense counterweight to this theory has been to show the FBI's bureaucratic blocking of the Moussaoui leads, such as they were, and the government's slowness to act on information in its possession about two leading hijackers who lived openly in the United States for 18 months before the attacks.

"The FBI has to have a confession before anybody listens?" asked Moussaoui defense attorney Edward MacMahon while cross-examining Zebley.

"Everyone would have been listening," a slightly rattled Zebley said, had Moussaoui admitted why he was rushing to complete a Boeing 747 jet simulator training, why he was buying knives with short blades and who was sending him money.

If only Moussaoui allowed the arresting agents to look at his belongings, they would have found Western Union receipts for $14,000 in wire transfers from Germany and the name and phone number of the sender handwritten in Moussaoui's notebook.

That information, Zebley said, would have been "something you could run with."

Moussaoui's money transfers would have led the FBI to a key coordinator of the plot -- Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni who tried and failed four times to acquire a visa to come to the United States. He sent Moussaoui the cash and facilitated the activities of three hijacker-pilots who once shared an apartment with him in Hamburg.

Using telephone records, Zebley showed how Binalshibh called an an Qaeda operative in United Arab Emirates to get the money for Moussaoui, and how that UAE number opened the door to the hijackers, who had also called that number repeatedly in the summer of 2001. The phone calls revealed home addresses, flight schools and communications among the conspirators.

"Was that information available to the FBI in August 2001?" prosecutor Robert Spencer asked Zebley.

"It could have been," Zebley said. Building one layer of information onto another led to 11 of 19 hijackers.

Agent: No 20th hijacker
Under cross examination, Zebley conceded Moussaoui never called that UAE telephone number or any of the 19 hijackers.

"I don't think there's any such thing as a 20th hijacker," he said.

Carrie Lemack, whose mother, Judy LaRoque, was aboard the American Airlines jet that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, has been watching via closed circuit broadcast available to families in Boston, Massachusetts, where two of the four hijacked planes originated.

"The 'what coulds' go a lot further than Moussaoui," Lemack says. "What could the government have done if they talked to Moussaoui more? If they had someone try to talk to him in Arabic?" she says.

Lemack, who attended many hearings of the 9/11 Commission, says many inside government did not act on the dire warnings about al Qaeda by former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke and former CIA Director George Tenet.

"If Lee Harvey Oswald told someone he was going to shoot JFK, they could have saved him, too. I thought it was the government's job to investigate, not make terrorists do it for them If we're just waiting for the terrorists to tell us where they're going to strike next, we're never going to stop them," Lemack said. (9/11 families feel let down)

Zebley's summary came a day after a senior Transportation Security Administration official said stricter security could have been put in place at airports before September 11, had officials known of a conspiracy to hijack airliners using small knives.

Moussaoui eager to testify
Robert Cammaroto said he could have issued a security directive banning short knives, and mandating the airlines, which oversaw gate check-ins in those days, to do physical searches of passengers whose luggage was selected for additional screening.

"We could have done it in a couple of hours," he said. The FAA knew that Muslim fundamentalists plotted to use airplanes as weapons, he said, but the threat was perceived to be overseas.

The fear that Moussaoui was a potential hijacker was first expressed by Harry Samit, the FBI agent who arrested him outside Minneapolis.

The day after Moussaoui stopped talking, Samit began sending e-mail to FBI superiors about Moussaoui. He would send 70 in all, many in frustration as FBI headquarters deemed insufficient his requests for warrants to search Moussaoui's belongings.

The missed opportunities, independent of Moussaoui, to locate the hijackers is the theme of Moussaoui's defense.

One of the possible defense witnesses when the trial resumes Monday may be the defendant. Moussaoui, who rarely speaks to his attorneys, has said he intends to testify.

"I will testify whether you want it or not," he declared Thursday as he left court.

9/11 & Bush's 'Negligence'
By Robert Parry
March 24, 2006


In the U.S. government’s pursuit of the death penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui, FBI officials have inadvertently revealed how an even mildly competent George W. Bush could have prevented the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people – and set the country on a dangerous course for revenge.

FBI agent Harry Samit, who interrogated Moussaoui weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, sent 70 warnings to his superiors about suspicions that the al-Qaeda operative had been taking flight training in Minnesota because he was planning to hijack a plane for a terrorist operation.

But FBI officials in Washington showed “criminal negligence” in blocking requests for a search warrant on Moussaoui’s computer or taking other preventive action, Samit testified at Moussaoui’s death penalty hearing on March 20.

Samit’s futile warnings matched the frustrations of other federal agents in Minnesota and Arizona who had gotten wind of al-Qaeda’s audacious scheme to train pilots for operations in the United States. But the agents couldn’t get their warnings addressed by senior officials at FBI headquarters.

Another big part of the problem was the lack of urgency at the top. Bush, who had been President for half a year, was taking a month-long vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and shrugged off the growing alarm within the U.S. intelligence community.

Separate from the FBI field agents, the Central Intelligence Agency was piecing the puzzle together from tips, intercepts and other scraps of information. On Aug. 6, 2001, more than a month before the attacks, the CIA had enough evidence to send Bush a top-secret Presidential Daily Briefing paper, “Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US.”

The CIA told Bush about “threat reporting” that indicated bin-Laden wanted “to hijack a US aircraft.” The CIA also cited a call that had been made to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001 “saying that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.”

“The system was blinking red” during the summer of 2001, CIA Director George Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission.

Bush’s Justice Department and FBI headquarters were in the loop on the CIA reporting, but didn’t reach out to their agents around the country, some of whom, it turned out, were frantically trying to get the attention of their superiors in Washington.

Then-acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard told the 9/11 Commission that he discussed the intelligence threat reports with FBI special agents from around the country in a conference call on July 19, 2001. But Pickard said the focus was on having “evidence response teams” ready to respond quickly in the event of an attack.

Pickard “did not task field offices to try to determine whether any plots were being considered within the United States or to take any action to disrupt any such plots,” according to the 9/11 Commission’s report.

Contrasting Styles

Amid this bureaucratic inertia, Bush’s role was crucial. As President, he was the best-positioned official to force the various parts of the government to undertake a top-down review of what was known, what evidence was being missed, what could be done.

Richard Clarke, who had been President Bill Clinton’s counterterrorism chief and stayed in that job after Bush took office, said the Clinton administration reacted to such threats with urgent top-level meetings to “shake the trees” at the FBI, CIA, Customs and other relevant agencies.

Clarke said senior managers would respond by going back to their agencies to demand a search for any overlooked information and to put rank-and-file personnel on high alert, as happened when an al-Qaeda plot to bomb Millennium celebrations was thwarted in 1999.

“In December 1999, we received intelligence reports that there were going to be major al-Qaeda attacks,” Clarke said on CNN’s “Larry King Live” two years ago. “President Clinton asked his national security adviser Sandy Berger to hold daily meetings with the attorney general, the FBI director, the CIA director and stop the attacks.

“Every day they went back from the White House to the FBI, to the Justice Department, to the CIA and they shook the trees to find out if there was any information. You know, when you know the United States is going to be attacked, the top people in the United States government ought to be working hands-on to prevent it and working together.

