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Gold9472
03-05-2006, 01:51 AM
At Satellite Courthouses, 9/11 Relatives Will Watch Moussaoui's Sentencing

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/national/nationalspecial3/05trial.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

By NEIL A. LEWIS
Published: March 5, 2006

WASHINGTON, March 4 — When lawyers make their opening statements on Monday in the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui in a Virginia courtroom, Sally Regenhard intends to be in Lower Manhattan. Against the advice of friends, she is planning to watch the proceedings on closed-circuit television at the Moynihan federal courthouse, just blocks from where her son died on Sept. 11, 2001.

Sally Regenhard with a photo of her son, Christian. The Moussaoui trial, she said, is "our only opportunity to get a modicum of justice."

Mrs. Regenhard is among more than 500 family members of 9/11 victims who have signed up to watch the first and possibly only trial in the United States of someone charged with direct responsibility for the attacks.

Federal criminal trials are not generally broadcast, but the government has set aside rooms for the family members to view the proceedings in courthouses in Manhattan; Central Islip, Long Island; Boston; Philadelphia; Newark; and in the same building in Alexandria, Va., where Mr. Moussaoui will be tried.

Mrs. Regenhard, whose 27-year-old son, Christian, a probationary firefighter, was killed in the attacks, said her life remained consumed with mourning and efforts to understand what happened that day. Her son graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and was a marine, writer, artist and world traveler, she said.

"The families are focused on this man Moussaoui, this trial, because it is our only opportunity to experience some accountability," Mrs. Regenhard said. "Our only opportunity to get a modicum of justice."

Mr. Moussaoui did not participate in the attacks; he was in prison at the time on immigration charges. Prosecutors have argued, however, that he was part of the conspiracy to fly airplanes into buildings, and that if he had not lied to investigators about his reasons for taking flight lessons, the plot might have been uncovered.

Mr. Moussaoui has said that he is a member of Al Qaeda, despises Americans and was training to fly an airplane into the White House on a different day.

"He's a proxy," said Mrs. Regenhard, who believes it is appropriate to view him as a stand-in for the 19 hijackers who died that day. "If this man would have been called up that day, he would have accepted the assignment in a heartbeat."

David de Vere, who lives in England and whose daughter Melanie died in the World Trade Center, declined an invitation to view the trial as a representative of British citizens who were killed. "Apart from the logistical and cost problems of crossing the pond," he said, he chose not to attend the trial because he did not view Mr. Moussaoui as representing the entire conspiracy.

In an e-mail message, Mr. de Vere said he felt that Osama bin Laden and most of the organizers of the attacks would "never be captured."

"I certainly could never accept Moussaoui as a proxy for the whole," he wrote.

Mr. Moussaoui, a 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan heritage, has pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy in connection with the attacks in New York and Washington. As a result, the trial will be solely over whether he is put to death by lethal injection at a federal prison in Indiana or spends the remainder of his life in jail.

Most of the family members interviewed said they did not have strong feelings about which penalty he received.

"What happens to him is of no matter to me," said Jane Pollicino, whose husband died at the World Trade Center. "I've tried to take part in anything that is connected to 9/11."

Mrs. Pollicino, who plans to watch the trial from the Long Island courthouse, said she still had little expectation of escaping what she called a suffocating grief.

"There's no end to this," she said, adding that last month the New York City medical examiner's office returned a toothbrush used by her husband, Steve, that she had turned over for DNA identification purposes. She said her husband's remains were never found.

Lois Diehl, whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center, plans to watch the trial from Newark with her 19-year-old daughter. Ms. Diehl said she did not mind if Mr. Moussaoui received a life sentence instead of a death sentence. "I would like him to be in solitary, not watching TV in prison and having a grand old time," she said.

Ms. Diehl said her daughter surprised her by expressing an interest in watching the trial. "She would like to see the man who is partially responsible for her father's killing," she said.

As for her own motives, she said they were difficult to explain. "We used to fall asleep at night holding hands," she said.

Mrs. Regenhard said that she would not mind if Mr. Moussaoui were put to death, but that her son would have believed in showing mercy.

She said her friends had exhorted her not to view the trial, as it would only increase her grief and anger. She will be among about 170 people watching from Manhattan, the largest contingent at any of the sites, and will also travel to Virginia to be in the courtroom, where prosecutors have reserved at least a dozen seats for family members that will be available on a rotating basis.

Mr. Moussaoui's mother, Aisha el-Wafi of France, will also be at the Virginia courthouse. She is scheduled to watch the trial from a separate room with an interpreter who will translate the proceedings into French. Leonie M. Brinkema, the presiding judge, arranged for the room so the translation would not disrupt the proceedings.

One family member who will not attend is Stephan Gerhardt, whose brother, Ralph, was killed in one of the World Trade Center towers. He said he had intended to go but decided "there was nothing I could gain there."

"I hate the word 'closure,' and I wasn't looking for closure," Mr. Gerhardt said. "I was looking to understand a little bit why the hatred is so strong in Moussaoui and others like him."

On Monday, a jury pool of 85 people will be whittled to the 12 who will decide Mr. Moussaoui's fate and 6 alternates. Opening statements are scheduled to begin in the afternoon, with the prosecutor emphasizing Mr. Moussaoui's failure to tell investigators what he knew.

Mr. Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers, with whom he does not speak, are expected to argue that the government knew a great amount about Al Qaeda's plans and that Mr. Moussaoui's failure to speak was not as important as prosecutors contend.

Gold9472
03-06-2006, 11:38 AM
Sentencing process for 9/11 defendant getting under way

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/terror/20060306-0537-moussaoui.html

By Matthew Barakat
ASSOCIATED PRESS

5:37 a.m. March 6, 2006

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – After more than four years of wrangling and delay, the death penalty trial of the only man charged in the United States in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is ready to begin.

Final jury selection was scheduled for Monday in the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, a 37-year-old French citizen who has admitted his loyalty to the al-Qaeda terror network and its leader, Osama bin Laden, but denies he has anything to do with Sept. 11.

A jury pool of 83 was called to the federal courthouse in Alexandria. Prosecutors and defense lawyers will whittle that group to a jury of 18 – 12 plus six alternates – using peremptory strikes, which allow each side to dismiss jurors for any reason they choose except race or gender.

Each side gets 30 peremptory strikes. Defense lawyers asked for additional strikes last week, but the judge denied that request Friday.

The jurors scheduled to report for service already have been qualified to serve during a two-week jury selection process in which they were quizzed individually by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema and filled out 50-page questionnaires asking their views about the death penalty, al-Qaeda, the FBI and their reactions to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Opening statements are scheduled for Monday afternoon, and the first witness is also expected to take the stand Monday.

Arrangements for the trial have been years in the making. Among the plans are provisions for victims of the terror attacks and their families to watch the trial on closed-circuit television at federal courthouses in Boston, Central Islip, N.Y., Newark, N.J., Philadelphia and in Alexandria, thanks to legislation passed in Congress.

Moussaoui pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with al-Qaeda to hijack planes and commit other crimes. The trial will simply determine Moussaoui's punishment, and only two options are available: death or life in prison.

To obtain the death penalty, prosecutors must first prove a direct link between Moussaoui and the Sept. 11 attacks. Moussaoui denies any connection to 9/11, but says he was training for a possible future attack.

Prosecutors will try to link Moussaoui to 9/11 by arguing that the FBI would have prevented the attacks if only Moussaoui had told the truth to the FBI about his terrorist links when he was arrested in August 2001.

The defense argues that the FBI and other agencies knew more about the hijackers' plans before 9/11 than Moussaoui and still failed to stop the attacks.

Gold9472
03-06-2006, 07:24 PM
Moussaoui's lies led to 9/11 deaths-prosecutor

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-03-06T222806Z_01_N048724_RTRUKOC_0_UK-SECURITY-MOUSSAOUI.xml

By Deborah Charles
Mon Mar 6, 2006 10:28 PM GMT

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (Reuters) - Federal prosecutors argued on Monday that even though September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui was in jail during the attacks he should be executed because his lies led directly to the deaths of 3,000 people.

But one of his court-appointed lawyers said that executing Moussaoui would only make him a martyr because many al Qaeda members only "live so that they can die."

Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, pleaded guilty in April to six counts, three of which carry the death penalty. The charges included conspiracy to commit terrorism.

"Please don't make him a hero," argued defence attorney Edward MacMahon in opening arguments at the trial to determine his sentence. "He just doesn't deserve it."

Moussaoui, 37, was arrested the month before the 2001 attacks after raising suspicions at a flight school and was in jail on September 11. Prosecutors said if he had not lied to investigators and told what he knew, the hijackings might have been averted.

"Even though he was in jail on September 11, 2001, Moussaoui did his part ... as a loyal al Qaeda soldier," said lead prosecutor Robert Spencer. "His lies permitted his al Qaeda brothers to go forward and that's what they did."

"Had Moussaoui just told the truth on September 11, 2001, it would all have been different," he said.

Moussaoui, dressed in a green prisoner's jumpsuit and a white cap, spent most of his time leaning back in his chair rubbing his long, bushy beard. In the past he has disrupted some court appearances, but this time he watched and took notes with little expression.

Earlier, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema seated 12 jurors and five alternates in the only trial to be held in the United States in connection with the attacks, which killed about 3,000 people.

The jury must first decide whether his actions led directly to at least one death on Sept 11. If the jury finds they do, then he can be executed, but if they find the opposite he would receive life in prison.

MacMahon, one of several court appointed attorneys who Moussaoui disdains, called the government's argument "entirely speculative."

"This trial cannot be viewed by you as jurors as part of the war on terror," he said. "We must give this man a fair trial no matter who he is, what he thinks of us and who he represents."

A few relatives of those who died on September 11 were in the court audience and others watched at special viewing rooms in Boston, New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and at the Alexandria courthouse.

At the Manhattan federal courthouse, Barry Zelman, 51, wearing a large badge with a picture of his brother who died in the World Trade Centre, said it would be hard watching Moussaoui and his trial

"There's going to be a lot of anger and a lot of emotion," Zelman said. "He's al Qaeda in the flesh."

"For most of us I hope it brings some peace and healing," said Eunice Hanson, who lost her son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter on one of the planes that struck the trade centre. "It will be painful, very painful."

Brinkema said evidence from six enemy combatants may be presented during trial. The trial was delayed for years due to appeals over Moussaoui's demands for access to al Qaeda detainees he said could help his case.

The charges against Moussaoui were conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism, commit aircraft piracy, destroy aircraft, use weapons of mass destruction, murder U.S. employees and destroy property.

Although he said he was not meant to be part of the September 11 attacks, he said Osama bin Laden had picked him to fly a plane into the White House as part of a broader conspiracy.

Gold9472
03-07-2006, 09:19 PM
FBI Agent Admits Hints Of 9/11 At Moussaoui Trial
Zacarias Moussaoui's lawyers are trying to suggest that the FBI knew more about al Qaida's plans than Moussaoui did.

http://www.wcsh6.com/home/article.asp?id=32453

3/7/2006

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (AP) -- In cross-examination, a defense lawyer got FBI agent Michael Anticev to admit that the FBI was aware years before Nine-Eleven that al Qaida planned to slam planes into prominent buildings.

Earlier, Anticev read excerpts from an al Qaida training manual on how to deceive investigators in an interrogation.

Prosecutors say if the confessed al Qaida member had told investigators the truth, Nine-Eleven would have been prevented.

Prosecutors are pushing for a death penalty for the man who pleaded guilty to conspiring with al Qaida to hijack planes and commit other crimes.

Meanwhile Moussaoui's mother, Aicha el-Wafi, is talking about her strained relationship with her son. In Moussaoui's on-again, off-again association with his lawyers, el-Wafi says Moussaoui once asked his mother not to talk to the defense team. When she did to try to help him, he got mad at her.

Moussaoui's mother also suggests she's concerned about her son's demeanor, saying he appears to be someone else. She says she thinks her son is on medication to calm him.

Gold9472
03-08-2006, 08:04 PM
Words from 9/11 flight rivet courtroom
FBI knew years earlier of al-Qaida's plans, agent testifies

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/1141821042311050.xml&coll=2

Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Michael J. Sniffen
Associated Press

Alexandria, Va. -- Reading from radiophone transmissions, a federal prosecutor transfixed the courtroom at Zacarias Moussaoui's sentencing trial Tuesday with a minute-by-minute account of al-Qaida's hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11 and the plane's journey into the north tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

"We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low," flight attendant Amy Sweeney told ground controllers who had asked at 8:44 a.m. where the plane was. Then a few seconds' pause, and finally: "Oh my God, we are way too low!" The phone went dead at 8:46 a.m. as the Boeing 767 jetliner hit the tower in the first of four crashes by hijacked jetliners that day.

Moussaoui, the confessed al-Qaida conspirator who is facing a life-or-death decision, was as electrified as the jury and the audience.

As a recess was called moments later, the 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent surged from his chair, pumped his right fist in the air and shouted: "Allah Akbar! God curse America! Bless Osama bin Laden!" He usually mutters these invocations when leaving court.

The actual audio recordings of radiophone calls by flight attendants on Flight 11 have been played in public before. But to avoid inflaming the jury at this sentencing trial, prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed instead to read an account of the flight, including major sections of the phone call transcripts.

Nevertheless, the reading by Assistant U.S. Attorney David Raskin riveted the jury and audience -- all the more so because it came after two hours of intricate testimony by FBI agent James Fitzgerald about how the bureau tracked the hijackers after Sept. 11.

Around the courtroom, heads had been left nodding by Fitzgerald's detailed and precise description of innumerable hotel receipts, phone call records and financial transactions for 19 men with unfamiliar Arab names, which the FBI gathered to reconstruct how they circled the globe and arrived in the United States.

Nearly all communicated with an al-Qaida cell in Hamburg, Germany, and got money wired to them in this country from one of three al-Qaida operatives.

At some point, prosecutors will bring on witnesses to show that Moussaoui also got money from the same source, but Fitzgerald never mentioned Moussaoui in his testimony.

Nor did he say there was any contact between Moussaoui and the 19 hijackers, a point the defense has already stressed.

Earlier, defense attorney Edward MacMahon got FBI agent Michael Anticev to acknowledge on cross-examination that the FBI was aware years before Sept. 11 that al-Qaida had plans to fly airplanes into prominent buildings. Moussaoui's lawyers are portraying him as a pathetic loner who dreamed of becoming a terrorist but was shut out of Sept. 11 planning and considered by one al-Qaida leader "cuckoo in the head."

Moussaoui pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with al-Qaida to hijack planes and commit other crimes. The jury will choose between execution or life in prison without possibility of release.

To obtain the death penalty, prosecutors must first prove Moussaoui took an action that led directly to deaths on Sept. 11. Moussaoui denies he had any role in Sept. 11 and says he was training for a possible future attack on the White House.

Gold9472
03-08-2006, 08:16 PM
"Release of the document responsive to plaintiff's FOIA request would threaten to interfere with the criminal prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person to be brought to trial in the United States for the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. The process of selecting prospective jurors for the penalty phase of Moussaoui's trial is expected to begin in late 2005. Therefore, the FBI withheld the responsible record, a CD-ROM of time-lapse images from Pentagon security cameras, pursuant to Exemption 7(A) because its release could reasonably be expected to interfere with that law enforcement proceeding. Federal prosecutors may ask the Court to impose the death penalty. Widespread dissemination of this record could present significant harm to the government's criminal case."

That is the reason given to Scott Hodes of www.flight77.info as to why they won't release the videos of the Pentagon. That reason no longer has merit because as we just found out, "to avoid inflaming the jury at this sentencing trial, prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed instead to read an account of the flight, including major sections of the phone call transcripts".

They're not going to be needing the tapes, so why not release them?

Gold9472
03-12-2006, 02:32 PM
AP Review: Gov't Missing Deadlines, Limits

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060312/ap_on_re_us/sunshine_week_delays

By MARTHA MENDOZA, AP National Writer 1 hour, 9 minutes ago

Many federal agencies fall far short of the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, repeatedly failing to meet reporting deadlines while citizens wait ever longer for documents, an Associated Press review has found.

Requests for information ranging from historical records to federal contracts usually take months and sometimes take years to be filled; most departments missed the Feb. 1 deadline to send legally required annual reports to the Justice Department (and many still haven't been submitted) and the Justice Department hasn't produced an annual summary of FOIA reports for two years.

"Federal FOIA is the water torture. It's just drip, drip, drip. You wait and you wait and you wait," said Charles Davis who heads the National FOI Coalition.

The Freedom of Information Act, signed 40 years ago by President Johnson, dictates that federal records must be shared with the public unless they involve national security or private information about an individual or business.

Johnson's statement at the signing — "A democracy works best when the people have all the information that the security of the Nation permits" — has been echoed repeatedly by lawmakers in both parties in recent years, who have updated the law periodically with deadlines and restrictions to prompt quicker responses.

But an Associated Press analysis of about 250 annual FOIA reports submitted to the Justice Department between 1998 and 2005 found that:

_Backlogs are increasing at most agencies. Overall, the total number of requests pending at the 15 executive departments at the end of Fiscal Year 2004 was 147,810, a 24 percent increase over the previous year. Nine of the 15 federal departments reported an increase in their backlogs from Fiscal Year 2003 to Fiscal Year 2004.

_Many backlogs are lengthy. The most recent reports available from the 50 worst laggards show the median wait for a request to be handled ranges from about three months to more than four years, depending on the agency. The slowest federal agency is the National Archives, where officers explained most of their requests, pending for an average of 1,631 days, have to be reviewed by the originating agency for declassification before they can be released.

_Agencies involved with national security are clamping down on the amount of information they release to the public. The FBI, CIA and Defense departments, all agencies that have considerable investigative branches, again reduced the percentage of requested information released in full in 2005, continuing a trend dating back at least seven years. The Justice Department, however, showed a slight increase in the amount of information it released in full for the first time since the 2001 terror attacks.

_A full month after the Feb. 1 deadline, about 30 percent of federal agencies and departments required to submit annual FOIA reports to the Justice Department had failed to do so. Those with late reports included the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services which, all together, received about 88 percent of all FOIA requests in the country in 2004.

Paul McMasters, ombudsman of the nonpartisan First Amendment Center and one of the nation's leading authorities on freedom-of-information issues, said Congress tried to remedy the lagging response times in 1996 by extending the amount of time agencies have to respond, from ten to 20 days.

He said that remedy seems to have backfired, prompting agencies simply to delay even longer. In addition, because there are no consequences for missing FOIA deadlines, McMasters said few FOIA directors seem to take the legal requirements seriously.

"There is absolutely no incentive for federal government employees to act with any sense of urgency on FOIA requests, and there are every sort of incentive to delay and delay," he said. "Those incentives are a culture of secrecy that has always existed in government, from 40 years ago when FOIA was passed to the present time."

FOIA does not require agencies to release information within a certain amount of time. The law does, however, mandate that agencies respond to requests in some way within 20 days. These responses often come in the form of a postcard acknowledging that a request has been received.

Actual processing often takes much longer. The most recent figures available show that a third of Cabinet departments had at least one agency where requests were pending for more than a year.

Even requests that are stamped "expedited" based on an exceptional need or urgency can lag for many months. The Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy, which is in charge of administering FOIA across the federal government, kept an expedited request pending for 185 days last year.

Daniel Metcalfe, who directs the Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy, said that when a request is expedited it heads to the front of the line. But complicated requests can take a long time to complete, he said.

"Even though the agency is trying its hardest to process the request as soon as practicable, it could take a long time because of the scope, volume or complexity of what is being sought."

Congress introduced the "Faster FOIA Act" last spring, and President Bush issued an executive order in December, calling on agencies to take several consumer-friendly steps. Among them: streamlining the handling of requests under the FOIA and appointing senior officials to monitor compliance with the law.

To date all 15 cabinet level agencies have appointed chief FOIA officers as required, although only seven of those agencies appear to meet Bush's specific requirement that these appointees be "at the Assistant Secretary or equivalent level."

Bush also ordered agencies to streamline the handling of requests under the FOIA and appointing senior officials to monitor compliance with the law.

But Bush's directive stopped short of modifying a 2001 policy issued by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft requiring agencies to carefully consider national security, effective law enforcement and personal privacy before releasing information. Ashcroft cited security concerns in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks as the reason for the changes to open government laws.

"The Bush-Cheney Administration sent a powerful message government-wide with the Ashcroft FOIA policy in 2001," said Sen. Patrick Leahy (news, bio, voting record), D-Vt., a leading FOIA reform advocate who has several bills pending in Congress to modify the law.

"That shifted the upper hand in FOIA requests from the public to federal agencies. The new policy says, in effect, 'When in doubt, don't disclose, and the Justice Department will support your denials in court.' It undermines FOIA's purpose, which is to facilitate the public's right to know the facts, not the government's ability to hide them," he said.

His colleague, Sen. John Cornyn (news, bio, voting record), R-Texas, said "more remains to be done to ensure that American citizens have access to the information they need and deserve."

Cornyn is pressing for additional funding to address backlogs, which he said will "speed the rate at which information is given to the public."

In its review, the AP found that in 2005, in addition to increasing backlogs, many agencies decreased the amount of information they were willing to release in full. FBI authorities gave just six out of every 1,000 FOI applicants everything they asked for, down from 50 out of every 1,000 in 1998. The CIA has seen a similar, steady decline: just 11 percent of the FOIA requests processed at the CIA were granted in total in 2004, down from 44 percent in 1998.

Washington-based attorney Scott A. Hodes, who led the FBI's Freedom of Information litigation unit from 1998 to 2002, said there's an institution-wide inclination to avoid complying with the law.

"It doesn't surprise me that most responses are late, and that they tend to deny a lot. Even though your higher level administration officials will say they like FOIA, there's a general dislike of FOIA," he said.

Gold9472
03-13-2006, 12:02 PM
Angry judge questions U.S. death case against Moussaoui
Judge to consider witness coaching by government lawyers

http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/03/13/moussaoui.trial.ap/index.html

Monday, March 13, 2006; Posted: 10:47 a.m. EST (15:47 GMT)

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (AP) -- An angry federal judge unexpectedly recessed the death penalty trial of al Qaeda 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 informed the judge and the defense over the weekend that a lawyer for the Federal Aviation Administration had coached four government FAA witnesses.

The coaching violated the rule set by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema 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.

Moussaoui pleaded guilty 11 months ago to conspiring with al Qaeda to hijack planes and commit other crimes.

The sentencing trial is being held for the jury to choose between execution or life in prison without possibility of release.

To obtain the death penalty, prosecutors must first prove Moussaoui took an action that led directly to deaths on September 11.

Moussaoui denies he had any role in September 11 and says he was training for a possible future attack on the White House.

Gold9472
03-13-2006, 08:03 PM
Moussaoui's mother comforted by 9/11 mom at church gathering

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--moussaouismother0313mar13,0,7538028.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork

(Gold9472: Only in America.)

March 13, 2006, 9:26 AM EST

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) _ The mother of Zacarias Moussaoui was tearfully embraced by the mother of a World Trade Center victim at a church gathering.

Aicha el-Wafi appeared at the "welcoming gathering" on Sunday in White Plains, about 25 miles north of ground zero, before returning home to France. The event included peace workers, anti-death-penalty activists and mothers from Memorial United Methodist Church.

A sentencing trial entered its second week Monday in Virginia for Moussaoui, a confessed al-Qaida conspirator, who could face the death penalty.

At Sunday's gathering, Connie Taylor, who lost her 37-year-old son, Bradley, on Sept. 11, stepped toward el-Wafi and embraced her. Many of those who formed a circle around them also began to cry, The Journal News reported.

Taylor said she had concluded that el-Wafi's plight was greater than her own.

"She is blaming her son, in part," Taylor said. "That must be so horrible. I didn't experience that."

"The hardest suffering in the world today is that of parents who lose their children," el-Wafi said in French. "There will never be an explanation to justify this. The suffering will last forever."

El-Wafi, who raised four children alone while working as a cleaning woman, said that she lost her son to an Islamist movement just as another mother might lose hers to drugs or a cult.

She said that her older son has also joined an Islamist movement, in Lebanon. "In these movements, they look for the little cracks to get into people's minds and control them," she said.

El-Wafi said her future might include work for peace and justice causes. In the fall of 2002, she arranged to meet in New York with six people who lost loved ones on Sept. 11.

But for now, her life is in a holding pattern.

"I am only a mother," she said.

Gold9472
03-13-2006, 08:08 PM
Prosecutor used transcript to aid witness

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/breaking_news/14090242.htm

MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN
Associated Press
3/13/2006

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - The government lawyer who has jeopardized the prosecution of al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui used a transcript of the first day of the trial to try to shape future testimony to meet or deflect possible defense attacks, court documents indicate.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema suspended Moussaoui's sentencing trial Monday when she learned from prosecutors of e-mails sent to upcoming witnesses by Carla J. Martin, an attorney in the Transportation Security Administration.

Arguing that Martin's e-mails tainted three government and four defense witnesses beyond repair, the defense has asked the judge to dismiss the government's bid to execute Moussaoui, 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.

Martin could not be reached for comment.

The judge sent the jury home until Wednesday and called a hearing Tuesday with Martin and the witnesses to decide what to do. Meantime, she ordered Martin's e-mails released to the public because "if the death penalty winds up being dismissed, the public has a right to know how and why it happened."

Prosecutors had asked that the full text of the e-mails be kept from the public and the defense.

In the 16 pages of e-mails, Martin criticizes the government's opening statement about how the Federal Aviation Administration would have responded to prevent the 9/11 attacks if Moussaoui hadn't lied about his terrorist connections when arrested at a Minnesota flight school Aug. 16, 2001.

She told upcoming government witness Lynne Osmus the prosecutors' opening statement left gaps "the defense can drive a truck through."

Martin concluded the government was going to mistakenly argue that if Moussaoui had told agents about buying short-bladed knives, like those used by the 9/11 hijackers, the FAA could have kept all of them off airplanes by airport screening with X-ray and magnetometer machines.

"There is no way anyone could say that the (airline) carriers could have prevented all short-bladed knives from going through," she e-mailed Osmus. "Dave MUST elicit that from you and the airline witnesses on direct, and not allow the defense to cut your credibility on cross, (just as they did yesterday with the FBI witness). ..."

Prosecutor David Novak told Brinkema on Monday that this was a harmless e-mail because the government never intended to claim airport screening was 100 percent effective.

In an e-mail to government witness Claudio Manno, Martin notes that FAA did not know that FBI agents had found radical Middle Easterners taking flying lessons in Phoenix before 9/11 or that CIA Director George Tenet was briefed on Aug. 23 that an Islamic extremist named Moussaoui was taking pilot lessons.

"The defense will exploit the fact that the FAA was not clued in to what was going on," Martin e-mailed Manno. "You need to assert that we did not necessarily need to wait until we got all available information, that we acted independently, indeed, we had a statutory mandate, to follow up on any issue that we thought was a threat to civil aviation."

In several e-mails, Martin said, "Today, the FBI agent on the stand got tripped up" by defense lawyer Edward MacMahon. FBI agent Michael Anticev first asserted "I don't think anybody was looking at using aircraft as weapons." But MacMahon got him to acknowledge that the FBI knew before 9/11 that al-Qaida operative Abdul Hakim Murad arrested in the Philippines in 1995 told investigators of plans to fly a plane into CIA headquarters.

She e-mailed Manno: "I've asked Matt to pull any unclass. Information on Murad - as I know we ran down this issue, deemed it not to be credible ... . Dave will need to go over that with you."

Prosecutor Novak told the court he first learned of the coaching, which he called "horrendously wrong," in a voicemail from Martin last Friday evening. He told the judge he spent the weekend investigating what Martin did and gathering her e-mails.

He said that six of the seven upcoming witnesses had read her e-mails and two of them had read the attached trial transcript. He was unable to locate one of the defense witnesses.

Martin was admitted to the bar in 1990. She graduated from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and got a law degree from the Washington College of Law. She worked in the FAA chief counsel's office but now works as a lawyer for TSA. After 9/11, Congress transferred responsibility for aviation security from FAA to the newly created TSA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and a number of FAA employees transferred to TSA.

Gold9472
03-14-2006, 02:44 PM
Victims' Families Outraged by Government Blunder
Zacarias Moussaoui Could Escape the Death Penalty

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/LegalCenter/story?id=1722513

March 14, 2006 — Families of victims of Sept. 11, 2001, are horrified at the possibility that al Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui may be spared the death penalty.

"I lost my son on 9/11," Sally Regenhard said. "He was just the most wonderful person that God ever made. I was looking to this trial to see if we could eradicate one evil person, to remove one force of evil from this beautiful world, and this is why I'm devastated to see that again. We may have lost the only opportunity that was really left for us to have some justice."

Moussaoui pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with al Qaeda to fly airplanes into U.S. buildings, although he denied having any role in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkman suspended Moussaoui's sentencing trial on Monday to assess the misconduct of government lawyer Carla Martin, who had provided seven witnesses with information from opening statements.

"I was really horrified and very outraged to hear that this type of mistake was made," Regenhard said. "This is probably one of the most important trials in the history of this country — how someone could put that at risk. She betrayed the families of the victims who certainly have been waiting nearly five long years to get some kind of scintilla of justice."

Defense attorney Edward MacMahon has moved to bar the government from pursuing the death penalty, and, if he wins, Moussaoui will automatically be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Families of the 9/11 victims say that is not enough.

"We don't have the answers, and we're looking around every corner," said Barry Zelman whose brother died on 9/11. "My brother's life was very important, so me pursuing the people who killed him is very important. I felt the government dropped the ball."

Gold9472
03-15-2006, 08:22 AM
Government Lawyer's Error Upsets Families of 9/11 Victims

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/14/AR2006031401610.html

By Timothy Dwyer and Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, March 15, 2006; Page A11

Yesterday was another day of frustration for families of the victims of Sept. 11, 2001.

They have waited more than four years through delays and appeals for Zacarias Moussaoui's trial to begin. Satellite courtrooms, established by Congress, have been set up in Boston, Manhattan, Long Island, Newark and Philadelphia so they could watch the government make its case that the only person convicted in the United States in the terrorist attacks should be executed.

Although the families might disagree about what role Moussaoui played in the attacks and what his sentence should be, many have said that they looked forward to the trial as a vehicle to gather information, heal wounds and, for some, seek some closure.

Some family members said they were upset that the actions of a Transportation Security Administration lawyer, Carla J. Martin, could potentially derail the government's case. U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema decided yesterday to exclude all aviation security evidence after Martin violated a court order by e-mailing trial transcripts to seven witnesses and coaching them about their upcoming testimony.

"I am furious," said Rosemary Dillard, whose husband, Eddie, was killed on the plane that was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon. "Aviation is a big part of this case. Aviation is what killed our loved ones. It was planes. You take aviation out . . . where do they go from here?"

Where the trial goes after the events of the past two days is a question that many family members were asking yesterday.

They differ on whether Moussaoui should get a life or death sentence. But many were hoping that the penalty phase of the admitted al-Qaeda member would be an opportunity to learn more about what the U.S. government knew regarding terror threats before Sept. 11, 2001, and what it did with the information.

"How are we supposed to get any new information now?" said Fiona Havlish, formerly of Buck County, Pa., whose husband was killed at the World Trade Center. "I think what all of us are looking for is the truth, and the truth has not been forthcoming out of Washington. I mean, I can only speak for myself, but I do not feel that the truth has come out no matter how hard we as family members have tried. And this was just one more avenue to find a particle of truth, and that is being thwarted."

Havlish recently moved to Colorado and has been following the case by watching television news. She said she is morally opposed to the death penalty but wants the trial to go forward to serve as a conduit of information for the families.

Some family members questioned how Martin could have blatantly disregarded a court order -- or not been aware of it.

Some wondered whether she was being used as a scapegoat for other government officials who did not want the aviation security evidence to be made public.

"I don't think she is alone," Dillard said in a telephone interview last night. "I just don't think she could have gotten away with that. Somebody helped her or prompted her. It just makes me wonder whether this is one more thing where no one is going to be held accountable. . . . It's almost too clean. I wonder if there is more to the story than we know."

D. Hamilton Petersen said he would like to hear Martin's side of the story before he makes any judgments. "We need to give Carla Martin an opportunity to explain herself," he said in a telephone interview. "While it was a gaffe, it was not nefarious, and it was not done by the darkness of night. To err is human, and we need to get the facts, in fairness to Miss Martin." Peterson's father, Donald A. Peterson, and his stepmother, Jean H. Peterson, were killed when United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in western Pennsylvania.