”Now, contrast that with what happened in the summer of 2001, when we even had more clear indications that there was going to be an attack. Did the President ask for daily meetings of his team to try to stop the attack? Did (national security adviser) Condi Rice hold meetings of her counterparts to try to stop the attack? No.”

In a March 19, 2006, speech in Florida, former Vice President Al Gore also noted this contrast between how the Clinton administration reacted to terrorist threats and how the Bush administration did in the weeks before Sept. 11.

“In eight years in the White House, President Clinton and I, a few times, got a direct and really immediate statement like that (Aug. 6, 2001 warning), in one of those daily briefings,” Gore said.

“Every time, as you would want and expect, we had a fire drill, brought everybody in, (asked) what else do we know about this, what have we done to prepare for this, what else could we do, are we certain of the sources, get us more information on that, we want to know everything about this, and we want to make sure our country is prepared.

“In August of 2001,” Gore added, “such a clear warning was given and nothing – nothing – happened. When there is no vision, the people perish.” [To see Gore’s speech on C-Span, click here.]

Gone Fishing

After receiving the CIA’s Aug. 6, 2001, warning, Bush is reported to have gone fishing and cleared brush at his ranch. There is no evidence that he did anything to energize or coordinate the government response to the expected attack.

“No CSG (Counterterrorism Security Group) or other NSC (National Security Council) meeting was held to discuss the possible threat of a strike in the United States as a result of this (Aug. 6) report,” the 9/11 Commission wrote. “We have found no indication of any further discussion before Sept. 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al-Qaeda attack in the United States.”

Talking on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on April 4, 2004, the commission’s chairman and vice chairman, New Jersey’s Republican former Gov. Thomas Kean and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., said they believed the Sept. 11 attacks were preventable.

“The whole story might have been different,” Kean said, citing a string of law-enforcement blunders including the “lack of coordination within the FBI” and the FBI’s failure to understand the significance of suspected hijacker Moussaoui’s arrest in August 2001 while training to fly passenger jets.

However, from the recent testimony at Moussaoui’s sentencing hearing, it’s now clear that FBI agents in Minnesota did grasp the significance of the flight training and did send alarming messages to Washington-based FBI officials responsible for counterterrorism. But those officials at headquarters apparently missed or ignored the warnings.

Moussaoui’s defense attorney, Edward B. McMahon Jr., asked Michael E. Rolince, who was chief of the FBI’s International Terrorism Operations Section, if he was aware that FBI agent Samit had sent a memo to Rolince’s office on Aug. 18, 2001, warning that Moussaoui was a potential terrorist.

“No,” Rolince answered. “What document are you reading?”

Samit’s report “sent to your office,” McMahon replied. Rolince said he never saw the urgent memo. [Washington Post, March 22, 2006]

When the 9/11 Commission interviewed Rolince for its 2004 report, Rolince “recalled being told about Moussaoui in two passing hallway conversations but only in the context that he [Rolince] might be receiving telephone calls from Minneapolis complaining about how headquarters was handling the matter,” though the calls never came, the report said.

But Rolince was not the only senior FBI official oblivious to the missed clues. The 9/11 report said acting FBI director Pickard and assistant director for counterterrorism Dale Watson weren’t briefed on Moussaoui prior to Sept. 11, either.

The significance of the new information from Moussaoui’s hearing – which followed his guilty plea to charges that he had conspired with al-Qaeda to commit acts of terrorism – is that there’s no longer any doubt that key pieces of the puzzle were tantalizing close to the FBI officials who could have done something.

FBI headquarters also blew off a prescient memo from an FBI agent in the Phoenix field office. The July 2001 memo warned of the “possibility of a coordinated effort by Usama Bin Laden” to send student pilots to the United States. The agent noted “an inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest” attending American flight schools.

No action was taken on the Phoenix memo before Sept. 11.

How Incompetent?

Yet, if President Bush had demanded action from on high, the ripple effect through the FBI might well have jarred loose enough of the pieces to make the overall picture suddenly clear, especially in view of the information already compiled by the CIA.

Ironically, that is almost the same argument that federal prosecutors are making in seeking Moussaoui’s execution. It’s not that he was directly involved in the Sept. 11 plot, they say; it’s that the government might have been able to stop the attacks if he had immediately confessed what he was up to.

To some civil libertarians, the case raises troubling Fifth Amendment issues by creating a precedent for putting someone to death who didn’t promptly confess and thus didn’t provide clues that might have prevented a separate murder that the defendant didn’t specifically know about and wasn’t directly involved in.

In effect, the government is basing its demand for Moussaoui’s death on the notion that the failure to do something that might have prevented the tragedy of Sept. 11 should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

However, the Bush administration has taken almost the opposite position on its own culpability. Despite a strong case for criminal negligence – beginning with FBI officials and reaching up to the Oval Office – Bush and other senior officials have insisted they have nothing to apologize for.

Indeed, Bush has made his handling of the Sept. 11 terror attacks the centerpiece of his presidential legacy. Arguably, he rode the whirlwind from the attacks right through the war in Afghanistan to the invasion of Iraq to his second term as President.

Only recently – after a similar case of botched leadership during the Hurricane Katrina disaster – has the air whooshed out of the Bush balloon. Add in the disastrous decisions around the Iraq War and many Americans see a pattern of arrogant, incompetent leadership that fails to give adequate heed to evidence or attention to details.

For other Americans, the theory of Bush’s incompetence doesn’t go nearly far enough to explain the breathtaking lapses that let the Sept. 11 attacks happen.

Some 9/11 skeptics have come to believe that the destruction of the Twin Towers and the damage to the Pentagon must have been an “inside job” with some elements of the Bush administration conspiring with the attackers to create a modern-day Reichstag Fire that would justify invading Iraq and consolidating political power at home.

The new Moussaoui evidence, however, tends to support the theory of incompetence, though of a kind so gross that it would border on criminal negligence, at the FBI as well as the White House.

Perceptive field agents did their job in sending up warning flares to Washington, but a vacationing President and an inattentive FBI bureaucracy failed to take note or take the necessary actions to head off the tragedy.

Then, with the Twin Towers and the Pentagon still smoldering, Bush and his neoconservative advisers saw in the nation’s anger and fear the emotions needed to implement an agenda of authoritarian rule at home and preemptive wars abroad.


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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

From the Los Angeles Times
FBI Agent Says 9/11 Plot Was Within Grasp

He tells the court that had Moussaoui told all he knew, 11 hijackers could have been located. 'I will testify!' the defendant shouts.
By Richard A. Serrano
Times Staff Writer

March 24, 2006

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Federal prosecutors completed their case Thursday in the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui with a former FBI agent who said that if Moussaoui had cooperated after his arrest in August 2001, 11 of the 19 hijackers could have been located fairly quickly and stopped before the terror attacks of Sept. 11.

The testimony set the stage for the French terrorist to take the witness stand in his own defense next week.

"I will testify!" Moussaoui shouted to his lawyers after the government presented its last witness. "Whether you want it or not, I will testify!"

His four court-appointed lawyers have urged him not to take the stand, fearing his volatile temper and oft-expressed hatred for Americans will only encourage the jury to sentence him to death.