Some family members saw some irony in the judge's decision because, on the surface, excluding aviation security testimony would appear to favor the defense, but the family members said it would hurt their quest to get as much information made public as possible about the circumstances of their loved ones' deaths.

"I felt the government wasn't telling us all that it knew, and I do know that feeling is shared in the Massachusetts circle of families within which I travel," said Blake Allison, of Hanover, N.H., whose wife, Anna Allison, was killed on American Airlines Flight 11. "We talked about this the first day of the trial, the hope that the trial would bring some clarity to some of the circumstances leading up to 9/11."

Gold9472
03-15-2006, 09:33 AM
Prosecution setback in America's only 9/11 trial

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2087267,00.html

By Jenny Booth and agencies
3/15/2006

The judge hearing America's only trial of a 9/11 conspirator has banned six witnesses from testifying after discovering that they had been coached.

The ruling by District Judge Leonie Brinkema wipes out half of the prosecution's case against Zacarias Moussaoui, who has admitted conspiracy in al-Qaeda plots to use passenger jets as terror weapons.

Moussaoui was arrested a month before the quadruple hijackings that killed 3,000 people, but US prosecutors are arguing for the death penalty for him, saying that he did not reveal information that could have prevented the attacks.

The witnesses that have been excluded from giving evidence were all due to talk about aviation security, the issue at the heart of the trial. Prosecutors are now wondering whether to appeal.

Relatives of 9/11 victims, who have been watching the proceedings live on television screens set up in courtrooms around America, said that they were appalled by the development.

"I felt like my heart had been ripped out," said Rosemary Dillard, whose husband Eddie was killed aboard the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. "I felt like my husband had been killed again. I felt like the Government had let me down again."

Judge Brinkema's remit is to decide on a sentence for Moussaoui, who was arrested after his instructors at a US flight school became suspicious.

She spent all day in closed court session yesterday, listening to the six witnesses who, it emerged, had been sent extensive transcripts of evidence previously heard in the trial in order to prepare them for their day in court.

The transcripts were sent out by Carla Martin, a lawyer for the Transportation Security Administration, with a covering note explaining that they might help them in answering questions. By well-established legal convention, witnesses are banned from hearing previous evidence in court cases in case it affects their own testimony.

All six said that they had received the e-mails, but did not plan to change their evidence as a result. Ms Martin herself also appeared briefly in court, but did not testify because she could not find a lawyer to represent her. The judge read Ms Martin her rights and warned she might face civil or criminal proceedings for contempt of court.

"I don't think in the annals of criminal law there has ever been a case with this many significant problems," said Judge Brinkema, who considered abandoning the trial altogether but eventually decided to adjourn it until Monday.

"I am removing from this case any and all witnesses and evidence dealing with the aviation component. What we have in this case... is that six witnesses, two for the government and four potential defence witnesses, were tainted."

The missing testimony was expected to deal with how much the Federal Aviation Administration already knew about possible terror threats to airlines prior to 9/11, and what security measures were in place.

The Government is trying to prove that if Moussaoui had not lied to the FBI when he was arrested, the FAA would have been able to thwart the attacks through increased security measures on aeroplanes.

Edward MacMahon, Moussaoui's attorney, said: "This is Mr Moussaoui's trial and it's one that needs to be fair from a constitutional standpoint, and it just flat out isn't."

The judge adjourned the sentencing trial until Monday to give the prosecution time to decide whether to appeal.

Gold9472
03-15-2006, 09:59 AM
Government case in Moussaoui trial hurt
Judge bars prosecution testimony on aviation security measures

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11823125/

Updated: 7:30 p.m. ET March 14, 2006

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - The judge in the Zacarias Moussaoui sentencing case decided Tuesday to allow the government to continue to seek the death penalty against the confessed al-Qaida conspirator, but she also barred part of the government's case, which she said had been riddled with “significant problems.”

Exasperated by mounting government missteps, U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that no testimony about aviation security measures would be allowed during the trial into whether Moussaoui is executed or spends life in prison.

“What the government by its own admission has said is half its case has gone away,” NBC's Pete Williams reported Tuesday. “Obviously, this prosecution is in very serious trouble.”

Brinkema postponed the trial until Monday, at the request of the prosecution.

The government’s case originally had two parts. Prosecutors intended to show active steps the FBI could have taken and defensive measures aviation officials could have taken to thwart the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks if Moussaoui had not lied about his terrorist connections when he was arrested a month earlier.

“I don’t think in the annals of criminal law there has ever been a case with this many significant problems,” Brinkema said. She ruled the trial could proceed after a daylong hearing into whether coming witnesses had been tainted by improper coaching by a federal lawyer.

Brinkema added, “More problems arose today that none of us knew about yesterday.”

Isolation order violated, judge says
She said that her order to isolate planned witnesses from trial transcripts and news reports had been violated.

She also said she was troubled that one witness sought by defense lawyers was told by federal attorney Carla J. Martin that he could not speak to them and that Martin falsely told the defense that two others were not willing to speak to them.

“I wouldn’t trust anything Martin had anything to do with at this point,” Brinkema said. The jury was not present for Tuesday’s questioning and ruling.

Brinkema said the proper remedy was not to eliminate the government’s bid for the death penalty — as the defense asked — but to acknowledge that parts of the case dealing with aviation security matters were now “irremediably contaminated.”

Government may appeal
Prosecutor Rob Spencer immediately told the judge the government objected to excluding all such testimony and exhibits and would consider appealing her ruling.

Earlier Tuesday, four federal aviation officials scheduled to testify in the sentencing trial said that coaching would not affect what they would tell the jury. But they disclosed new problems in the government’s handling of witnesses.

Among those problems:


Government lawyers sent a letter Feb. 14 saying that at least three federal aviation officials sought as defense witnesses refused to talk to defense lawyers. The three said they had never seen the letter and one of them said he would have been willing to talk to the defense.
Martin told one official, sought as a defense witness, that he was not to have contact with defense attorneys.
Two of the witnesses read and watched news coverage of the week-old trial despite the judge’s order they not follow the case. The government admitted it did not advise witnesses of the judge’s order governing their conduct.
Martin not only e-mailed seven witnesses about trial events but also told one person that the defense was trying to portray Moussaoui as “cuckoo.”

As Robert White, a Transportation Security Administration intelligence liaison officer, was testifying that he had not seen the letter saying he was unwilling to talk to talk defense lawyers, Judge Brinkema interrupted the questioning.

“Did you see the subpoena issued for you?” she asked.

“No,” White replied.

TSA intelligence analyst John Hawley and Matthew Kormann, an officer in the TSA intelligence service, also said they were unaware that a letter had been sent saying they refused to talk to the defense.

Judge warns government lawyer
Martin, the Transportation Security Administration attorney who prompted Tuesday’s hearing without the jury present, also was summoned. But her questioning was delayed when she told the judge she had not been able to arrange for her own lawyer. Brinkema had warned her that “you violated a court order and could be held in civil or criminal contempt,” and directed her to return with a lawyer by Wednesday morning.

Martin had been the government attorney for the seven witnesses and worked with prosecutors on preparing evidence.

Kormann also testified that in addition to receiving an e-mail from Martin, she told him at a meeting last week about the defense’s cross-examination of an FBI agent.

Claudio Manno, deputy chief of security for the Federal Aviation Administration on Sept. 11, 2001, and Pat McDonnell, who retired in May 2001 as FAA director of intelligence, both testified they had been reading and watching news accounts of the trial and were not told until last Friday that Brinkema had ordered witnesses not to follow the proceedings.

Kormann, McDonald, Manno and Manno’s boss, Lynne Osmus, all denied in court that they would alter their testimony in any way as a result of being coached last week by Martin.

Phone conversation at issue
Defense lawyer Edward MacMahon also elicited testimony Tuesday that prosecutor David Novak had conducted a joint telephone conversation with two upcoming witnesses, despite long-standing prohibitions against trial witnesses interacting before they testify.

Novak told Brinkema the phone call, which apparently happened after the judge issued rules on witnesses on Feb. 22, concerned only the logistics of trial exhibits, not the substance of testimony.

MacMahon had moved to bar the government from pursuing the death penalty.

Moussaoui pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with al-Qaida to fly airplanes into U.S. buildings; this trial is to determine whether he will be executed or spend life behind bars.

The only person charged in this country in al-Qaida’s Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Moussaoui has denied having any role in those attacks. He says he was training for a possible future attack.

Gold9472
03-15-2006, 08:35 PM
Moussaoui Judge Asked to Reconsider Ban
Federal Prosecutor Says 'No Point' in Continuing Trial Under Ruling

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/15/AR2006031501121_pf.html

By Jerry Markon, Timothy Dwyer and William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, March 15, 2006; 7:27 PM

Federal prosecutors Wednesday implored a judge to reverse her decision banning key witnesses from the death penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, saying that the "misguided conduct" of a single government attorney should not be allowed to imperil the case.

Calling the ruling unprecedented and "grossly punitive,'' prosecutors said it devastates their case that Moussaoui should be executed for the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema Tuesday barred seven witnesses and all evidence concerning aviation security from the trial, saying the misconduct of Transportation Security Administration lawyer Carla J. Martin had tainted the evidence beyond repair.

The barred testimony "is one of the two essential and interconnected components of our case," the prosecutors wrote in a motion submitted to Brinkema. Excluding the witnesses, the prosecutors wrote, make it "impossible for us to present our theory of the case to the jury."

At a minimum, prosecutors urged Brinkema to let them present a portion of the disputed evidence through a new witness who had no prior contact with Martin. A veteran government attorney, Martin shared testimony and communicated with the seven witnesses in violation of a court order and committed what Brinkema called other "egregious errors.''

The filing came as more evidence emerged that Brinkema's ruling had threatened the trial of the only person convicted in the United States on charges stemming from Sept. 11.

On Tuesday, a federal prosecutor told the judge in the case that he saw "no point" in going ahead with the proceedings under a ruling that barred key government witnesses from testifying.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert A. Spencer made the comment in a conference call among Brinkema and lawyers for the prosecution and defense after Brinkema prohibited testimony and evidence from half a dozen federal aviation witnesses. Brinkema issued the ruling after a day-long hearing convinced her that misconduct by a federal lawyer had so tainted the proceeding that all evidence concerning aviation security must be stricken.

The decision gutted the case that prosecutors were building in their attempt to have Moussaoui executed for the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Moussaoui, 37, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, pleaded guilty last April to six conspiracy counts related to the Sept. 11 attacks. If the death penalty trial does not go forward or if the jury ultimately decides in favor of the defense, Moussaoui would be sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Gold9472
03-15-2006, 08:39 PM
Tell me why this is red.

"At a minimum, prosecutors urged Brinkema to let them present a portion of the disputed evidence through a new witness who had no prior contact with Martin."

Partridge
03-15-2006, 08:40 PM
Cos now its in the public domain?

Gold9472
03-15-2006, 08:41 PM
Cos now its in the public domain?

Isn't it curious they have a new witness that isn't tainted to talk about a "portion" of the evidence...

Partridge
03-15-2006, 08:43 PM
Ah I don't know, courtroom legalese isn't my speciality by a long shot!

Gold9472
03-15-2006, 08:49 PM
Ah I don't know, courtroom legalese isn't my speciality by a long shot!

Is it so hard to believe? A "veteran government attorney" "shared testimony and communicated with the seven witnesses in violation of a court order" and now, those witnesses are "tainted" "beyond repair".

Except for the one special untainted witness who is only going to share a small piece of whatever puzzle the rest of them were willing to share.

Gold9472
03-15-2006, 08:52 PM
Ever see this? This isn't known to "everyday" people...

http://www.yourbbsucks.com/forum/showthread.php?t=487

Partridge
03-15-2006, 09:09 PM
Is it so hard to believe? A "veteran government attorney" "shared testimony and communicated with the seven witnesses in violation of a court order" and now, those witnesses are "tainted" "beyond repair".

Except for the one special untainted witness who is only going to share a small piece of whatever puzzle the rest of them were willing to share.

Oh yeah I agree. I thought you were raising some objection on point of law or something. For sure, they've probably done the same with all the prosecution's witnesses, but of course (ahem) 'they haven't'. As if they would do such a thing like that! ;-)

Gold9472
03-15-2006, 09:31 PM
Oh yeah I agree. I thought you were raising some objection on point of law or something. For sure, they've probably done the same with all the prosecution's witnesses, but of course (ahem) 'they haven't'. As if they would do such a thing like that! ;-)

No... I'm no legal eagle. I wish Se7en were here.

Gold9472
03-16-2006, 01:35 PM
Moussaoui trial lawyer on administrative leave
TSA attorney violated witness rules, caused case to be halted

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11857720/

Updated: 11:08 a.m. ET March 16, 2006

WASHINGTON - The lawyer whose coaching of witnesses in the death penalty case of Zacarias Moussaoui caused his trial to be halted was placed on administrative leave from her job, the Transportation Security Administration said Thursday.

That decision was confirmed by agency spokeswoman Yolanda Clark.

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 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.

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.

Partridge
03-16-2006, 01:50 PM
Is 'adminsitrative leave' some kind of euphamism for 'suspended with pay'?

Gold9472
03-17-2006, 04:28 PM
Judge accepts government compromise offer on Moussaoui evidence

http://www.kget.com/news/national/story.aspx?content_id=ED5C234B-0692-4F09-B309-BC0FC346F7E4

3/17/2006

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) - The judge in the death penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui has decided to allow the government to present substitute aviation security witnesses.

The decision partially reverses her ruling Tuesday to bar all aviation security testimony after the prosecution admitted a government lawyer coached witnesses.

The judge has issued a written order that says prosecutors can present exhibits and a witness or witnesses if they are untainted by contact with Transportation Security Administration lawyer Carla Martin.

The partial reversal helps prosecutors.

They have said it would be a waste of time to continue if couldn't present evidence about aviation security measures that could have been taken to prevent 9/11.

Gold9472
03-17-2006, 10:53 PM
Missed 9/11 clues that mean life or death

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2087627,00.html

Foreign Editor's Briefing by Bronwen Maddox
3/18/2006

ALL that is now at stake is whether the US will execute Zacarias Moussaoui for his role in the September 11 attacks, or whether he will spend his life in jail.
Since his guilty plea, the so-called twentieth hijacker, who never made it on to the planes, has had no other future.

The life imprisonment option became more likely this week when the Government suffered a big blow to its case for the death penalty. That draws attention to the weakness of its central claim that it could have prevented the attacks, if it had just known a little bit more.

The trial was never going to be a quiet affair, given the stakes. Moussaoui, who stumbled into US custody a month before the attacks, having attracted attention at flight school by asking to learn to land and take off a 747 jet, is the only clear prosecution target, who was firmly in the legal system from the start, and not in the limbo of Guantanamo Bay. The drama this week is that Leonie Brinkema, the US district judge, threw out about half of the prosecution’s key witnesses because one of the prosecution’s lawyers had committed serious errors.

US television news yesterday was buzzing with pictures of Carla J. Martin, the federal attorney who single-handedly brought half the Government’s case crashing down. Ms Martin, a large woman with a curtain of platinum blonde hair, refused to speak as she strode out of the Alexandria courtroom in her unwanted starring role. She has taken on a lawyer of her own and been advised not to testify in court.

Her offences included telling defence lawyers — wrongly — that two witnesses would not speak to them, and briefing aviation security witnesses by showing them transcripts of the trial so far. Judge Brinkema said: “I don’t think in the annals of criminal law there has ever been a case with this many significant problems.”

The Government badly needed the aviation witnesses. To secure the death penalty, it needs to show that Moussaoui was responsible for at least one death on September 11, 2001.

The core of its case is that the FBI could have prevented the hijackings by tightening airport security and telling baggage checkers to look for knives, if Moussaoui had not “lied” by not revealing his terrorist connections when he was arrested in August.

If only he had told them he had links with al-Qaeda, then they would have been alarmed, and tightened security. That’s the gist of this part of the case.

But it is disingenuous. It goes without saying that if all kinds of people had told them more, they would have been prepared. It also ignores the many clues which had been missed. As George Tenet, the former head of the CIA, told the 9/11 Commission, by August, “the system was blinking red”.

The commission, set up by Congress and President Bush, calls Moussaoui “an al-Qaeda mistake”, because he was “an unreliable operative”. He was a “missed opportunity”, it says in its report, which became a national bestseller.

But he was not missed out of extreme neglect. Agents were pressing ahead on his case; Paris and London passed on new details as they came in, although too late. The report believes “a maximum US effort to investigate Moussaoui” might just have pointed to the plot. But the better chance, it suggests, was that more publicity about his arrest might have derailed the plotters.

The commission’s subtle chronicle of the slips of that summer, which also shows how easily they were made, has the force of plausibility. But the case the Government wants to bring against Moussaoui seems to depend on overstating its ability to have prevented 9/11.

Gold9472
03-17-2006, 10:55 PM
Judge Accepts Compromise Deal on Moussaoui

http://www.chippewa.com/articles/2006/03/16/ap/headlines/d8gdhuqo0.txt

By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN and MATTHEW BARAKAT
Published: Friday, March 17, 2006 2:51 PM CST

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - The federal judge in the death penalty trial of al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui accepted a government compromise Friday that will allow prosecutors to present new witnesses about aviation security.

Judge Leonie Brinkema in a written order said prosecutors could present exhibits and a witness or witnesses if they are untainted by contact with Transportation Security Administration lawyer Carla J. Martin, cited by Brinkema for misconduct earlier this week when the judge decided to exclude all aviation security evidence.

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

Her partial reversal of an earlier order was a boon to prosecutors who had said it would be a waste of time to continue the case if they were not allowed to present some evidence about possible defensive aviation security measures the government might have taken to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Justice Department spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos signaled that the prosecution was prepared to resume its case on Monday. "We're pleased to be able to move forward with this important case on behalf of the thousands of victims and their families," Scolinos said.

Defense lawyers had argued Thursday that Brinkema was fully justified in concluding that evidence about U.S. aviation security was tainted beyond repair.

Moussaoui's lawyers also had said that there was no reason for her to agree to a request by prosecutors on Wednesday that she revoke her order or at least impose less severe penalties on the government.

Brinkema has sent the jury home until Monday while she decides what to do.

The only person charged in this country in the Sept. 11 attacks, Moussaoui pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with al-Qaida. But he says he had nothing to do with 9/11 and was training for a possible later attack.

To obtain a death penalty, prosecutors must prove that Moussaoui's actions _ his lies, in this case _ led directly to at least one death on Sept. 11, 2001.

Martin's lawyer, Roscoe Howard, said Thursday she had been "viciously vilified by assertions from the prosecution" and is preparing a response he said "will show a very different, full picture of her intentions, her conduct and her tireless dedication to a fair trial."

Meanwhile, in New York, lawyers representing plaintiffs in a liability lawsuit stemming from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks have asked a judge there to conduct an inquiry into whether Martin, or any other TSA lawyers, engaged in witness tampering or other acts to favor American Airlines and United Airlines, defendants in the case.

"We are particularly concerned that TSA may not have acted with the total impartiality required of that Agency in decisions it has made that affect our cases," lawyers Marc S. Moller and Beth E. Goldman wrote in a letter to U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, who is overseeing the civil lawsuit over property damages that resulted from the terrorist attacks.

On the Net:

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

Gold9472
03-17-2006, 11:02 PM
Lawyers: Coaching was to aid 9/11 airlines

http://www.oregonlive.com/newsflash/national/index.ssf?/base/national-61/1142599456131850.xml&storylist=ornational

By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN and LESLIE MILLER
The Associated Press
3/17/2006, 2:59 p.m. PT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawyers for two airlines being sued by 9/11 victims prompted a federal attorney to coach witnesses in the Zacarias Moussaoui death penalty trial so the government's case against the al-Qaida conspirator would not undercut their defense, victims' lawyers allege.

A United Airlines lawyer received a transcript of the first day of the Moussaoui trial from an American Airlines lawyer and forwarded it to Carla J. Martin, a Transportation Security Administration lawyer, the victims' lawyers, Robert Clifford and Gregory Joseph, claim.

Martin's attorney, former federal prosecutor Roscoe C. Howard, acknowledged that his client and United attorney Jeff Ellis were close friends and had talked about the two cases. "But I don't think there is any collaboration between them," Howard said.

He dismissed the Clifford and Joseph letter as the work of aggressive lawyers who "want to take a look at all the documents in the Moussaoui case" to see if they might help their clients.

Martin forwarded that day's transcript to seven federal aviation officials scheduled to testify later in the sentencing trial of the 37-year-old Frenchman, in violation of an order by Moussaoui trial judge Leonie Brinkema.

Martin's e-mailing of the transcript and her efforts to shape their testimony prompted Brinkema to toss out half the government's case against Moussaoui as contaminated beyond repair.

American Airlines attorneys denied on Friday that the government position in the Moussaoui case would have undercut their defense in the civil suit and said that none of their attorneys had any direct contact with Martin about the Moussaoui trial.

The contacts between Martin and airline lawyers were detailed in a legal brief filed on Moussaoui's behalf Thursday. That brief contained a March 15 letter from Clifford and Joseph complaining about Martin's actions to U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who is presiding over the civil damage case in New York.

They wrote Hellerstein that the government's opening statement in the Moussaoui case "took the position that the hijackings were completely preventable and that gate security measures could have been implemented to prevent the 9/11 hijackers from boarding the planes had security been on the look out for short-bladed knives and boxcutters."

"This stands in stark contrast to the position that has been repeatedly articulated by counsel to the aviation defendants in the September 11 actions."

Because that government position could have a "devastating" impact on the airlines' defense in the civil suit, American Airlines' lawyer forwarded the transcript to a United Air Lines lawyer who forwarded it to Martin, Clifford and Joseph wrote. As proof, they cited March 7 e-mails that they provided to Hellerstein.

The e-mails they sent Hellerstein were made public in the Moussaoui case this week as part of the investigation of Martin's actions. They show that on March 7 Maia Selinger, a legal assistant at a New York law firm that represents American Airlines in the civil suits, sent the first day's trial transcript to Christopher R. Christensen, an American Airlines lawyer, who in turn forwarded the transcript to United lawyer Ellis. Ellis then forwarded the transcript to the TSA's Martin.

But none of the e-mails by airline attorneys in which the transcript was forwarded contained any text message at all, much less explaining why they were forwarding a transcript that was publicly available on the Internet.

"The TSA lawyer then forwarded the transcripts and sent multiple e-mails to government witnesses in a clear effort to shape their testimony in a manner that would be beneficial to the aviation defendants" in the civil suit, Clifford and Joseph wrote.

They then quoted a March 8 e-mail Martin sent to one of the government's Moussaoui witnesses that said:

"My friends Jeff Ellis and Chris Christenson, NY lawyers rep. UAL and AAL respectively in the 9/11 civil litigation ... all of us aviation lawyers, were stunned by the opening. The opening has created a credibility gap that the defense can drive a truck through. There is no way anyone could say that the carriers could have prevented all short-bladed knives from going through — (Prosecutor) Dave (Novak) MUST elicit that from you and the airline witnesses on direct...."

Clifford and Joseph said the developments represent "far more than appearance of impropriety" and asked Hellerstein to investigate "the mutual back-scratching relationship that appears to exist between the (airline) defendants and the TSA."

Meantime, Marc S. Moller, an attorney for 9/11 families seeking damages for deaths or injuries, wrote Hellerstein that he wanted to depose Martin and the seven government officials she contacted because "we are particularly concerned that TSA may not have acted with total impartiality ... in decisions it has made that affect our cases." Moller stressed that he was making no allegations of impropriety.

Asked about the allegations by Clifford and Joseph, United spokeswoman Robin Urbanski said, "Our actions have been entirely appropriate as have those of our outside counsel."

In a letter dated Thursday to Hellerstein, American Airlines' attorneys Desmond Barry and Roger Podesta wrote that the "assertion that a government admission of devastating significance to the defense of this case has somehow been made in the Moussaoui trial is just plain wrong."

They said the airlines have always maintained that their actions on 9/11 should be measured against whatever security standard federal aviation authorities imposed at the time. They said the government position in the Moussaoui trial — that security would have been tightened if Moussaoui had not lied about his terrorist connections when arrested in August 2001 — is irrelevant to their defense because the standards they were supposed to meet were not changed.

They added, "There have been no communications between any counsel for American Airlines and Carla Martin or anyone else at the TSA regarding the Moussaoui trial." And they said Christensen specifically had no communications with her at all "in approximately one year." They noted Martin had misspelled Christensen's name as Christenson.

TSA spokeswoman Yolanda Clark said she was unfamiliar with the allegations made by Clifford and Joseph.

Earlier Thursday, Clark confirmed that TSA had put Martin on administrative leave.
On Tuesday, Brinkema said 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.

Brinkema warned her she could face civil or criminal charges and appeared to have violated rules of legal ethics.

Martin was a government lawyer for the aviation witnesses called by both sides and liaison between them and prosecutors and defense attorneys. Beyond that, she co-signed one government brief submitted in the case, attended closed hearings on classified documents and worked closely with prosecutors preparing their exhibits.

Gold9472
03-19-2006, 08:24 PM
9/11 Families Blast TSA for Excessive Secrecy, Abuse of Power
Urge Congress to Compel Agency to Release Pre-9/11 Documents Wrongfully Kept from Families

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060314/dctu025.html?.v=48

Tuesday March 14, 10:39 am ET

WASHINGTON, March 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Charging the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) with wrongfully denying them access to documents once in the public domain, the 9/11 Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism today called on Congress to force TSA to change its practices on classifying materials as "Sensitive Security Information" (SSI).

"Why has TSA provided documents to attorneys for an admitted terrorist, Zacarias Moussaoui, but denied them to us?" asked Julie Sweeney Roth of Yarmouthport, Mass., whose husband, Brian Sweeney, was a passenger on United flight 175. "Whose side is TSA on?"

"The truth is our most powerful weapon in the war on terrorism," said Alice Hoglan of Los Gatos, California, mother of Mark Bingham, one of the United flight 93 passengers who charged the hijackers and prevented the airplane from being crashed into either the Capitol or the White House. Contending that TSA would be fulfilling its responsibility to protect the nation's transportation system by releasing the information the families are requesting, Hoglan said, "It was because my son and his fellow passengers learned the truth about the hijackers' intentions that they were able to save countless lives as their final, brave act. That is why I am outraged that TSA is trying to hide the truth and making Americans less safe."

"SSI should have a different acronym -- CYA," said Dr. Stephen Alderman of Bedford, N.Y., whose son, Peter Alderman, died at the World Trade Center. "The materials we're requesting deal with pre-9/11 security procedures that have changed, making them of no use to would-be terrorists. Some aired on national television and were published in newspapers. TSA's only conceivable motive is avoiding embarrassment or protecting the airlines."

Sweeney Roth, Dr. Alderman, and his wife, Elizabeth, are among a group of 9/11 family members meeting with members of Congress today as part of an effort to educate U.S. senators and representatives about the problems at TSA and to change TSA's SSI practices.

Congress created the SSI designation to enable TSA to prevent the release of information that the agency determines presents a threat to the nation's transportation system. The 9/11 Families made clear that they are not challenging TSA's right to withhold information that could present a genuine security threat. Instead, they charged that TSA is abusing its authority by stamping as SSI and keeping secret a host of materials that clearly pose no threat whatsoever -- including many documents once openly available but now shrouded in secrecy.

TSA's classification of these documents and its insistence that its SSI decisions are essentially unreviewable brazenly violate the intent of Congress, the families charged. They cited a June 2005 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm, blasting TSA for its failure to implement adequate policies, guidance, procedures, internal controls and training regarding the SSI process. Though TSA claims to have subsequently set in place a structure for reviewing SSI, the agency has still failed to offer any guidelines by which it trains its employees to determine what is and is not SSI, despite many congressional requests.

The 9/11 Families charged that many of TSA's SSI classifications "are so absurd, they turn real life into satire." For example:

When the videotape showing hijackers passing through security at Washington Dulles airport on 9/11 was aired on NBC, TSA issued a two-line press release boasting that it "strongly validates the dramatic changes that TSA has made in the world of aviation security." Now, TSA has classified the tape as SSI. Yet TSA itself released a similar videotape showing lead hijacker Mohammed Atta passing through security at the airport in Portland, Maine, on 9/11.

TSA has taken material that has long been in the public domain -- including information published in the Congressional Record and major newspapers -- and labeled it SSI.

TSA has classified as SSI the five Federal Aviation Administration warnings to the airlines issued in the months before 9/11, despite the fact that they were quoted in the 9/11 Commission's report and discussed in public testimony.

The 9/11 Families also noted that TSA's policies resulted in the dismissal of charges against a baggage handler, who had been caught stealing from a passenger's luggage, because TSA labeled incriminating materials as SSI and refused to turn them over to the Court.

The 9/11 Families are urging Congress to compel TSA to fulfill the families' requests for access to pre-9/11 documents and materials that were once publicly available. They noted that a House Appropriations Subcommittee wrote last year that it "expects the Department to try to release as much, not as little, information to the public as possible" and that U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said from the bench that TSA's conduct in reviewing SSI "is cruel and inhuman to the people involved."

Some of the 9/11 Families are plaintiffs in litigation against the airlines and are seeking documents withheld by TSA, but others who are not are joining the effort to educate Congress about TSA's abuse of its authority to keep information secret. "This is a matter of principle," said Hoglan, who settled with the Victims' Compensation Fund and thus cannot sue the airlines. "It's about our right to know the truth about why our loved ones were killed. It's about protecting our democracy and our system of checks and balances."

The 9/11 Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism represents 6,161 survivors and family members of those who died in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The 9/11 Families are seeking to hold al Qaeda's financiers accountable for their central role in these atrocities and to make America safer by cutting off the financial pipeline fueling global terrorism.

Gold9472
03-20-2006, 08:34 PM
FBI agent: warnings about Moussaoui unheeded

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060320/ts_nm/security_moussaoui_dc

By Deborah Charles 1 hour, 1 minute ago

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.

Gold9472
03-20-2006, 08:40 PM
I've never made an article completely red before.

Partridge
03-20-2006, 08:55 PM
From the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/national/20cnd-moussaoui.html?ex=1300510800&en=f948fee9a3efd02e&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss)

F.B.I. Discounted Suspicions About Moussaoui, Agent Says

http://view.atdmt.com/ORG/view/nwyrkfxs0040000007org/direct/01/



By NEIL A. LEWIS (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/neil_a_lewis/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: March 20, 2006
ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 20 — The F.B.I. (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/federal_bureau_of_investigation/index.html?inline=nyt-org) agent who arrested and interrogated Zacarias Moussaoui (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/zacarias_moussaoui/index.html?inline=nyt-per) 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 (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/al_qaeda/index.html?inline=nyt-org) 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.

Gold9472
03-20-2006, 10:07 PM
FBI Agent Slams Bosses at Moussaoui Trial

http://www.forbes.com/business/commerce/feeds/ap/2006/03/20/ap2608623.html

By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN , 03.20.2006, 06:36 PM

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.

Partridge
03-21-2006, 11:41 AM
Roommate Told FBI of Moussaoui Interests
AP (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MOUSSAOUI?SITE=ORMED&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT)

A former roommate of confessed al-Qaida terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui told FBI agents that Moussaoui had expressed an interest in holy war and believed Muslims were within their rights to kill infidels, according to court testimony.

A videotaped deposition of Hussein al-Attas, who roomed with Moussaoui in 2001 in Oklahoma and was with Moussaoui in Minnesota in August 2001 when he was arrested by federal agents, was to be played for the jury Tuesday when Moussaoui's death-penalty trial resumes.

The jury got a preview of some of al-Attas' statements through the testimony Monday of Harry Samit, the FBI agent who arrested Moussaoui in August 2001 and also interrogated al-Attas.

Samit testified that his belief that Moussaoui was a radical Islamic extremist bent on terrorism was based in part on al-Attas' statements.

Al-Attas told Samit that Moussaoui often talked about jihad, or holy war, and that Moussaoui once pointed out to him a television report about Osama bin Laden, with Moussaoui noting that bin Laden was an important person.

Samit testified that he worked obsessively after Moussaoui's Aug. 16, 2001, arrest to convince FBI headquarters that Moussaoui warranted a full-scale investigation and that a search warrant should be obtained for his belongings.