The government's final witness was Aaron Zebley, one of the FBI's two chief case agents on the Moussaoui investigation, who now works as an assistant U.S. attorney.

He identified a series of phone calls, Western Union money transfers and other evidence linking Moussaoui to Al Qaeda handlers in Germany and the United Arab Emirates. Those same handlers coordinated the movements of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers in the U.S.

Zebley said that if Moussaoui had told the FBI about these money transfers, agents could have identified 11 of the hijackers and stopped them before they reached the airports in Boston, Washington and Newark, N.J., on the morning of Sept. 11.

"We could have set about finding them, obviously," Zebley said. "We could have shared this information with our law enforcement partners on the federal, state and local levels. We could have shared this with our intelligence partners too, and the Secret Service."

Moussaoui pleaded guilty in April to having a role in the Sept. 11 conspiracy. He said he was handpicked by Al Qaeda front man Osama bin Laden to come to the U.S., take pilot lessons and eventually fly a jet into the White House.

On Sept. 11, three planes struck the two World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. A fourth plane, which went down in a western Pennsylvania field after passengers tried to reclaim the jetliner, is believed to have been headed toward either the White House or the U.S. Capitol.

Zebley also testified that had Moussaoui allowed the FBI to inspect his belongings, agents would have found lists of flight schools, including the jet simulator school he was attending in Eagan, Minn., and other pilot training facilities in south Florida where some of the hijackers learned to fly.

"We could have got to those flight schools and looked for people like the defendant," Zebley said. "Somebody rushing through flight school and onto jet simulators. Someone with a Middle Eastern name. We'd be looking for people who look like the defendant."

But under cross-examination, Zebley admitted that there were key elements of the Sept. 11 plot that appeared completely unknown to Moussaoui.

None of Moussaoui's possessions carried the names of any of the hijackers. All of the flight tickets purchased by the hijackers were bought after Moussaoui was arrested, indicating he did not know the date for the attacks. And there also was no proof that Moussaoui knew which buildings and structures were being targeted.

Zebley conceded that FBI does not believe Moussaoui was supposed to have been aboard one of the planes. "There never was a 20th hijacker," Zebley said. But he added, "the plot was to get as many conspirators in the U.S. as possible."

Zebley concluded a troubled prosecution case in which several other FBI witnesses conceded that the bureau had ignored repeated warnings about a looming terrorist attack. And the government's case was hurt when a federal lawyer improperly coached several prospective witnesses familiar with aviation security.

The lawyer, Carla Martin of the Transportation Security Administration, has been subpoenaed to appear Monday before U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema to explain her conduct. The judge barred the "tainted" witnesses from testifying.

The defense began its case late Thursday by calling Eric Rigler, a former FBI special agent who now runs a criminal justice consulting firm in Texas. Rigler led the jury through the FBI's many "missed opportunities" to detect the plot, as laid out in a report by the Justice Department's inspector general.

The defense is trying to show that even if Moussaoui had cooperated with the FBI, its agents made so many mistakes in the weeks before Sept. 11 that it would be unfair to blame the massive loss of life on the defendant, who was in jail when the attacks occurred.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,...2102266,00.html

Al-Qaeda trial lands FBI in dock for criminal ineptitude
From Tim Reid in Alexandria, Virginia



THEY filed into court three weeks ago — the grieving families, the press, the curious public, the jury — expecting to see the Bush Administration lay out in devastating detail why Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person convicted in the US for his connection to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, should be put to death.
What they have witnessed is a dark tragicomedy, a courtroom farce with the FBI and the Government revealed in excruciating detail as the Keystone Kops, and Moussaoui himself, hood-eyed, thickly bearded and constantly ranting, an onlooker as blunder has followed blunder.

Displaying an exceptional level of incompetence, prosecutors have managed to put the Government in the dock on charges of criminal ineptitude and cronyism, while the self-confessed al-Qaeda terrorist and disciple of Osama bin Laden they are desperate to execute sits on the sidelines, with every chance of reaching old age.

Moussaoui, 37, a Frenchman of Moroccan descent, attended flight-training school in Minnesota in early 2001. After arousing suspicion in August of that year for trying to learn how to fly a Boeing 747, he was arrested by the FBI and held on immigration charges.

In custody on September 11, 2001, he has confessed that he was training to become a pilot for a later attack on the White House, but has always denied prior knowledge of the attacks on New York and Washington. He pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy charges.

The Administration argues that he should be executed because if he had told investigators the truth after he was arrested, the FBI would have had enough information to stop the September 11 attacks. The jury is being asked to decide whether he should be executed or spend life in prison.

Enter Carla Martin, a government lawyer. The crux of the prosecution case rested on the testimony of seven aviation officials, who were going to testify that a timely confession by Moussaoui would have prevented the hijackings. In violation of the judge’s order, Ms Martin, an aviation lawyer with no prosecution experience, allowed the seven witnesses to see trial transcripts, coached them on what to say, and told one not to respond to a subpoena issued by the defence.

One witness was so irritated by her persistent e-mails that he showed them to prosecutors. They were compelled to inform Leonie Brinkema, the presiding judge.

“I’ve never seen a more egregious violation of the rule about witnesses,” she said. She threatened to dismiss the case, which would have precluded execution. Instead, she allowed two “untainted” aviation witnesses to try to bolster a significantly weakened government case.

“I felt like my heart had been ripped out,” Rosemary Dillard, whose husband, Eddie, 54, died in the Pentagon attack, said. “I felt like my Government let me down one more time.”

This week a wealth of new evidence of how the FBI bungled the Moussaoui investigation became so Pythonesque in its absurdity that even the victims’ families were roaring with laughter.

Into the witness box stepped Harry Samit, the FBI agent who arrested Moussaoui. He was called by the prosecution but became the star witness of the defence.

He said that he warned his supervisors more than 70 times that Moussaoui was an al-Qaeda operative who might be plotting to hijack an airplane and fly it into a building. He said that he was regularly thwarted by two superiors, David Frasca and Michael Maltbie, from obtaining a warrant to search Moussaoui’s flat. He accused the men of being criminally negligent.

Mr Maltbie told him that getting a warrant, which could be troublesome, might harm his — Maltbie’s — career prospects. Mr Maltbie has since been promoted.

On Tuesday Ed MacMahon, Moussaoui’s defence laywer, cross-examined Michael Rolince, of the FBI. He was there to defend the bureau, but his answers brought down the house.

Mr Rolince was forced to concede that he had never seen an April 2001 intelligence briefing paper warning that bin Laden was preparing to mount an attack, even though he had signed it. Mr MacMahon then introduced an April 13, 2001, FBI communication, approved by Mr Rolince, giving warning about bin Laden’s threat inside the US. Mr Rolince said that he had not approved it.

“Is it possible for a document to say you approved it if you have not approved it?” the judge asked.

“Absolutely,” he replied. With that, the jury, the press benches, the victims’ families and the press gallery erupted in laughter.

March 26, 2006
The Nation
A Bellwether for the Power of a President
By JONATHAN MAHLER
TAKE a good look at the prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, an admitted member of Al Qaeda who may soon be sentenced to death, after pleading guilty to conspiracy in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks. It may be the last time a suspected terrorist will enjoy the full panoply of rights — a jury of civilians, an independent judge, the guarantee of an open trial — accorded to criminal defendants in the United States.