The agent obtained a search warrant only after the Sept. 11 attacks, and attributed the FBI's failure to launch a timely investigation to "criminal negligence" and careerism by certain agents in FBI headquarters. The bureau's failures thwarted an opportunity to prevent the attacks, he said.

Moussaoui is the only person charged in this country in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks.

He has already pleaded guilty to conspiring with al-Qaida to hijack aircraft and commit other crimes. But he denies a specific role in 9/11. His sentencing trial will determine his punishment: death or life in prison.

The FBI's actions between Moussaoui's arrest and Sept. 11 are crucial to the trial because prosecutors allege that Moussaoui's lies to Samit prevented the FBI from thwarting or at least minimizing the Sept. 11 attacks. Prosecutors must prove that Moussaoui's actions caused the death of at least one person on 9/11 to obtain a death penalty.

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.

Partridge
03-22-2006, 11:41 AM
Supervisor: I Never Read Moussaoui Memo
AP (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MOUSSAOUI?SITE=INELK&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT)

A terrorism supervisor in FBI headquarters dismissed a field agent's concerns about confessed al-Qaida member Zacarias Moussaoui in the weeks before Sept. 11, 2001, as "hunches and suppositions" during testimony at Moussaoui's death-penalty trial.

The supervisor, Michael Rolince, testified Tuesday that he had not even read an Aug. 18, 2001, memo written by Minneapolis agent Harry Samit, who arrested Moussaoui and was convinced from the outset that Moussaoui was a terrorist with plans to hijack aircraft.

Rolince, who headed the FBI's International Terrorism Operations section, said he was briefed on Moussaoui only twice by a subordinate in hallway conversations lasting less than a minute.

Rolince concluded that the bureau had a long way to go in building a case against Moussaoui, even though Samit had laid out in a nearly 30-page memo his reasons for believing that the bureau had built a sufficient case to launch an all-out investigation and obtain a search warrant for Moussaoui's possessions.

"What Agent Samit's hunches and suppositions were is one thing," Rolince said. "What we knew was clearly something else."

Samit's memo proved prescient. He correctly predicted two of the six specific charges to which Moussaoui pleaded guilty: plotting international terrorism and air piracy.

Moussaoui is the only person in this country charged in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks. He pleaded guilty to conspiring with al-Qaida to hijack aircraft and other crimes, but he denies any role in Sept. 11. He says he was preparing for a possible future attack on the White House.

The sentencing trial now under way will determine Moussaoui's punishment: death or life in prison.

The FBI's actions in the time between Moussaoui's Aug. 16, 2001, arrest on immigration violations and Sept. 11, 2001, are key issues at Moussaoui's death-penalty trial. Prosecutors allege that if Moussaoui had revealed his plans for a terrorist attack, the FBI could have thwarted or at least minimized the attacks. To obtain a death penalty, prosecutors must prove that Moussaoui's actions caused the death of at least one person on Sept. 11.

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.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema limited the scope of Rolince's testimony after the defense objected that he was trying to describe what the FBI would have done if it had known about Moussaoui's terrorist ties.

The defense argued that speculative testimony based on a hypothetical confession by Moussaoui unfairly implied that Moussaoui had some obligation to confess.

Brinkema allowed some limited hypothetical questioning but advised the jury: "Juries cannot decide cases on speculation. ... Nobody knows what would have happened."

Gold9472
03-23-2006, 10:40 AM
Witness Lists FAA Measures Available for a Pre-9/11 Tip
An agency official is the first to give aviation testimony after a federal attorney nearly derailed the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-moussa23mar23,1,29052.story?coll=la-headlines-nation

(Gold9472: Pretty one-sided testimony wouldn't you say? What were the "tainted" witnesses going to testify about? That air traffic controller tapes were destroyed? That the FAA received multiple warnings prior to 9/11? This trial is a sham.)

By Richard A. Serrano, Times Staff Writer
March 23, 2006

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A week after their case nearly imploded amid allegations of witness tampering, federal prosecutors began introducing aviation testimony Wednesday in Zacarias Moussaoui's sentencing trial, hoping to prove that had he cooperated, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks could have been prevented.

Their first witness was Robert Cammaroto, chief of the Federal Aviation Administration's commercial airports policy division at the time of the attacks. He was allowed to testify on a limited basis after revelations last week that a Transportation Security Administration lawyer had improperly coached other federal aviation witnesses on their testimony.

Cammaroto listed security measures that could have been implemented had Moussaoui cooperated with the FBI after he was arrested in Minnesota for visa violations on Aug. 16, 2001.

For two hours, prosecutors methodically walked Cammaroto through his testimony. He told the court how the government could have responded to the Sept. 11 threat, and he offered new details on how the Federal Aviation Administration beefed up security when, in 1995, it was learned that Muslim extremists were plotting to blow up a dozen U.S. airliners over the Pacific Ocean.

Cammaroto spoke with authority and the experience of 25 years in the government security field — starting as an air traffic controller, moving on to become a federal air marshal and rising to a post as one of the FAA's top law enforcement officials.

Asked by Assistant U.S. Atty. David J. Novak how swiftly airport security officials would have reacted had Moussaoui revealed that the Sept. 11 hijackers planned to smuggle small knives aboard planes and then commandeer the cockpits, Cammaroto said:

"It could have been done fairly quickly. In a matter of hours."

But under cross-examination by defense lawyer Gerald T. Zerkin, Cammaroto conceded that in the late summer of 2001, the approach to airport security was far more relaxed than it is today.

Few people envisioned planes being hijacked on suicide missions, he said, and airport gate screening operations were less stringent. Passengers often were permitted to carry aboard such items as folding knives, bottles, screwdrivers and knitting needles.

Indeed, shown a security video of some of the Sept. 11 hijackers easily passing through checkpoints at Washington Dulles International Airport that morning, Cammaroto noted that only seven of the 19 had even been sent to a secondary screening, and none had been denied a seat.

"It seemed an act of desperation to blow yourself up" back then, Cammaroto said.

In the past, he said, hijackings mainly involved planes' diversion to Cuba or ransom demands. "We'd never had an incident where the bomber rode the bomb," he said.

The aviation testimony and evidence are central to the government's argument for executing Moussaoui. Prosecutors seek to convince the jury that Moussaoui knew enough about the Sept. 11 plot to help stop it.

But Moussaoui lied to the FBI and then refused to cooperate, sharply dividing the FBI about what to do with him.

The FBI never sought search warrants to open his belongings and learn more about why he was training on jumbo jet simulators in Minnesota.

The defense maintains that Moussaoui, who pleaded guilty to being a Sept. 11 conspirator last April, was a lone operator and never had any direct role or knowledge that four planes were going to be boarded that day, three of which reached targets in New York and Virginia.

With Moussaoui's survival at stake, the government's case nearly fell apart last week when it was discovered that TSA senior attorney Carla J. Martin had improperly influenced seven TSA and FAA witnesses for the government. U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema sharply limited the government's aviation testimony and evidence to just one or two witnesses, making Cammaroto's testimony all the more crucial.

The judge has yet to call Martin into the courtroom to explain her conduct.

Cammaroto described half a dozen security steps the FAA could have taken to try to head off the attacks. He said more officers could have been posted immediately at airport checkpoints, and small knives and other potential weapons could have been confiscated at the gates.

He said planes could have been searched before boarding to make sure previous passengers had not hidden bombs or weapons in overhead baggage bins or in lavatories.

Cammaroto said flight crews could have been warned to keep cockpit doors secure, and new no-fly lists could have been posted to stop the 19 hijackers from boarding planes.

"We could have done much of this in the course of a couple of hours," he said.

He drew a parallel with the "Bojinka" plot, uncovered in 1995 in Manila, in which radical Islamists planned to hide liquid bombs on 12 U.S. planes and detonate them over the Pacific.

Just as they could have done to thwart the Sept. 11 conspiracy, Cammaroto said, officials alerted the airlines about the Bojinka conspiracy, stopped passengers from carrying open drink containers aboard, and sent bomb-sniffing dogs to the Philippines. More thorough pat-downs and other passenger searches also were initiated.

"As our intelligence improved, we were able to refine and refine and refine until we got closer to the mark," he said.

In the end, there were no attacks.

Partridge
03-23-2006, 12:32 PM
Agent says Moussaoui could have helped FBI
AP (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MOUSSAOUI?SITE=NYMID&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT)

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. [Partridge: Perhaps someone a bit more knowledgable can help me out here but... I recall seeing/reading somewhere that some NY official - Guliani maybe - said something to the effect that "we knew [one of the towers] was going to collapse" - yet they failed to tell the firemen in the building. Shouldn't that person also be facing the death penalty for causing 'at least one death'?]


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.

Partridge
03-23-2006, 12:33 PM
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.

The Pentagon videos?!?!?

Gold9472
03-25-2006, 03:29 PM
Families' Hope For Answers At 9/11 Trial Is Unfulfilled
With New Information Scant, Frustration and Pain Mingle

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/24/AR2006032401922.html

By Timothy Dwyer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 25, 2006; Page A08

Eleni Kousoulis carries a glossy photograph of her sister, Danielle, who was killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. She brought it to the seventh-floor courtroom of U.S. District Court in Alexandria this week when she and her mother, Zoe, made the trip from their home in Merion, Pa.

They had watched some of the death penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui on closed-circuit television in the courthouse in Philadelphia -- where only a few people have come each day -- but wanted to see Moussaoui in person and feel what it was like to sit a few feet away from him.

"It was emotional at times, especially when you see him smiling and laughing," Kousoulis said.

Moussaoui has pleaded guilty to conspiring with al-Qaeda in the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, and the government is seeking his execution.

The prosecution rested its case Thursday. For the families that have been watching the trial or keeping track of it, the process has been painful, frustrating and, sometimes, unsatisfying. What many of them were looking for, besides justice, was information about the day their loved ones were killed or injured and what the government could have done to prevent the attacks.

"There was one young lady I was talking to in court one day, and she was saying that the government is on trial as much as Moussaoui," said Abraham Scott of Arlington, a regular spectator whose wife, Janis, died in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. "And in a sense she was right. They are both on trial."

Family members interviewed yesterday said they thought that prosecutors had a difficult case to prove -- that the Sept. 11 attacks could have been prevented had Moussaoui not lied when he was arrested by the FBI in August 2001. Some were angry at Carla J. Martin, a lawyer with the Transportation Security Administration whose coaching of witnesses prompted key testimony from Federal Aviation Administration employees to be disallowed.

"I'm not satisfied," said Rosemary Dillard of Alexandria, whose husband, Eddie, was also on the plane that hit the Pentagon. "I was definitely expecting more information to come out at the trial. It is still not a clear picture. It is very blurred for me."

Others gave the prosecutors credit.

"I think they did the best they could with what they had," said Kousoulis, a lawyer with the federal public defender's office in Delaware.

She said that she welcomed Moussaoui's promise to testify; he could take the stand as early as Monday. "I would love it," she said. "I think he would be stupid to testify, but I would love him to get on the witness stand, love to hear what he had to say to see if he could give us more information than what we have now."

Congress and U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema designated federal courthouses in Boston, Newark, Philadelphia and New York and on Long Island, N.Y., where families can watch the trial. In addition, a courtroom in Alexandria has been set aside for viewing the broadcast. Only family members with special passes are allowed in, so it is difficult to gauge the turnout.

Zoe Kousoulis said that in Philadelphia, attendance had ranged from a half-dozen people to one or two.

The half-dozen people who gather daily to watch the trial in U.S. District Court in Boston have come up with a name for themselves.

"The Usual Suspects," said Blake Allison of Hanover, N.H., whose wife, Anna Allison, was killed on American Airlines Flight 11, which struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Allison said he thought the prosecution was hurt by the testimony of FBI agent Harry Samit, who said that he sent reports to FBI headquarters with more than 70 references to Moussaoui as a terrorist and that the FBI declined his requests to open a criminal investigation or get a search warrant.

"I have felt from the outset that Moussaoui didn't deserve the death penalty for his role in this because I did have doubts about his relationship to the events of Sept. 11," Allison said. "And the prosecutors have done nothing to alter my opinion. . . . I was hoping that this would bring to light information that would put the events into a more clear light, and I am very disappointed that that has not happened."

He said that the elimination of some of the FAA testimony gutted half of the prosecution's case and prevented the families from hearing what the FAA would have done, or did, to prevent the attacks.

Cathie Ong-Herrera, whose sister, Betty Ong, was a flight attendant on Flight 11, traveled from California to Alexandria during the first week of testimony and has been following it closely in news reports.

She said Martin damaged "the prosecution case and kept it from going the way that it was supposed to go. For the families, I think I have to say that we were hoping to learn more than we already know, and she hurt the case as far as helping us get more information."

Sheila Langone, whose two sons -- a firefighter and a police officer -- were killed at the World Trade Center, said she feared that Martin's misstep will spare Moussaoui's life.

"I am of the opinion right now that he will not get the death penalty," she said. "I think that little screw-up kind of messed things up. I would hope that it wouldn't affect it, but I think it will."

She said the trial proved to her that "there is an awful lot in our government that needs to be straightened out. The FBI doesn't talk to the CIA, and the CIA doesn't talk to anyone else."

Gold9472
03-29-2006, 09:58 AM
Mastermind of 9/11 says 34 took part in the attacks

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0603290178mar29,1,2047672.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

(Gold9472: BUUUUUULLSHIT. Tell me why.)

By Josh Meyer
Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times
Published March 29, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed has told his interrogators that at least 34 people were "participants" in the attacks, including a mysterious Jordanian who supposedly prepared 10 of the hijackers for their grisly task by training them to butcher camels and sheep with Swiss Army knives.

Mohammed's statements were read aloud in court this week during the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person ever charged as a co-conspirator in the attacks.

During his interrogations, Mohammed broke down the participants in the Sept. 11 attacks into six groups, each having differing levels of involvement in the plot or prior knowledge of it, according to a 58-page summary read aloud in court Monday.

Among the few in the top tier was Abu Turab Al-Urduni, a Jordanian who, according to Mohammed's testimony, had "full knowledge" of the plot because of his job as trainer of 10 of the "muscle" hijackers tasked with commandeering the planes, subduing the pilots and keeping the passengers at bay.

Abu Turab, as he was referred to in the summary, also trained the hijackers in bombing and train hijacking so they wouldn't be certain what their real assignment would be once they reached the U.S., Mohammed said. That way, if they were caught, they wouldn't be able to tip off authorities that the plot involved plane hijackings.

The disclosures, if true, are significant in that one of the more senior conspirators of the Sept. 11 attacks has until now never been identified publicly.

A U.S. intelligence official familiar with the continuing Sept. 11 investigation said Abu Turab was killed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in late 2001.

Gold9472
03-30-2006, 09:34 AM
For 9/11 Lies, Must He Die?

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/29/opinion/courtwatch/main1454637.shtml

(Gold9472: What's good for the goose...)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 30, 2006

Moussaoui's lies, or his truths, are not in themselves enough to make him eligible for the death penalty. The government also must have proved that if he had told the truth about Sept. 11, the feds would have been able to foil the plot.

Make sure you pay attention and keep this straight, because so long as we both shall live, we are never, ever going to see a constellation like this again in a high profile death penalty case.

Put another way, the Sept. 11 trial of Zacarias Moussaoui - the most important capital case of its time, one that's been surreal and ironic from the start - reached new heights (or depths, depending upon your point of view) of the absurd Wednesday afternoon here in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.

In a trial in which they seek the death penalty against a man solely for lying, federal prosecutors have asked jurors to believe that Zacarias Moussaoui was telling the truth when he said Monday that he was a key component of the plot for the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Defense attorneys, meanwhile, told those same jurors that their client, whose life they have doggedly fought to spare, is a "homicidal liar" who is still scheming and plotting with malice against America and all it stands for, including the very system of justice which has brought us all to this time and place.

For long stretches during closing arguments, therefore, it was difficult to tell for sure which attorneys were arguing for which side. The feds, who must establish as a matter of law that Moussaoui lied to authorities when he was arrested in August 2001, now are relying heavily upon his candor as a surprise witness to prove that he is eligible for the death penalty in this case.

The defense, which told jurors all along that Moussaoui is - as defense attorney Edward MacMahon put it Wednesday, a "hanger-on" - is now asking jurors to go tough on him and not give him the satisfaction he seeks from dying as a martyr.

Jurors got their instructions from the judge late Wednesday afternoon. They also should have gotten some Ritalin - so complex are the bank shots, crosscurrents and psychological eddies being offered to them by the lawyers.

Moussaoui, in his own pathetic way, succeeded in tying up the case on appeal for more than four years and now - in just a few weeks on trial - he has proven himself capable of twisting around the lawyers responsible for his fate. It's no wonder that MacMahon, the defense attorney, called the happy but inept warrior "manipulative, and obviously so."

Prosecutor David Raskin started the afternoon's sermons by emphasizing his best evidence — really his only good evidence - the creepy defendant himself, and the jaw-dropping statements that Moussaoui made to jurors earlier in the week.

"Zacarias Moussaoui came to this country to kill as many Americans as he could," Raskin told the jury, adding that "he killed people by lying and concealing" the Sept. 11 plot. Those people would be "alive today," said Raskin, if Moussaoui "had told the truth" when he was arrested in Minnesota on immigration charges on August 16, 2001.

We proved to you, Raskin told the jury, that Moussaoui "lied with lethal intent." But here is where the prosecution seemed to travel to Wonderland.

If Moussaoui so gleefully lied way back when, why should anyone believe he is telling the truth now? If, as Raskin pointed out, al Qaeda training manuals teach wannabe terrorists how to lie to achieve their goals, why should anyone believe that Moussaoui has thrown out the book? Yet that is precisely what Raskin asked jurors to believe when he emphasized the importance of Moussaoui's in-court admissions.

"He is not making this up," Raskin told jurors, just moments after stating that Moussaoui is a master at making "false statements designed to deceive." Trust his allegiance to al Qaeda and the terror plot, he told the panel, even as he reminded them that "al Qaeda teaches people to lie."

Raskin's argument at this point reminded me of an old line that lawyers dream of using but rarely do: 'Were you lying then, or are you lying now?' In a capital case, in which proof beyond a reasonable doubt is the name of the game, can the government win once someone is forced to ask that question of its star witness?

Moussaoui's lies, or his truths, are not in themselves enough to make him eligible for the death penalty. The government must also have proved that people died on Sept. 11 as a result of those lies, and in order to make that case it must have established that the feds would have foiled the plot - if only Moussaoui had been candid when federal agents were querying him about his goal of learning to fly jumbo jets despite being unable to find his way around an airfield.

This is the point that drew the most attention during the course of the trial, and it is the point that brings into play all the incompetence our government displayed in the days before Sept. 11 - when we all cared about was who killed Chandra Levy.

On this point, prosecutors could only say, tepidly, that had Moussaoui told the truth when arrested, "the government would have that valuable information and would have used it to prevent the attacks or at least part of the attacks."

In Raskin's view, it is "a no-brainer, ladies and gentlemen," that the feds would have tracked down at least three of the four pilot hijackers had Moussaoui only given them a few more clues.

When Moussaoui was arrested, Raskin argued, the government needed, in order to foil the plot, only "specific intelligence about the catastrophe that was about to occur" - specific intelligence Raskin said Moussaoui had, but did not share. Moussaoui instead "chose al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and as a result 2,971 people are dead," said Raskin, his voice rising.

When it was MacMahon's turn, the defense attorney immediately attacked the credibility of his own client, who reportedly spent more time on the witness stand (three hours) than he had conversing with his attorneys over four years of representation.

Moussaoui was "never slated, other than in his dreams" to be a part of the Sept. 11 plot, MacMahon quickly told jurors, and the government cannot prove the hypothetical question of what might have happened in advance of Sept. 11 had Moussaoui merely come clean. "He's told so many stories in the past, that he's simply not worthy of belief, MacMahon said. He's a "grafter," the attorney added, and even al Qaeda was scammed by his tricks.

Of his client, MacMahon had plenty more to say. Moussaoui always thinks he is "more important and more involved" than he really is, the defense attorney said, and he is trying to "write a role for himself in history" while at the same time trying, with his outbursts, to "trigger bias and prejudice" among jurors.

In that, said MacMahon, as in everything else in Moussaoui's life, "he will fail." I have heard many defense attorneys describe their clients in less-than-cheery terms. I don't think I have ever before heard an attorney call their client a pathetic loser, especially in a capital case where defense attorneys usually talk about the high value of every human life.

Of the government's claim that all would have been rosy on Sept. 11 had Moussaoui been honest, MacMahon ridiculed the notion that the government could have connected the dots.

To argue this point, MacMahon cited the testimony of current and former high-ranking government officials like Condoleeza Rice and Richard Clarke, whose testimony appeared at the trial in the form of videotaped snippets from the Sept. 11 Commission hearings.

Rice, who was National Security Advisor on Sept. 11, told the panel under oath that the failure to foil the terror plot was "a structural" one that did not depend upon any single bit of evidence. Clarke - the counterterrorism chief, and the most candid of officials after 9/11 - told the Commission (and therefore jurors) that it is impossible to go back and figure out what might have happened before Sept. 11, because it's simply too "speculative."

MacMahon then asked jurors to be better than Moussaoui believes they can be: to send him and his terror buddies a message that their bitter and unfounded prejudices against Americans are just that.

"You are not the hateful, vengeful enemies that Mr. Moussaoui thinks you are," MacMahon told the panel, challenging them not to lower themselves to his client's base level. "There is no evidence," said MacMahon, that "anything Moussaoui ever did or said caused death" on Sept. 11.

So there you have it. The government that Moussaoui hates so much wants jurors to embrace his testimony — and he ends up being the prosecution's star witness at his own trial. Meanwhile, the lawyers trying to save his life call him a failure at everything in life except for lying, and ask jurors to believe a half dozen other terrorists who say Moussaoui was the only one of the deadly gang who couldn't shoot straight.

At the center of it all is a confessed al Qaeda operative, who couldn't figure out a way to involve himself in a terror attack, but who instead finds himself at the mercy of his own, self-proclaimed worst enemies.

If I had not seen and heard the closing arguments with my own eyes and ears, I would never have believed it.

Gold9472
04-05-2006, 07:21 PM
Giuliani to testify for U.S. at 9/11 trial
Jury also to hear cockpit voice recorder from United flight 93

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/LAW/04/05/moussaoui/

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (CNN) -- Rudy Giuliani, who led New York through its darkest days after the September 11 terrorist attacks, will be among the first witnesses when the death penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui resumes on Thursday, CNN has learned.

In addition, the lone cockpit voice recorder recovered from the four hijacked planes will be played publicly for the first time, the judge has ruled.

Giuliani, the former mayor of New York who some consider a possible presidential candidate in 2008, will testify about the impact of 9/11 as a witness for the government.

Besides the 2,749 lives lost as the twin towers of the World Trade Center burned and fell, prosecutors intend to show how the attacks disrupted New York's government and economy. The deaths of 343 firefighters also are part of that evidence.

Giuliani may offer compelling testimony about a fire rescue unit captain who died, Terry Hatton. Hatton's wife, Beth Petrone, was Giuliani's executive assistant for 17 years, and Giuliani officiated at the couple's marriage.

Moussaoui's attorneys and federal prosecutors met behind closed doors Wednesday with U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema to finalize the emotional evidence that will be introduced in the coming weeks.

Brinkema ordered that jurors can hear the cockpit voice recorder from United Flight 93 -- the Newark to San Francisco flight that crashed in a reclaimed coal field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Relatives of the 40 passengers and crew who have heard the 31-minute tape say it confirms a heroic uprising in which passengers turned on the hijackers.

Prosecutors invited Flight 93 families to hear the tape at a special briefing in 2002, when the Moussaoui trial was originally scheduled to begin.

Jurors already have heard a partial transcript of American Airlines flight attendant Betty Ong telling the airline's customer service center about stabbings and the spraying of mace near the front of the plane as the first plane headed toward the Trade Center.

"We can't even get up to business class right now 'cause nobody can breathe," Ong said at the start of the four-and-half-minute call.

Life or death decision
The jury found Moussaoui eligible for the death penalty on Monday, concluding that lies he told federal agents interrogating him a month before the attacks directly contributed to some of the nearly 3,000 deaths on September 11.

The panel of nine men and three women must now decide whether Moussaoui should die by injection, the only form of execution permitted in the federal system.

Moussaoui, 37, a French national of Moroccan descent, admitted last year that he conspired with al Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for September 11, to hijack and crash planes into prominent U.S. buildings.

Until he testified at his trial, Moussaoui insisted he had no role in the plot or advance knowledge of specific plot details.

But on the witness stand, Moussaoui said he knew in advance of the plan to crash planes into the World Trade Center and was to pilot a fifth plane into the White House on September 11.

Moussaoui's self-incriminating testimony severely damaged the defense case. His attorneys suggest that Moussaoui hopes to become an al Qaeda martyr.

10 'aggravating factors'
The pain and suffering of the 9/11 families is one of 10 "aggravating factors" prosecutors will set out to prove to justify a death sentence. The physical and emotional harm to survivors is another. As many as 40 witnesses are prepared to testify about the attack's impact on them and their families.

The federal death penalty statute requires the government to prove that Moussaoui's lies to protect the terror conspiracy caused grave risk of death and were committed in a heinous, cruel, depraved manner with substantial planning and premeditation.

Additionally, prosecutors intend to prove Moussaoui shows no remorse and exploited educational opportunities in a free society for violent means when he trained at U.S. flight schools.

Besides the deaths, prosecutors intend to show that the attacks disrupted the functions of the Pentagon and of New York's government and economy.

Meanwhile, Moussaoui's mother is not expected to testify for the defense, CNN has learned. Aicha el-Wafi recently wrote the judge, but the letter's contents have not been disclosed.

El-Wafi, 59, a retired telecommunications worker who lives in southern France, attended three days of the trial's first phase. In an interview with CNN that week, she said she feared her son would be made "a scapegoat" for September 11. (Watch Moussaoui's mother describe "political" trial -- 2:22)

"He's right to choose death instead of staying and dying like a rat in a hole," el-Wafi told French 2 television after the verdict, according to a translation.

Moussaoui's defense team is planning witnesses and evidence about their client's mental health. They may include a pair of Washington psychiatrists who were in court to observe Moussaoui's testimony.

One defense expert has concluded that Moussaoui suffers from a thought disorder, probably schizophrenia, according to court papers.

A social worker is expected to describe Moussaoui's troubled family history and their mistreatment as North African immigrants in France.

CNN's Kevin Bohn and Justine Redman contributed to this story.

Good Doctor HST
04-05-2006, 07:50 PM
I can't understand for the life of me why the death penalty is necessary for Moussaoui.

Supposedly, he's the only living link within the U.S. borders between the 9/11 attacks and his co-conspirators. Wouldn't it be better to keep him alive, extract as much information from him as possible? As years go by, the worst that could happen would be not getting any relevant info about Al Qaeda. The best would be tripping up Zac a little and getting more out of him.

But, the bloodthirsty crowd has spoken. Off with his head! His death will most assurdely avenge the atrocities of 9/11....

Gold9472
04-12-2006, 10:46 AM
Moussaoui Jurors Hear Flight 93 Tape

http://www.sierratimes.com/rss/newswire.php?article=/news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060412/ap_on_re_us/moussaoui&time=1144851561&feed=us

Posted: Wednesday April 12,2006 - 07:19:21 am

By MATTHEW BARAKAT, Associated Press Writer 8 minutes ago

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Federal prosecutors seeking the execution of Zacarias Moussaoui figuratively placed the jury aboard doomed Flight 93 for its last searing moments, playing a recording in which a passenger begs the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers, "Please, don't hurt me" and another cries "I don't want to die."

The United Air Lines flight crashed in a Pennsylvania field as passengers tried to retake the plane — according to a cockpit voice recording played publicly Wednesday for the first time — as the jury weighed whether to recommend the death sentence for Moussaoui, an admitted terrorist conspirator.

The recording began with the hijackers' voice clearly stating "ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain ... we have a bomb on board, so sit."

For the next few minutes, passengers are repeatedly told, 'Don't move," "Shut up" "Sit," and "down down down."

An air traffic voice says, "Is that United 93 calling?"

A translation of the hijackers' Arabic words was provided to the jury. At one point a hijacker is heard to say "In the name of Allah, most merciful, most compassionate."

There's a voice in the cockpit saying "Please don't hurt me. Oh God!" Then a few seconds later somebody says "I don't want to die!" three times.

Then there are what sound like groans in the cockpit. Then in Arabic a couple of minutes later, a voice of a hijiacker says "Everything is fine. I finished." He said that around the time that the plane is turning back toward Washington.

As the jury heard the recording, prosecutors played a video presentation that simultaneously showed the flight path, speed and heading in a mockup similar to a flight simulator.

In the final minutes of Flight 93, passengers attempted to retake the plane at which point the hijackers crashed it into the western Pennsylvania field. The plane had been headed for the U.S. Capitol, according to Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Moussaoui is the only person charged in this country in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks. The jury deciding his fate has already declared him eligible for the death penalty by determining that his actions caused at least one death on 9/11.

Even though he was in jail in Minnesota at the time of the attacks, the jury ruled that lies told by Moussaoui to federal agents a month before the attacks kept them from identifying and stopping some of the hijackers.

Now they must decide whether Moussaoui deserves execution or life in prison.

Defense lawyers say the jury should spare Moussaoui's life because of his limited role in the attacks, evidence that he is mentally ill and because his execution would only play into his dream of martyrdom.

After several days of testimony related to the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the focus shifted Tuesday to the Pentagon, where the jury saw some of the most gruesome evidence in the trial.

Several photos showed badly burned bodies, facial features still discernible. Defense lawyers objected unsuccessfully to their display.

Lt. Col. John Thurman testified that when the Pentagon was hit, he thought a bomb had exploded, then later described a sensation similar to an earthquake as the plane moved under his second floor office.

Thurman crawled through the office, unable to lift his head above the carpet because the smoke was too intense. He said he felt an overwhelming need to take a nap and "that's when it hit me: I'm going to die. And I got very angry. Angry that terrorists would take my life on the same day my parents were getting their first grandchild" (from his sister).

"I realized I had to get out. I pushed file cabinets with all of my strength and found an opening," Thurman said.

Thurman left the Pentagon coughing up black soot and was taken to a hospital. He fully recovered from his injuries after a weeklong hospital stay that included a medically induced coma.

"I feel incredibly lucky," he said. "But there's guilt about getting the lucky break."

Also on Tuesday, the judge issued an order requiring an unidentified individual to be produced for testimony. The order apparently applied to would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid — defense lawyers issued a subpoena last week seeking his testimony. Prosecutors had opposed the subpoena.

Moussaoui testified previously that he and Reid were going to hijack a fifth plane on Sept. 11 and fly it into the White House. The defense lawyers, who have tried to discredit their client's credibility, have said Moussaoui is exaggerating his role in Sept. 11 to inflate his role in history.

Gold9472
04-13-2006, 03:15 PM
Moussaoui no longer wants death penalty

http://today.reuters.com/misc/PrinterFriendlyPopup.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-04-13T184319Z_01_N13382229_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-MOUSSAOUI.xml

By Deborah Charles
Thu Apr 13, 2006 2:43 PM ET

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (Reuters) - September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui said on Thursday that he no longer wanted to be executed as the death penalty was not in line with Islamic teaching, but doubted his testimony held any sway with the jurors considering his sentence.

Moussaoui, 37, who pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy in connection with the September 11 attacks, pulled back from statements made several times over the past four years that indicated he would welcome a death sentence.

His lawyer Gerald Zerkin showed him a filing he made to the court in August 2002 in which he said the "greatest jihad in Islam is to speak the truth in front of the tyrant and be executed for it."

Moussaoui said he no longer wanted to include the "and be executed" part of that statement, because he had consulted Islamic books and decided that violated Muslim religious beliefs.

Taking the stand for the second time at his sentencing trial against the advice of his lawyers, he criticized his court-appointed defense team and said their strategy should have included the argument that jail was a better punishment since execution would reward him with martyrdom.

Defense lawyers have tried to persuade the jury that he is mentally unstable with delusions of importance in al Qaeda and should not be sentenced to death.

But Moussaoui, a French citizen, has refused to cooperate with those lawyers and was asked by one of them if he thought his attorneys were in a conspiracy to kill him.