Instead, the government plans to try accused terrorists before special tribunals in which the judge is appointed by the Pentagon, the jurors are military officers and certain canonical rights in our civil system — like the right to be present at all sessions of the trial — are absent. The future of the tribunals will be up to the Supreme Court, which will rule on their legality in Salim Hamdan v. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, which is to be argued on Tuesday.

Salim Hamdan, born in Yemen, was captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 and has confessed to working as a driver for Osama bin Laden. Like Mr. Moussaoui, Mr. Hamdan was charged with conspiring with Al Qaeda to commit acts of terrorism. The critical distinction, though, is that Mr. Hamdan was charged as a war criminal, meaning he was designated for prosecution before a military tribunal rather than in a federal court. His lawyers, led by Neal K. Katyal, a professor at Georgetown University, have sued to block the tribunal; hence Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

There is much more at stake here than the fate of one detainee. Mr. Hamdan's case will test a broader strategic shift in the American approach to fighting terrorism. By treating terrorism as an act of war rather than a crime, the Bush administration is hoping to end an embarrassing string of botched criminal terrorism prosecutions, including those of Mr. Moussaoui — where the judge recently rebuked a government prosecutor for improperly coaching witnesses — and Sami al-Arian, who is accused of being an Islamic Jihad activist and who was acquitted of various charges by a Florida jury several months ago.

The administration is also trying to ease the burdens of proof on its prosecutors, whom the government believes are at a disadvantage in the post-Sept. 11 era, when the emphasis is on prevention of terrorist attacks rather than their prosecution. "If you are serious about stopping people before things take off, then necessarily your evidence is going to be more ambiguous," said Andrew McCarthy, the lead prosecutor in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

More significant, President Bush would be extending his commander-in-chief authority to the war on terror. What this means in a practical sense is that he and his successors would be vested with perhaps greater wartime powers than any previous president. Unlike prior wars, limited by duration and geography, the war on terror is global and potentially endless. Indeed, terrorism will last well beyond the defeat of radical Islam.

IS the war on terror really a war? The logical parallel to Sept. 11 would appear to be Pearl Harbor, but Bruce Ackerman, a Yale law professor and author of "Before the Next Attack," argues that the two are not the same. "Pearl Harbor was an act of violent incursion that everybody recognized augured more violent acts of incursion because there was a Japanese fleet out there," he says. "We don't know whether we're looking at a powerful and well-organized enemy, or some terrorists who just happened to get lucky."

Yet the alternative — defining terrorist attacks simply as crimes — doesn't seem quite right either. After all, it was no coincidence that a target of the Sept. 11 hijackers was the headquarters of the United States military. Terrorists are capable of inflicting damage on a scale beyond the reach of any criminal enterprise. Anyway, the United States has responded to the attacks with military force; it seems a little late to debate whether the country is at war.

What are the implications of an unending war with no geographical boundaries? In one of their briefs, Mr. Hamdan's lawyers warn of "a dangerous and unprecedented expansion of executive authority" that would be tantamount to a re-allocation of constitutional power. A precedent that gave the president sweeping authority to fight the war on terror, they argue, could become "the edifice upon which any number of actions could be grounded, even against U.S. citizens." The president could assert his commander-in-chief powers to permit electronic surveillance without a wiretap, for instance, or to detain indefinitely an American citizen arrested in Cleveland.

Draconian as this sounds, advocates of the administration's position point out that warrantless surveillance and protracted detentions of suspected enemy combatants, even if they are American citizens, pale in comparison with the suspensions of civil rights deemed necessary in previous wars. During World War I, for instance, an American was sentenced to 10 years for questioning the "good faith" of our ally. His crime was making a film that depicted British atrocities in the Revolutionary War.

The court has traditionally deferred to the president in wartime, then gradually stripped the office of any newly accrued authority once the hostilities ended. Given the indefinite nature of the war on terror, though, this pattern no longer seems relevant.

The last time a president tried to make the case that the theater of war should not be confined to the area of hostilities, he was rebuffed: during the Korean War, the Supreme Court barred Harry S. Truman from seizing steel mills to prevent a strike. Of course, Truman could not point to a recent attack on American soil to help make his case.

In short, the Hamdan case presents the Supreme Court with two historically unappealing choices: to police the president's ability to make war or to allow executive authority to go unchecked.

Jonathan Mahler, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is writing a book about the Hamdan case.



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FBI on trial, too, alongside Moussaoui
Prosecution's own witnesses caused the most problems
- Neil A. Lewis, David Johnston, New York Times
Saturday, March 25, 2006


Washington -- The sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui was supposed to have been the government's best opportunity to hold someone accountable for the deaths on Sept. 11, 2001.

But after federal prosecutors finished laying out their case this week, even those who strongly supported an aggressive prosecution may wonder whether the trial has shed as much light on Moussaoui's culpability as it has on the missteps and mistakes by U.S. law enforcement agencies.

The testimony of two prosecution witnesses, in particular, has brought renewed and unwelcome attention to how the FBI dealt with early warning signs.

Moussaoui was in jail on Sept. 11, but prosecutors have argued that he deserves to be executed, because he lied to investigators about what he knew of al Qaeda's plans to fly planes into buildings when he was arrested three weeks earlier on immigration violations.

The government presentation, which ended Thursday, did not go smoothly. First, the prosecution nearly collapsed after the disclosure that a federal transportation lawyer working with the prosecutors had improperly coached aviation witnesses.

Other problems surfaced when the prosecutors presented two witnesses who were supposed to bolster their case that Moussaoui's lies made him responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths. The two witnesses testified that if he had told the truth on Aug. 16, 2001, the FBI could have moved swiftly to foil the plot.

The first witness, Harry Samit, an FBI agent in Minnesota who questioned Moussaoui at his arrest, asserted that had he been given the truth, "we would have several new leads to investigate," and that the plot might have been thwarted. Instead, he said Moussaoui's answers sent investigators on "wild goose chases."

Under cross-examination by Edward MacMahon, a court-appointed lawyer for Moussaoui, Samit acknowledged that after the attacks, he had written strongly worded reports saying his superiors had improperly blocked his attempts to investigate Moussaoui. He added that he was convinced that Moussaoui was a terrorist involved in an imminent hijacking plot.

That senior FBI officials drag- ged their feet on investigating Moussaoui was not new. But it had never been presented as vividly as a reluctant Samit was obliged to do under cross-examination.

He offered a devastating comment from a supervisor who said pressing too hard to obtain a warrant for Moussaoui would hurt his career. Samit also wrote that his superiors did not act because they were guilty of "criminal negligence" and were gambling that Moussaoui had little to offer.

Samit was followed to the witness stand by Michael Rolince, a retired FBI counterterrorism supervisor who similarly recited a list of actions that the bureau could have taken if Moussaoui had told them about al Qaeda plans to take over planes with knives and fly into buildings.

But when MacMahon began reading from a document detailing many suspicions about Moussaoui's intentions, Rolince interrupted, "Can I ask what document that's coming from?"