"I thought you had not my best interests at heart," said Moussaoui," he said in response to a question Zerkin. "First you are American, second you are Jewish."

One of his major complaints was that he was never given a Muslim attorney.

BARGAINING CHIP?
Moussaoui said in court last month that he was supposed to fly a fifth plane into the White House as part of the al Qaeda hijacking plot. This testimony contradicted his previous claims that he was not meant to be part of the September 11 hijacking, but was supposed to be in a second wave of attacks.

Many observers thought his testimony solidified the prosecution's case that he was involved in the deaths of 3,000 people on September 11.

Moussaoui, dressed in a green prisoner jumpsuit and white cap, said on Thursday his earlier comments had made little difference.

"I thought about ... the consequences for me saying I was a part of 9/11. I decided to just put my trust in God and tell the truth and time will tell," he said.

"Even without my testimony, taking into account the emotion of the case, there was definitely a chance I would be found eligible for death," he said.

He also said he would try to convince a jury that if they sentence him to life instead of executing him they might be able to save American lives if he could be used as a bargaining chip.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema allowed Moussaoui to act as his own lawyer for more than a year early in the case, but eventually revoked the right after he continued to file inflammatory motions with the court attacking her, his lawyers and U.S. officials.

Gold9472
04-15-2006, 05:30 PM
Reid Won't Testify at Moussaoui Trial

http://www.kfmb.com/stories/story.46645.html

Last Updated:
04-15-06 at 10:37AM

Al-Qaeda terrorist and would-be shoe-bomber Richard Reid will not be testifying at the death-penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema on Friday vacated the order she had previously issued requiring Reid to testify for the defense at Moussaoui's trial.

Brinkema gave no substantive explanation for her order. She cited a letter written Friday by Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers and a motion filed by the federal public defenders in Boston who represented Reid. Both the letter and the motion by Reid's lawyers are sealed, though.

Reid is serving a life sentence in Colorado after a failed try to blow up an American Airlines flight in 2001.

Moussaoui testified last month at his death-penalty trial that he and Reid were going to hijack a fifth plane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House.

That testimony came after years of denying any specific role in 9/11. Moussaoui had previously said he was part of a separate al-Qaeda plot, and written testimony from Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed asserting that Moussaoui was never part of the 9/11 plans but was instead to be in a second wave of attacks.

Moussaoui's defense lawyers have suggested Moussaoui fabricated his story about Reid and their role in the 9/11 plot in an effort to sabotage his own defense and achieve martyrdom through execution. The lawyers also indicate that Moussaoui is trying to inflate his role in history.

Defense lawyers had hoped that if Reid would disavow any knowledge of Moussaoui's claim, thus bolstering their argument that Moussaoui was lying when he claimed he was to have been one of the 9/11 pilots.

On Thursday, though, Moussaoui took the stand for a second time and elaborated that Reid had was on a "need-to-know basis" and had not yet been informed of al-Qaeda's plans for Sept. 11. Thus any denial by Reid may have been a moot point in light of Moussaoui's most recent testimony.

Moussaoui, in his testimony Thursday, referred to Reid as his "buddy" from the al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and said the two had tried to exchange letters while in prison.

Although plans to have Reid take the witness stand have been abandoned, it is possible that lawyers will craft a written statement or stipulation that will contain some of what Reid would have said.

Calls to Reid's lawyers in Boston were not immediately returned Friday.

Moussaoui is the only person charged in this country in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks. The jury deciding his fate has already declared him eligible for the death penalty by determining that his actions caused at least one death on 9/11.

Now they must decide whether Moussaoui deserves execution or life in prison.

The trial resumes Monday and Brinkema said the jury may begin deliberations early next week.

Gold9472
04-18-2006, 09:18 AM
Man who helped spare Unabomber at 9/11 trial

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2139236,00.html

By Sam Knight and agencies
4/18/2006

The courtroom battle to understand the mind of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker", will intensify today when one of America's most renowned psychologists claims that the al-Qaeda member is a paranoid schizophrenic.

The fate of Moussaoui, who faces the death penalty after confessing that he was a co-conspirator in the September 11 attacks, rests on whether his defence lawyers can convince the jury in Alexandria, Virginia, that their client is mentally ill and has exaggerated his role in the atrocity.

Crucial to their argument is the testimony of Dr Xavier Amador, an professor in clinical psychology at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, who has analysed the mental health of, among others, Ted Kaczynski ("The Unabomber"), and Russell Weston, who killed two police officers on Capitol Hill in 1998 in what he described as an attempt save the world from cannibalism.

Kaczynski was spared the death penalty while Weston's criminal trial was delayed indefinitely after he refused to take drugs that would control his delusions and allow him to stand trial.

Taking the stand yesterday afternoon, Dr Amador, the author of five books, including I am Not Sick, I Don’t Need Help!, said that he believed "Mr Moussaoui suffers from schizophrenia and it is a paranoid subtype".

Today Dr Amador is expected to expand on the diagnosis, which has been made after examining four years of outbursts and letters by Moussaoui, who has refused to to be assessed by psychologists.

Moussaoui, a 37-year-old French citizen of Moroccan descent, has insisted that he is sane throughout the death penalty phase of his trial. Last week, Robert Spencer, a federal prosecutor, asked him if he was "crazy", to which he replied: "Thank God, I am not."

But his defence team are attempting to prove otherwise, saying that Moussaoui's violent upbringing at the hands of his abusive father in Paris created a vulnerable, fragile man who was easily swayed to extremist Islam when he encountered radical preachers in London.

Moussaoui's two sisters, who both receive treatment for mental illness, have told the court their brother was "a little sweetheart" who had been terrorised by his father. Yesterday, one of Moussaoui's guards told the jury that the admitted al-Qaeda member dreams of being pardoned by President Bush and moving to London to write a book.

Gold9472
04-20-2006, 08:57 PM
Moussaoui Prosecutors Doubt Part of Claim

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060420/ap_on_re_us/moussaoui

By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 41 minutes ago

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Prosecutors acknowledged on Thursday the government has no evidence to support — and actually doubts — part of Zacarias Moussaoui's dramatic courtroom confession that he was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks: His claim that shoe bomber Richard Reid was to be on his team.

Thanks to legal maneuvering outside court, the potentially damaging concession reached the jury in a decidedly undramatic way: It was part of a stipulation agreed to by the government and read to the jury in the monotone voice of defense lawyer Alan Yamamoto.

The disclosure came shortly before the defense rested its case for sparing the life of the 37-year-old Frenchman. Testimony in the trial concluded after prosecutors presented their only rebuttal witness, psychiatrist Raymond Patterson, who examined Moussaoui. Patterson disagreed with defense experts who testified the terrorist conspirator is a paranoid schizophrenic.

On Monday, jurors who must choose execution or life in prison for Moussaoui will hear closing arguments and begin deliberations.

The windup of testimony in the 1 1/2-month roller coaster trial covered several issues:

_Seven more people who lost relatives in the attacks testified on Moussaoui's behalf about how they have devoted their lives to reconciliation rather than vengeance. The defense called 13 victim relatives over two days to try to blunt the impact of nearly four dozen victims and relatives whose heart-rending testimony for the prosecution had some jurors wiping their eyes.

_The defense read another government-approved stipulation acknowledging that six al-Qaida operatives who directly planned and put in place the Sept. 11 plot, including mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and planner Ramzi Binalshibh, are in U.S. custody and have not been charged. Some Sept. 11 families have criticized the government for charging only Moussaoui, whom they consider marginal, and not major players such as Shaikh Mohammed.

The concession about Reid went directly to the argument between prosecutors and defense lawyers over Moussaoui's credibility since he testified March 27. He stunned the courtroom that day by recanting his four-year-old claim of having nothing to do with Sept. 11. Instead he said he was to have hijacked a fifth jetliner, with Reid, that day. Previously, Moussaoui claimed his planned attack on the White House was part of a later plot.

Since Moussaoui testified, the court-appointed defense team — with whom he does not cooperate — has portrayed him as a delusional schizophrenic who lied either to achieve martyrdom through execution or to enhance his role in history.

Prosecutors have tried to shore up Moussaoui's reputation. They argue he is not insane but a committed Islamic fundamentalist jihadist who finally confessed his role and determination to kill Americans.

Defense lawyers tried to bring Reid to court from federal prison, where he is serving life for attempting to detonate a shoe bomb on a trans-Atlantic flight in late 2001.

That bid was thwarted in motions still sealed from the public. But defense lawyers were able to obtain the government's agreement on the statement about Reid.

"No information is available to indicate that Richard Reid had pre-knowledge of the Sept. 11 operation or was instructed by al-Qaida leaders to conduct an operation in coordination with Moussaoui," it said.

Reid named Moussaoui as the beneficiary in his will and two FBI analysts concluded that was an unlikely decision for him to make if they were going to be on a joint suicide mission, the statement said.

The two FBI analysts also concluded it was unlikely Reid was part of a Sept. 11 plot with Moussaoui because Reid spent May to September 2001 traveling in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, Turkey and Amsterdam and The Hague in the Netherlands. All Sept. 11 participants were in the U.S. by July 2001, the statement said.

During the government's rebuttal, Patterson testified his examination of Moussauoi found "exaggerations of traits we all have," but "not a major mental illness."

`In jargon: he's a character," Patterson said.

He dismissed items cited by defense doctors, such as an incident in which he spat on a defense doctor more than a dozen times while refusing to submit to an examination. "I describe that with the clinical term `pissed off,'" Patterson said, noting Moussaoui claimed guards manhandled him earlier that day.

Moussaoui's often vituperative and incoherent written court motions and his dream that President Bush will release him were not evidence of the disorganized thinking or delusions of schizophrenia, Patterson said. Rather, he said, they were a part of "fighting his war, using them as propaganda."

The jury earlier found Moussaoui eligible for execution. Although Moussaoui was in jail on Sept. 11, the jury ruled that lies he told federal agents before Sept. 11 kept them from identifying and stopping some of the hijackers.

Gold9472
04-22-2006, 09:00 AM
No evidence of 9/11 plotter's role

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,18889479-2703,00.html

April 22, 2006

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia: The US Government has admitted there was no evidence to back Zacarias Moussaoui's dramatic courtroom confession that he was to have been a key player in the 9/11 attacks.

The revelation, at the al-Qa'ida plotter's death penalty trial, undercut Moussaoui's claim that he and British shoebomber Richard Reid were to have hit the White House with a fifth hijacked jet in the September 11, 2001, attacks.

It came on the final day of evidence in the gruelling, emotional trial. On Monday, jurors will be handed the task of deciding whether Moussaoui should be put to death over the strikes, which killed almost 3000 people. Prosecutors yesterday targeted defence claims the Frenchman was a paranoid schizophrenic, suffering from delusions, and called a forensic psychiatrist, who denied he was mentally ill.

Gold9472
04-26-2006, 06:53 PM
U.S. seeks to keep evidence from 9/11 families
Prosecutors ask Moussaoui judge to reconsider order

http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/04/26/moussaoui.aviation/index.html

From Phil Hirschkorn
Wednesday, April 26, 2006; Posted: 4:16 p.m. EDT (20:16 GMT)

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (CNN) -- Prosecutors asked a judge to rethink granting 9/11 families suing airlines access to evidence gathered for the criminal case against al Qaeda terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema's April 7 order requires prosecutors to provide copies of all unclassified aviation security documents to attorneys representing September 11 families in a civil lawsuit pending in New York.

Prosecutors called the order "unprecedented" and urged Brinkema to withdraw it. The motion was filed by Chuck Rosenberg, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Brinkema's order would allow the families' attorneys access to "highly sensitive" law enforcement documents and could compromise the continuing investigation into the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The inquiry is "the largest criminal investigation in our nation's history, which is still ongoing," the motion says.

"This order will likely provoke negative consequences for numerous criminal cases in the future," prosecutors said. Rosenberg requested a May 19 hearing.

American and United airlines each lost two passenger jets to al Qaeda hijackers on September 11, 2001.

Among the 65 plaintiffs in the civil case is Mike Low, whose daughter, Sara, was a flight attendant on the first plane to strike the World Trade Center. He testified as a government witness in the criminal case.

The plaintiffs sued the airlines for wrongful death in 2002, rather than accept compensation from a federal fund that gave $7 billion to families. Brinkema agreed with their attorneys that legislation creating the victims compensation fund protected the rights of nonparticipating families to bring a negligence claim.

In their motion, prosecutors argued that the aviation security documents are specially selected materials provided to a small group of attorneys cleared to handle sensitive evidence in the Moussaoui case.

"The government never contemplated this material would be disclosed more widely for use in private civil litigation," the motion says.

Ron Motley, an attorney who successfully argued for access to the documents last month, said he would reply to the government's motion next week.

"We have not asked the government to give the 9/11 victims one single thing they didn't provide to Moussaoui's lawyers," Motley said.

The order would require the government to begin turning over copies of documents two weeks after a verdict is returned in Moussaoui's trial.

The plaintiffs have struggled with the Transportation Security Administration to obtain pre-September 11 aviation security documents.

"It is amazing what some agencies think is secret," Brinkema said before issuing her order last month. "As a culture, we need to be careful not to be so wrapped up in secrecy that we lose track of our core values and laws."

The families' pursuit was triggered by the revelation early in the Moussaoui trial that TSA lawyer Carla Martin improperly coached witnesses. Martin, who had prepared aviation security documents and witnesses in the case, sent witnesses transcripts and commentary by e-mail, even though a court order required scheduled witnesses to ignore the proceedings.

Martin's e-mail chain revealed she had been communicating with airline attorneys, and the families' attorneys suspected collusion.

Gold9472
04-26-2006, 06:54 PM
"could compromise the continuing investigation into the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks"

Who's?

Gold9472
04-26-2006, 07:01 PM
"The inquiry is "the largest criminal investigation in our nation's history, which is still ongoing."

According to who? CERTAINLY not the Government. Ok, if the investigation is still ongoing, then why won't you accept the MOUNTAINS of evidence we have collected?

Gold9472
05-03-2006, 08:56 AM
Judge doesn't believe Moussaoui claims

http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/nation/14484077.htm

MATTHEW BARAKAT
Associated Press
5/3/2006

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - The judge presiding over Zacarias Moussaoui's sentencing told trial lawyers that she doesn't believe Moussaoui's claims on the witness stand that he knew advance details of the Sept. 11 plot.

"I still think that Moussaoui was not accurate in a lot of what he said about how much he knew about what was going to happen with which particular buildings and when," U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said during a closed hearing on April 21 outside the jury's presence. Transcripts of the hearing were released Tuesday.

Moussaoui's bombshell testimony on March 27, in which he took the stand against the advice of his court-appointed lawyers and claimed a direct role in the 9/11 plot after years of denial, revived a moribund prosecution case. Defense attorneys have argued that Moussaoui lied on the stand either to inflate his role in history or antagonize the jury into making him a martyr through execution.

Specifically, Moussaoui claimed that he and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid were to have flown a fifth plane on 9/11 into the White House, and that he also knew the World Trade Center towers were targeted.

Brinkema made her comment during a debate over jury instructions. She defended a technical ruling in favor of the defense as a way of "evening the playing field" in response to her concerns about Moussaoui's testimony.

Even though jurors have no way of knowing about Brinkema's editorial comment presuming they obey rules against following news coverage, prosecutor David Novak objected to her remark.

"With all due respect, that's the jury's decision to decide whether they found him to be credible or not," Novak told Brinkema.

A separate transcript released Tuesday revealed that defense attorneys tried unsuccessfully to remove a juror from the panel after she expressed fears that the media would harass her after the trial concludes.

The unidentified female juror said that a coworker had deduced she was on the panel even though the jury is anonymous. She also said during the April 17 hearing - before deliberations began - that she fears losing her privacy.

Defense lawyers said she should be replaced because her fears might influence her decision, but Brinkema kept the juror on the panel after she said her concerns would not affect her decision.

Meanwhile, the jury headed into a seventh day of deliberations Wednesday without reaching a verdict on whether to sentence the Sept. 11 conspirator to death or life in prison.

The nine men and three women have so far deliberated more than 35 hours. The jury does not plan to deliberate on Thursday afternoon and Friday so that one juror can attend his parents' 50th wedding anniversary and another can attend a school ceremony for his daughter.

Moussaoui is the only person charged in this country in the Sept. 11 attacks. The jury previously found Moussaoui eligible for execution after more than 16 hours of deliberations in late March and early April.

Although he was in jail on immigration violations on Sept. 11, the jury ruled that lies he told federal agents the month before the attacks kept them from identifying and stopping some of the hijackers.

Gold9472
05-03-2006, 04:47 PM
Jury spares 9/11 plotter Moussaoui
9/11 trial ends after wrenching images, heartbreaking testimony

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/LAW/05/03/moussaoui.verdict/

From Phil Hirschkorn
Wednesday, May 3, 2006 Posted: 2039 GMT (0439 HKT)

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (CNN) -- Al Qaeda terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui should spend the rest of his life in prison for his role in the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, a federal jury decided Wednesday.

The nine men and three women returned their verdict on the seventh day of deliberations after reliving the September 11 attacks through weeks of harrowing testimony and evidence.

U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema will formally sentence Moussaoui Thursday at 10 a.m.

Jurors sent a note Wednesday afternoon indicating they had reached a verdict. The jury had two choices -- death by injection or life in prison.

During the trial's monthlong penalty phase, jurors heard the voices of the doomed office workers at New York's World Trade Center calling 911 for help and listened to the first public playing of the cockpit voice recorder of United Airlines Flight 93.

They watched videos of victims leaping to their deaths from the flaming twin towers. They were shown images of charred remains found in the rubble of the trade center and at the Pentagon in northern Virginia, about 10 miles from the Alexandria courthouse where the trial was held.

And they twice heard from an unrepentant Moussaoui, who said he is willing to kill Americans "any time, anywhere." (Full story)

First 9/11 conviction in U.S.
Moussaoui, 37, a Frenchman of Moroccan heritage, is the first person convicted in the United States for his role in the attacks. Nearly 3,000 people died when hijacked passenger jets crashed into the trade center, Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

Although he was behind bars on September 11, Moussaoui pleaded guilty last year to terrorism conspiracy.

Three of the six conspiracy counts made him eligible for the death penalty: committing acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries, destroying aircraft and using planes as weapons of mass destruction.

The purpose of the eight-week trial was to determine Moussaoui's punishment. Jurors first found that Moussaoui's lies to federal investigators a month before the attacks furthered al Qaeda's plot and directly resulted in at least some 9/11 deaths, making the defendant eligible for execution. (Full story)

In the trial's second phase, jurors weighed factors such as the heinousness of the crime and its impact on the victims' families against Moussaoui's background and mental health.

About 30 family members of 9/11 victims, along with attack survivors and emergency responders, described how their lives have been changed. One after the other, widows and widowers, fathers and mothers, brothers, sisters and friends shared heart-wrenching stories of loss.

Perhaps the trial's most dramatic moment came when prosecutors played the cockpit voice recorder from Flight 93. It made clear passengers' efforts to retake control of the aircraft before the hijackers crashed it outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania. (Full story)

Defense focuses on mental illness
Defense attorneys focused on Moussaoui's mental health, calling experts who diagnosed him as a delusional paranoid schizophrenic. The jury heard that Moussaoui's troubled family history includes two sisters and an abusive father who suffer from mental illness. (Full story)

Moussaoui's friends from France and England, where he earned a business school degree in the early 1990s, described a young man with a big smile who enjoyed life. But Moussaoui underwent a transformation, falling under the spell of Muslim radicals who targeted recent converts such as him at a mosque in London's Brixton section, according to the defense.

"You could see the disdain on his face, " said mosque chairman Abdul Haqq Baker in a videotape played for the jury. "He was very keen to implement whatever drive was given to him for jihad."

On the stand, Moussaoui said he knew in advance of the plan to hijack passenger jets and fly them into the World Trade Center. He said he was supposed to hijack a fifth plane and fly it into the White House with Richard Reid, known as the shoe bomber.

Reid is serving a life sentence for attempting to set off a bomb hidden in his sneakers on a flight from Paris, France, to Miami, Florida, that was safely diverted to Boston, Massachusetts.

A statement from Reid, backed up by the FBI, contradicted Moussaoui's testimony that the two men were supposed to hijack a plane together. (Full story)

Moussaoui shows no remorse
On the witness stand, Moussaoui displayed a complete lack of remorse for the 9/11 deaths, saying he was sorry only that the attacks weren't more lethal.

"I just wish it could have gone on the 12th, the 13th, the 14th, the 15th, the 16th, the 17th. We can go on and on," Moussaoui said. "Like they say, no pain, no gain."

His attorneys asked the jury not to give him the death penalty and make him an al Qaeda martyr.

September 11 family members rotated through the main courtroom observing the trial in six seats reserved for them three rows behind Moussaoui.

More family members watched the trial on a closed-circuit broadcast available elsewhere in the Alexandria courthouse and in federal courthouses in Manhattan and Long Island, New York; Newark, New Jersey; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Boston.

"I am convinced he's not crazy in the legal sense, in that he can, and does, distinguish right from wrong," said Hamilton Peterson, who attended the trial. His father and stepmother died aboard Flight 93.

"I do think he is sick in the evil sense," Peterson added. "He absolutely gets it, specifically, the 9/11 conspiracy he was a part of and his desire for American blood."

Gold9472
05-03-2006, 07:06 PM
Moussaoui Verdict

Video
Click Here (rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/ter/ter050306_verdict.rm)

Gold9472
05-04-2006, 10:27 AM
Moussaoui goes to prison after last taunt
A member of the press gives the thumbs down as he leaves U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., Tuesday, May 2, 2006, after the jury in the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui failed to reach a verdict after their sixth day of deliberations. (AP Photo/Caleb Jones)

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/05/03/moussaoui_gets_life_in_prison/?p1=MEWell_Pos5

By Michael J. Sniffen and Matthew Barakat, Associated Press Writers | May 3, 2006

ALEXANDRIA, Va. --Al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui escaped the death penalty Wednesday as a jury decided he deserved life in prison instead for his role in the bloodiest terrorist attack in U.S. history. "America, you lost," Moussaoui taunted.

After seven days of deliberation, the nine men and three women rebuffed the government's appeal for death for the only person charged in this country in the four suicide jetliner hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001.

Three jurors said Moussaoui had only limited knowledge of the Sept. 11 plot, and three described his role in the attacks as minor, if he had any role at all.

Moussaoui, as he was led from the courtroom after the 15-minute hearing, said: "America, you lost. ... I won." He clapped his hands as he was escorted away.

Carie Lemack, whose mother, Judy Larocque, died on hijacked American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the World Trade Center, said her mom didn't believe in the death penalty and would have been glad Moussaoui was sentenced to life. "This man was an al-Qaida wannabe who could never put together the 9/11 attacks," Lemack said. "He's a wannabe who deserves to rot in jail."

But Patricia Reilly, who lost her sister Lorraine Lee in the New York attacks, was deflated. "I guess in this country you can kill 3,000 people and not pay with your life," she said. "I feel very much let down by this country."

From the White House, President Bush said the verdict "represents the end of this case but not an end to the fight against terror." He said Moussaoui got a fair trial and the jury spared his life, "which is something that he evidently wasn't willing to do for innocent American citizens."

The verdict came after four years of legal maneuvering and a six-week trial that put jurors on an emotional roller coaster and gave the 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent a platform to needle Americans and mock the pain of the victims' families.

Judge Leonie Brinkema was to hand down the life sentence Thursday morning, bound by the jury's verdict. Offering assurance to the losing side, she told prosecutors: "The government always wins when justice is done." Moussaoui smiled at that.

It was a stinging defeat for the Justice Department and Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, a former federal prosecutor in Alexandria who was overseeing the case. He said afterward, "The jury has spoken and we respect and accept that verdict."

Moussaoui is expected to spend the rest of his life at the federal maximum-security prison in Florence, Colo.

In Paris, his mother, Aicha El Wafi, told France-Info radio: "I feel nothing. I am dead, because my son was wrongly convicted."

The jury did not reach the unanimity required for a death sentence against the man who claimed a direct role in the Sept. 11 attacks even though he was in jail at the time on immigration charges.

During the trial, no one contested the contention that Moussaoui came to the United States intending to do harm and that he received flight training toward that goal. But his lawyers contended he was an al-Qaida outcast who was not trusted with the knowledge of the Sept. 11 plot.

Outside the courthouse, defense attorney Gerald Zerkin said of the jurors: "It was obvious that they thought his role in 9/11 was not very great and that played a significant role in their decision."

The jurors agreed unanimously Moussaoui "knowingly created a grave risk of death" for more than the intended victims of Sept. 11 and committed his acts with "substantial planning" -- accepting two of the aggravating factors necessary for a death sentence.

But they did not give sufficient weight to those findings to reach a death sentence, balancing them against mitigating factors offered by the defense. No jurors, however, accepted defense arguments that Moussaoui was mentally ill or that he wished to be executed to achieve the radical Islamic vision of martyrdom.

When the verdict was announced, Moussaoui showed no visible reaction and sat slouched in his chair, refusing to stand with his defense team. He had declined to cooperate with his court-appointed lawyers throughout the trial.

When the jurors came into the room, a couple of them looked directly at Moussaoui but most did not, looking at the judge instead. They all wore sober expressions. One dark-haired young man shook his head no before the verdict was read.

When the judge asked the jurors if their verdict was the same on all three counts, the forewoman, a high school math teacher, was joined by several other jurors in answering, "Yes."

The verdict was received with silence in the packed courtroom, where one row was lined with victims' families.

The jurors were divided on the 23 mitigating factors in the case: None was moved by the fact that top al-Qaida operatives in U.S. custody are not facing death penalty prosecutions, but three cited racism that Moussaoui faced as a child of Moroccan descent.

The closest the jurors came to unanimity in finding mitigating factors was on two questions involving his troubled childhood. On the first count of conspiracy to commit international terrorism, nine cited his unstable early childhood including stays in orphanages and a lack of emotional and financial support, and nine also cited physical and emotional abuse by his father.

But on the two other counts -- plotting to destroy aircraft and to use weapons of mass destruction -- those two family factors received less support: eight and seven and seven and six, respectively. Those were the only differences in the verdicts on the three counts.

In their successful defense of Moussaoui, his lawyers revealed new levels of pre-attack bungling of intelligence by the FBI and other government agencies. By the trial's end, the defense team was portraying its uncooperative client as a delusional schizophrenic. They argued he took the witness stand to confess a role in Sept. 11 that he never had -- all to achieve martyrdom through execution or for recognition in history.

They overcame the impact of two dramatic appearances by Moussaoui himself -- first to renounce his four years of denying any involvement in the attacks and then to gloat over the pain of those who lost loved ones.

Using evidence gathered in the largest investigation in U.S. history, prosecutors achieved a preliminary victory last month when the jury ruled Moussaoui's lies to federal agents a month before the attacks made him eligible for the death penalty because they kept agents from discovering some of the hijackers.

But even with heart-rending testimony from nearly four dozen victims and their relatives -- testimony that forced some jurors to wipe their eyes -- the jury was not convinced that Moussaoui, who was in jail on Sept. 11, deserved to die.

The case broke new ground in the understanding of Sept. 11 -- releasing to the public the first transcript and playing in court the cockpit tape of United 93's last half hour. The tape captured the sounds of terrorists hijacking the aircraft over Pennsylvania and passengers trying to retake the jet until it crashed in a field.

Gold9472
05-08-2006, 04:32 PM
Moussaoui: "I Lied About 9/11."

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=nation_world&id=4153666

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) - May 8, 2006 - Convicted Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui says he lied on the witness stand about being involved in the plot and wants to withdraw his guilty plea because he now believes he can get a fair trial.

In a motion filed Friday but released Monday, Moussaoui said he testified March 27 he was supposed to hijack a fifth plane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House "even though I knew that was a complete fabrication."

A federal court jury spared the 37-year-old Frenchman the death penalty last Wednesday. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema gave him six life sentences, to run as two consecutive life terms, in the federal supermax prison at Florence, Colo. At sentencing, she told Moussaoui: "You do not have a right to appeal your convictions, as was explained to you when you plead guilty" in April 2005. "You waived that right."

She said he could appeal his sentence but added, "I believe it would be an act of futility."

Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers told the court they filed the motion even though a federal rule "prohibits a defendant from withdrawing a guilty plea after imposition of sentence." They did so anyway because of their "problematic relationship with Moussaoui" and the fact that new lawyers have yet to be appointed to replace them.

Partridge
05-08-2006, 06:48 PM
Moussaoui Asks to Withdraw Guilty Plea
AP (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MOUSSAOUI?SITE=VADAR&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT)

Convicted Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui says he lied on the witness stand about being involved in the plot and wants to withdraw his guilty plea because he now believes he can get a fair trial from an American jury.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema denied Moussaoui's request Monday afternoon, saying the motion was "too late."

In a motion filed Friday but released Monday, Moussaoui said he testified on March 27 that he was supposed to hijack a fifth plane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House "even though I knew that was a complete fabrication."

A federal court jury spared the 37-year-old Frenchman the death penalty last Wednesday. On Thursday, Brinkema gave him six life sentences, to run as two consecutive life terms, in the federal supermax prison at Florence, Colo.

http://hosted.ap.org/icons/spacer.gifExplaining his latest reversal, Moussaoui said in an affidavit: "I was extremely surprised" by the life sentence.

"I had thought I would be sentenced to death based on the emotions and anger toward me for the deaths on Sept. 11, but after reviewing the jury verdict and reading how the jurors set aside their emotions and disgust for me and focused on the law and the evidence ... I now see that it is possible that I can receive a fair trial even with Americans as jurors."

At sentencing, Brinkema told Moussaoui, "You do not have a right to appeal your convictions, as was explained to you" when he pleaded guilty in April 2005. "You waived that right," she said.

Brinkema said Moussaoui could appeal his sentence but added, "I believe it would be an act of futility."Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers told the court that they filed the motion even though a federal rule "prohibits a defendant from withdrawing a guilty plea after imposition of sentence." They did so anyway, they said, because of their "problematic relationship with Moussaoui" and the fact that new lawyers have yet to be appointed to replace them.

The defense lawyers were not immediately available for comment Monday. Brinkema said they would be replaced after they filed any appeal Moussaoui might want.

The motion said Moussaoui told his lawyers Friday that he wanted to withdraw his guilty plea because when he entered it his "understanding of the American legal system was completely flawed."

In an attached three-page affidavit, Moussaoui cited his new opinion of American jurors and wrote that he now believes he has a fair chance "to prove that I did not have any knowledge of and was not a member of the plot to hijack planes and crash them into buildings on Sept. 11, 2001."

"I wish to withdraw my guilty plea and ask the court for a new trial to prove my innocence of the Sept. 11 plot," Moussaoui wrote. "I have never met (lead 9/11 hijacker) Mohammed Atta and, while I may have seen a few of the other hijackers ... (in Afghanistan), I never knew them or anything about their operation."

Explaining his twists and turns, Moussaoui said, "Solitary confinement made me hostile toward everyone, and I began taking extreme positions to fight the system."

Moussaoui said that, coupled with his inability to get a Muslim lawyer, led him to distrust his lawyers when they told him he could be convicted of being an al-Qaida member but acquitted of involvement in 9/11.

Moussaoui wrote that he pleaded guilty because he mistakenly thought the Supreme Court would immediately review his objection to being denied the opportunity to call captured enemy combatant witnesses to buttress his claim of not being involved in the 9/11 plot.

An appeals court agreed with the government that national security would be at risk if captured operatives like 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed testified or were even questioned by Moussaoui's lawyers. Instead, statements taken from their interrogations were read to the jury.

Shaikh Mohammed's statements said Moussaoui was never considered for the 9/11 plot, only a later attack.

Moussaoui shocked the courtroom at his sentencing trial when he recanted his four-year-old claim of having nothing to do with 9/11. When he pleaded guilty in 2005, he had explained that he was to hijack a 747 jetliner and fly it into the White House at some later date if the United States refused to release a radical Egyptian sheik who is serving a life term for terrorist acts in New York.

But when he testified, Moussaoui claimed that the 747 was to be a fifth plane hijacked on Sept. 11 and that Richard Reid, now imprisoned for a December 2001 shoe bombing attempt aboard a trans-Atlantic flight, was to be on his hijacking team.

That testimony revived the government's flagging case in the first part of the sentencing trial.

On April 3, the jury found Moussaoui eligible for the death penalty. It