MacMahon obliged, noting that it was an urgent memorandum written by Samit on Aug. 18, 2001, hoping to attract the attention of headquarters. Rolince had inadvertently underlined that the agent's suspicions had never risen to his attention.

One problem for the FBI is that the backbone of the prosecution's case -- that the bureau could have disrupted the plot had Moussaoui admitted all that he knew -- represents a substantial revision of conventional wisdom at the

FBI.
For years, agents have expressed the view that Moussaoui knew little about what his al Qaeda superiors wanted of him and have said it was highly speculative whether more information would have deterred the attacks.

The defense will begin its presentation next week.

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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file...MNGNRHU1D21.DTL


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March 27, 2006
Moussaoui Witness Points to Missed Chances
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:41 a.m. ET

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) -- Prosecutors in the death-penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui questioned a defense witness's assertion Monday that federal agencies missed multiple chances to catch two of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers in the months and years before the attacks.

The witness, former FBI agent Erik Rigler, was questioned about a Justice Department report that he said criticized the CIA for keeping intelligence about two known al-Qaida terrorist operatives in the United States from the FBI for more than a year.

The two were among the 19 suicide hijackers on 9/11. The report said they had been placed on a watch list in Thailand in January 2000, but not on a U.S. list until August 2001.

The prosecution asked Rigler if anything in the report linked the pair specifically to a civil aviation plot. Rigler said no, but the report's thrust was about their preparations for what turned out to be the 9/11 attacks, and their ability to elude federal agents.

''That's why they came here,'' he said. ''They didn't come for Disney.''

Rigler was the first defense witness for Moussaoui, the only person charged in this country in connection with the attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives.

After the prosecution phase, which lasted about two weeks, the defense is expected to wrap up its case in two days or so. The final defense witness may be Moussaoui himself, who wants to testify against the wishes of his court-appointed lawyers.

Prosecutors argue that Moussaoui, a French citizen, thwarted a prime opportunity to track down the 9/11 hijackers and possibly unravel the plot when he was arrested in August 2001 on immigration violations and lied to the FBI about his al-Qaida membership and plans to hijack a plane.

Had Moussaoui confessed, the FBI could have pursued leads that would have led them to most of the hijackers, government witnesses have testified.

To win the death penalty, prosecutors must first prove that Moussaoui's actions -- specifically, his lies -- were directly responsible for at least one death on Sept. 11.

If they fail, Moussaoui would get life in prison.

Moussaoui pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with al-Qaida to hijack planes and other crimes, but he denies any role in 9/11. He says he was training for a possible future attack on the White House.

------

Associated Press Writer Michael J. Sniffen contributed to this report.



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Moussaoui Says He Was to Hijack 5th Plane
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060327/ap_on_...zkxBHNlYwN0bQ--
By MATTHEW BARAKAT, Associated Press Writer 4 minutes ago

Al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui testified Monday that he and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid were supposed to hijack a fifth airplane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House.

Moussaoui's testimony on his own behalf stunned the courtroom. His account was in stark contrast to his previous statements in which he said the White House attack was to come later if the United States refused to release an Egyptian sheik imprisoned on separate terrorist convictions.

On Dec. 22, 2001, Reid was subdued by passengers when he attempted to detonate a bomb in his shoe aboard American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami. The plane was diverted to Boston, where it landed safely.

Moussaoui told the court he knew the World Trade Center attack was coming and he lied to investigators when arrested in August 2001 because he wanted it to happen.

"You lied because you wanted to conceal that you were a member of al-Qaida?" prosecutor Rob Spencer asked.

"That's correct," Moussaoui said.

Spencer: "You lied so the plan could go forward?"

Moussaoui: "That's correct."

The exchange could be key to the government's case that the attacks might have been averted if Moussaoui had been more cooperative following his arrest.

Moussaoui told the court he knew the attacks were to take place some time after August 2001 and bought a radio so he could hear them unfold.

Specifically, he said he knew the World Trade Center was going to be attacked, but he asserted he was not part of that plot and didn't know the details.

Nineteen men pulled off the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington in the worst act of terrorism ever on U.S. soil.

"I had knowledge that the Twin Towers would be hit," Moussaoui said. "I didn't know the details of this."

Sally Regenhard, whose firefighter son Christian died at the World Trade Center, said "at least there would have been a chance" to head off the attacks if Moussaoui had told investigators in August 2001 what she heard him admit in court Monday.

"I was convinced that this man was only a heartbeat away from taking the controls of a plane," she said.

Asked by his lawyer why he signed his guilty plea in April as "the 20th hijacker," Moussaoui replied: "Because everybody used to refer to me as the 20th hijacker and it was a bit of fun."

Before Moussaoui took the stand, his lawyers made a last attempt to stop him from testifying. Defense attorney Gerald Zerkin argued that his client would not be a competent witness because he has contempt for the court, only recognizes Islamic law and therefore "the affirmation he undertakes would be meaningless."

Moussaoui at first denied he was to have been a fifth hijack pilot but under cross examination spoke of the plan to attack the White House. He said Reid was the only person he knew for sure would have been on that mission, but others were discussed.

Reid pleaded guilty in October 2002 to trying to blow up Flight 63 and was sentenced to life in prison.

Moussaoui testified that at one point he was excluded from pre-hijacking operations because he had gotten in trouble with his al-Qaida superiors on a 2000 trip to Malaysia. He said it was only after he was called back to Afghanistan and talked with Osama bin Laden that he was approved again for the operation.

"My position was, like you say, under review."

The 19 terrorists on Sept. 11 hijacked and crashed four airliners, killing nearly 3,000 people in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and on the planes. The intended target of the plane that crashed into a Pennsylvania field remains unknown.

Moussaoui testified for nearly three hours, ending his time on the stand by declaring his gratitude that he was an al-Qaida member. When Spencer asked him if he was also grateful to have been the fifth pilot, the defendant merely said: "I'm grateful."

Moussaoui's lawyer asked him whether he thought anything in his testimony or court proceedings would affect his fate. He replied: "I believe in destiny. God gives life and death. I just have to speak the truth and God will take care of the rest."

Before Moussaoui took the stand, the court heard testimony that two months before the attacks a CIA deputy chief waited in vain for permission to tell the FBI about a "very high interest" al-Qaida operative who became one of the hijackers.

The official, a senior figure in the CIA's Laden unit, said he sought authorization on July 13, 2001, to send information to the FBI but got no response for 10 days, then asked again.

As it turned out, the information on Khalid al-Mihdhar did not reach the FBI until late August. At the time, CIA officers needed permission from a special unit before passing certain intelligence on to the FBI.

The official was identified only as John. His written testimony was read into the record.

"John's" testimony was part of the defense's case that federal authorities missed multiple opportunities to catch hijackers and perhaps thwart the 9/11 plot.

His testimony included an e-mail sent by FBI supervisor Michael Maltbie discussing Moussaoui but playing down his terrorist connections. Maltbie's e-mail said "there's no indication that (Moussaoui) had plans for any nefarious activity."

He sent that e-mail to the CIA even after receiving a lengthy memo from the FBI agent who arrested Moussaoui and suspected him of being a terrorist with plans to hijack aircraft.

Prosecutors argue that Moussaoui, a French citizen, thwarted a prime opportunity to track down the 9/11 hijackers and possibly unravel the plot when he was arrested and lied.

Had Moussaoui confessed, the FBI could have pursued leads that would have led them to most of the hijackers, government witnesses have testified.

To win the death penalty, prosecutors must first prove that Moussaoui's actions — specifically, his lies — were directly responsible for at least one death on Sept. 11.

If they fail, Moussaoui would get life in prison.

March 28, 2006
Moussaoui, Undermining Case, Now Ties Himself to 9/11 Plot
By NEIL A. LEWIS
ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 27 — Zacarias Moussaoui, who is facing the death penalty for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, took the witness stand in his own defense Monday, only to bolster the government's case by unhesitatingly acknowledging the charges in the indictment against him and adding a few new, self-incriminating statements.

Mr. Moussaoui said he knew in advance of Al Qaeda's plans to fly jetliners into the World Trade Center and asserted that his role on that day was to have been to fly another plane into the White House. He said he was to have been accompanied on the suicidal mission by Richard C. Reid, the so-called shoe bomber who was convicted in a separate failed effort to blow up a plane in flight.

Although Mr. Moussaoui had said over the last few years that he was a member of Al Qaeda and was learning to fly a plane to participate in some "second wave" of terrorist attacks, until now he had always insisted that he knew little of the plot for the attacks and vowed to fight the death penalty to the last of his strength.

But when he began his long-awaited testimony on Monday, he offered a lengthy description of a far deeper involvement with Al Qaeda and its plots. Not only was he a member of the terror network, he told the jury, he also said that he knew most of the Sept. 11 hijackers, admitted that he lied to investigators about his knowledge of their plot when he was arrested on immigration violations three weeks before the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and recounted that he was ecstatic when, behind bars, he heard the news of the attacks on a radio he had bought for that purpose.

Before the day was over, the jury also had the extraordinary experience of hearing a reading of testimony taken in a deposition from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is said to have organized the Sept. 11 attacks and is being held somewhere in the secret overseas detention system of the Central Intelligence Agency.

That deposition, in which Mr. Mohammed answered questions agreed to by prosecutors and defense lawyers, seemed to contradict Mr. Moussaoui's assertion that he was meant to be a pilot on Sept. 11.

Mr. Mohammed portrayed Mr. Moussaoui as a fringe figure who might have been used in a second wave of attacks if needed.

For more than an hour, Michael Nachmanoff, a public defender, recited Mr. Mohammed's answers in what resembled an oddly disembodied literary reading. Mr. Nachmanoff read out testimony that any planning for a second wave of attacks "was only in the most preliminary stages" and that targets had not even been selected.

But while that might seem to contradict Mr. Moussaoui's version of events, the defendant's first-person account, painting his own role in bold brushstrokes, was the day's main event.

When one of Mr. Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers asked if he was to have been the so-called 20th hijacker — a member of the team on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, with only four hijackers aboard, while the planes that hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Center had teams of five — he replied, "No, I was not to be a fifth hijacker."

But, he continued, "I was supposed to fly a plane into the White House."

In addition to the other four planes? asked his lawyer, Gerald T. Zerkin.

"That's correct," Mr. Moussaoui answered.

He also asserted, for the first time, that one of his team members was to have been Mr. Reid, a British convert to Islam who was arrested on Dec. 22, 2001, while trying to detonate an explosive device in his shoe during a flight from Paris to Miami. Previous investigations have provided no evidence of Mr. Reid's involvement in any other plots, or any efforts to enter the United States in the summer of 2001.

When Robert J. Spencer, the chief prosecutor, had his turn, Mr. Moussaoui agreed with just about every incriminating question.

Mr. Spencer asked if the reason Mr. Moussaoui had lied to the F.B.I. agent who questioned him in Minneapolis on Aug. 16 was "so you could allow the operation to go forward."

"That is correct," Mr. Moussaoui replied.

After his arrest, was he looking forward to news of the attacks?

"Yes, you could say that," Mr. Moussaoui said calmly.

He used the phrase "that is correct" dozens of times as the prosecutor led him through the facts presented in the indictment.

It was correct, Mr. Moussaoui said, that he knew hijackers were in the United States for some imminent mission that involved flying planes into buildings.

Was his reason for hoping to fly a plane into the White House to kill Americans?

"That is correct," he said.

Mr. Moussaoui, who has been truculent through proceedings in the past three years and whose outbursts have drawn rebukes from the judge, spoke calmly with a heavy French accent, leaning forward in the witness chair, sometimes casually holding out an empty cup for a marshal to fill with water.

He seemed testy only when being questioned by his own lawyer, who tried with little success to elicit replies that would help his case.

Mr. Moussaoui's testimony even undercut one of the pillars of the defense his lawyers had laid out for him, that he did not know any of the 19 hijackers who died on Sept. 11. As Mr. Spencer showed him their photos, Mr. Moussaoui said he knew 17 of them from the days he helped run a Qaeda guesthouse in Afghanistan.

Mr. Moussaoui, a 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan heritage, has already pleaded guilty to six conspiracy counts in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks. The sole question before the jury here is whether he should be executed or spend the rest of his life in jail.

The Justice Department has argued that he should pay with his life because had he not lied, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Aviation Administration would have moved swiftly to thwart the plot.

The defense may complete its case by Tuesday, and Judge Leonie M. Brinkema told the jurors they might get to deliberate as early as Wednesday. Under the federal death penalty law, the jury must first consider whether Mr. Moussaoui's actions caused some deaths on Sept. 11. If they decide unanimously that his actions did, they move to another phase to consider whether the death penalty is appropriate.

Mr. Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers, with whom he does not speak, almost certainly did not want him to testify as he did. But under the law they had no power to prevent him from doing so.

Until Mr. Moussaoui took the stand, the momentum seemed to be with the defense, which had contended that he was a fringe figure in Al Qaeda whose leaders held him in low regard.

Moreover, the government's case had been plagued by problems. After the disclosure that a government transportation lawyer had improperly coached some aviation security witnesses, the testimony of two other witnesses about how the F.B.I. handled investigative leads before Sept. 11 raised as many questions over the government's performance as it did about Mr. Moussaoui's culpability.

In addition to having served as the government's star witness, Mr. Moussaoui acknowledged to Mr. Spencer the depth of his hatred of Americans before a jury that is to decide whether he lives or dies.

He agreed that he rejoiced in the death of nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11 and that in August 2002, he wrote that he described a tape recording of a female flight attendant pleading for her life aboard one of the planes as "gorgeous."


David Stout and David Johnston contributed reporting for this article.



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March 28, 2006
Moussaoui Now Ties Himself to 9/11 Plot
By NEIL A. LEWIS
ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 27 — Zacarias Moussaoui, who is facing the death penalty for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, took the witness stand in his own defense Monday, only to bolster the government's case by unhesitatingly acknowledging the charges in the indictment against him and adding a few new, self-incriminating statements.

Mr. Moussaoui said he knew in advance of Al Qaeda's plans to fly jetliners into the World Trade Center and asserted that his role on that day was to have been to fly another plane into the White House. He said he was to have been accompanied on the suicidal mission by Richard C. Reid, the so-called shoe bomber who was convicted in a separate failed effort to blow up a plane in flight.

Although Mr. Moussaoui had said over the last few years that he was a member of Al Qaeda and was learning to fly a plane to participate in some "second wave" of terrorist attacks, until now he had always insisted that he knew little of the plot for the attacks and vowed to fight the death penalty to the last of his strength.

But when he began his long-awaited testimony on Monday, he offered a lengthy description of a far deeper involvement with Al Qaeda and its plots. Not only was he a member of the terror network, he told the jury, he also said that he knew most of the Sept. 11 hijackers, admitted that he lied to investigators about his knowledge of their plot when he was arrested on immigration violations three weeks before the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and recounted that he was ecstatic when, behind bars, he heard the news of the attacks on a radio he had bought for that purpose.

Before the day was over, the jury also had the extraordinary experience of hearing a reading of testimony taken in a deposition from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is said to have organized the Sept. 11 attacks and is being held somewhere in the secret overseas detention system of the Central Intelligence Agency.

That deposition, in which Mr. Mohammed answered questions agreed to by prosecutors and defense lawyers, seemed to contradict Mr. Moussaoui's assertion that he was meant to be a pilot on Sept. 11.

Mr. Mohammed portrayed Mr. Moussaoui as a fringe figure who might have been used in a second wave of attacks if needed.

For more than an hour, Michael Nachmanoff, a public defender, recited Mr. Mohammed's answers in what resembled an oddly disembodied literary reading. Mr. Nachmanoff read out testimony that any planning for a second wave of attacks "was only in the most preliminary stages" and that targets had not even been selected.

But while that might seem to contradict Mr. Moussaoui's version of events, the defendant's first-person account, painting his own role in bold brushstrokes, was the day's main event.

When one of Mr. Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers asked if he was to have been the so-called 20th hijacker — a member of the team on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, with only four hijackers aboard, while the planes that hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Center had teams of five — he replied, "No, I was not to be a fifth hijacker."

But, he continued, "I was supposed to fly a plane into the White House."

In addition to the other four planes? asked his lawyer, Gerald T. Zerkin.

"That's correct," Mr. Moussaoui answered.

He also asserted, for the first time, that one of his team members was to have been Mr. Reid, a British convert to Islam who was arrested on Dec. 22, 2001, while trying to detonate an explosive device in his shoe during a flight from Paris to Miami. Previous investigations have provided no evidence of Mr. Reid's involvement in any other plots, or any efforts to enter the United States in the summer of 2001.

When Robert J. Spencer, the chief prosecutor, had his turn, Mr. Moussaoui agreed with just about every incriminating question.

Mr. Spencer asked if the reason Mr. Moussaoui had lied to the F.B.I. agent who questioned him in Minneapolis on Aug. 16 was "so you could allow the operation to go forward."

"That is correct," Mr. Moussaoui replied.

After his arrest, was he looking forward to news of the attacks?

"Yes, you could say that," Mr. Moussaoui said calmly.

He used the phrase "that is correct" dozens of times as the prosecutor led him through the facts presented in the indictment.

It was correct, Mr. Moussaoui said, that he knew hijackers were in the United States for some imminent mission that involved flying planes into buildings.

Was his reason for hoping to fly a plane into the White House to kill Americans?

"That is correct," he said.

Mr. Moussaoui, who has been truculent through proceedings in the past three years and whose outbursts have drawn rebukes from the judge, spoke calmly with a heavy French accent, leaning forward in the witness chair, sometimes casually holding out an empty cup for a marshal to fill with water.

He seemed testy only when being questioned by his own lawyer, who tried with little success to elicit replies that would help his case.

Mr. Moussaoui's testimony even undercut one of the pillars of the defense his lawyers had laid out for him, that he did not know any of the 19 hijackers who died on Sept. 11. As Mr. Spencer showed him their photos, Mr. Moussaoui said he knew 17 of them from the days he helped run a Qaeda guesthouse in Afghanistan.

Mr. Moussaoui, a 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan heritage, has already pleaded guilty to six conspiracy counts in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks. The sole question before the jury here is whether he should be executed or spend the rest of his life in jail.

The Justice Department has argued that he should pay with his life because had he not lied, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Aviation Administration would have moved swiftly to thwart the plot.

The defense may complete its case by Tuesday, and Judge Leonie M. Brinkema told the jurors they might get to deliberate as early as Wednesday. Under the federal death penalty law, the jury must first consider whether Mr. Moussaoui's actions caused some deaths on Sept. 11. If they decide unanimously that his actions did, they move to another phase to consider whether the death penalty is appropriate.

Mr. Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers, with whom he does not speak, almost certainly did not want him to testify as he did. But under the law they had no power to prevent him from doing so.

Until Mr. Moussaoui took the stand, the momentum seemed to be with the defense, which had contended that he was a fringe figure in Al Qaeda whose leaders held him in low regard.

Moreover, the government's case had been plagued by problems. After the disclosure that a government transportation lawyer had improperly coached some aviation security witnesses, the testimony of two other witnesses about how the F.B.I. handled investigative leads before Sept. 11 raised as many questions over the government's performance as it did about Mr. Moussaoui's culpability.

In addition to having served as the government's star witness, Mr. Moussaoui acknowledged to Mr. Spencer the depth of his hatred of Americans before a jury that is to decide whether he lives or dies.

He agreed that he rejoiced in the death of nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11 and that in August 2002, he wrote that he described a tape recording of a female flight attendant pleading for her life aboard one of the planes as "gorgeous."


David Stout and David Johnston contributed reporting for this article.



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http://writ.news.findlaw.com/mariner/20060327.html

----
A September 11 Stand-in
By JOANNE MARINER
----
Monday, Mar. 27, 2006

The government has rested its case against Zacarias Moussaoui, accused of responsibility in the September 11 terrorist attacks. As family members of September 11 victims watched, some via closed circuit television at federal courthouses in New York, Boston, Newark, and elsewhere, prosecutors last Friday presented the final pieces of the evidence that they say justifies sentencing Moussaoui to death.

Moussaoui is the only person charged by the U.S. for the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. The September 11 families view his sentencing hearing as perhaps their only chance to obtain justice.


Yet Moussaoui did not participate in the attacks nor -- even by the government's version of events -- did he organize, plan or fund them. A bit player at most, he was already in U.S. custody on immigration charges by September 11.

While the 9/11 families are left with this rather pale facsimile of justice, others far more implicated in the September 11 attacks have been kept away from any court. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whom the 9/11 Commission called "the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks," is being held in secret CIA detention, as is Ramzi bin al-Shibh, accused of being the operation's paymaster.

The scandal of the Moussaoui prosecution is that it is the September 11 trial by default. The men who truly merit prosecution for the 9/11 attacks, if the accusations against them are true, are escaping justice.

Conspiracy, Arrest, Detention

It was sometime in mid-1996 that Mohammed, who holds Pakistani citizenship, is believed to have outlined the plan that would eventually develop into the September 11 attacks. He has also been linked to the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole; Richard Reid's failed 2001 attempt to blow up an aircraft; and the 2002 bombings of a synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia.

Bin al-Shibh, from Yemen, was allegedly to be a pilot in the September 11 attacks, but he was unable to obtain a U.S. visa. Barred from direct participation in the operation, Bin al-Shibh is believed to have taken on the role of coordinating communications and funding.

On the one-year anniversary of the attacks, Bin al-Shibh was reportedly captured in Karachi, Pakistan. Mohammed was reportedly captured the next March in a raid in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Both men were transferred into U.S. custody without extradition proceedings, and imprisoned, without trial, in secret locations abroad.

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Leaked accounts of the two men's treatment tell of torture and other abuse. Information is scanty, since the two are being held incommunicado, but Mohammed, in particular, has reportedly been subject to water-boarding. That notorious torture technique, a variation on methods used by Latin American dictatorships in the past, involves making a person believe he is drowning.

A secret August 1, 2002, Justice Department memorandum provides some insight into the men's treatment. Drafted in response to a CIA request for guidance, the memo says that torturing al-Qaeda detainees in captivity abroad "may be justified," and that international prohibitions on torture may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations in the war on terrorism. The administration only disavowed this view in June 2004, after the memo came to light.

Besides likely being subject to torture, the two men have also been effectively "disappeared." With no trials, no access to lawyers, and, indeed, no legal process at all, the men are being held in a legal black hole.

Their only attenuated connection to the justice system has been via the Moussaoui trial. Although Moussaoui acknowledges al Qaeda membership, he denies any responsibility for September 11. He claims, as well, that both Mohammed and al-Shibh could attest to his lack of involvement.

It is for this reason that the September 11 families will soon have the bizarre experience of hearing the two detainees' words without ever seeing their faces. Mohammed and bin al-Shibh will not themselves appear in court, but Moussaoui's defense lawyers are planning to have people recite testimony purportedly given by the two during their time in detention.

Evading Justice

A fair and public trial of Mohammed and bin al-Shibh would have been a powerful counterpoint to the lawlessness of the September 11 attacks. The trial would have promoted justice, reaffirmed America's reputation as a country of laws, and given comfort to the 9/11 families.

But having wrongly subjected them to "disappearance" and by credible accounts torture, the government is now unwilling to bring them before a judge. This does a great disservice to those seeking justice for the victims of 9/11.

March 28, 2006
Terrorists Told Interrogators That Moussaoui Had No 9/11 Role
By DAVID STOUT
ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 28 — Zacarias Moussaoui's lawyers used the accounts of known terrorists today to try to deflate their client's boastful claim that he had a major role in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and portray him instead as an ineffective, almost comic bungler.

Nearing the end of their attempt to persuade a federal jury to spare his life, Mr. Moussaoui's team tried to show that he was a fringe player, in part because more serious, effective terrorists thought him erratic, undisciplined and perhaps a bit unhinged.

"He had dreams about flying a plane into the White House," a South Asian terrorist known as Hambali told United States interrogators after his capture in August 2003. But his dreams were never going to become reality because Mr. Moussaoui was known to be "not right in the head and having a bad character," Hambali said.

The defense team was hoping to cast doubt on Mr. Moussaoui's testimony on Monday, in which he said he was to have flown a plane into the White House on Sept. 11, 2001, but that his dream was thwarted when he was arrested in Minnesota in August 2001 on immigration charges.

His lawyers hope to convince the jury in Federal District Court that, contrary to his boasts, Mr. Moussaoui knew little about the Sept. 11 plot, and therefore did not deserve to be put to death for withholding information and lying to investigators after his arrest.

For the jurors to choose death, as opposed to life in prison, they would first have to agree unanimously that Mr. Moussaoui was responsible for at least some of the carnage that occurred in 2001. If they decide that he was, the jurors would then decide on a penalty.

Judge Leonie M. Brinkema has said the jury may get the case as soon as Wednesday.

Besides the account of Hambali, the defense today offered the recollections of Mustafa al Hawsawi, a financial and travel planner for Al Qaeda who worked closely with the Sept. 11 hijackers; Mohammed Al-Qahtani, who is believed by many to be the real missing "20th hijacker," and an Al Qaeda operative known as Khallad, whom investigators have linked to the bombing of two American embassies in Africa in 1998 and the attack on the destroyer Cole in 2000, as well as to the Sept. 11 plot.

All the terrorists whose accounts were offered today are in American custody overseas and have been questioned extensively, Judge Brinkema said. She instructed the jury that lawyers for both sides have agreed that the accounts accurately reflect what the terrorists would testify to if they were available — which they are not, for national security reasons. Neither the defense lawyers or the prosecutors have been allowed to question the terrorists.

Mr. Hawsawi said that Mr. Al-Qahtani was to have been part of the Sept. 11 hijacking team. He had trained extensively to be one of the "muscle hijackers," as investigators now call them, and in Mr. Hawsawi's telling was "the last one" that the lead hijacker, Mohamed Atta, needed to "complete the group."

As for Mr. Moussaoui, Mr. Hawsawi said he scarcely knew him, and that "none of the other brothers talked to him."

The accounts of the imprisoned terrorists were laid out by lawyers in the federal public defender's office meaning, of course, that the "witnesses" themselves cannot be cross-examined, nor can the jury gauge their demeanor.

"Lawyers for both sides have had to work under very unusual circumstances," Judge Brinkema said.

While his lawyers tried to paint him as a buffoon, Mr. Moussaoui, 37, slumped in a chair, several feet away from his lawyers as always, occasionally stroking his beard.

Mr. Al-Qahtani told interrogators that Osama bin Laden had chosen "a special mission for him in America," one that would end in "martyrdom."

But Mr. Al-Qahtani's role in the Sept. 11 plot ended on Aug. 4, 2001, when he ran afoul of immigration and customs officials upon his arrival in Orlando, Fla. Mr. Al-Qahtani spoke no English and would not, or could not, tell officials whom he was to meet in America.

The officials were doubly suspicious because he had only a one-way ticket to the United States, even though he was traveling on a six-day visitor's visa with his Saudi passport. (It turned out that someone was indeed at the airport to meet him: Mohamed Atta. But Mr. Al-Qahtani was sent back to the United Arab Emirates, eventually moving to Afghanistan, where he was captured late in 2001.)

The Al Qaeda operative known as Khallad told his questioners that he knew of no role for Mr. Moussaoui in the Sept. 11 operation or any other Al Qaeda undertaking, according to the account offered today. The operative recalled that Mr. Moussaoui was known to be a security risk because of his careless use of the telephone.

The South Asian terrorist known as Hambali found Mr. Moussaoui a particular annoyance. He told his interrogators that Mr. Moussaoui showed up in Malaysia with a plan to buy 40 tons of ammonium nitrate — an enormous amount even for an ambitious terrorist undertaking.

Mr. Moussaoui claimed to have the backing of terrorist higher-ups, but Hambali thought four tons might be more reasonable. Four tons of the explosive was bought, but a use for it never materialized, and Hambali was "stuck with the nitrate and the bill," according to the account read in court today.

Fed up, Hambali gladly paid for an airline ticket to Europe, where Mr. Moussaoui could "become someone else's problem."



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Moussaoui Offered to Implicate Himself

By Jerry Markon and Timothy Dwyer

Zacarias Moussaoui wanted to be a witness for the prosecution -- and against himself.

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle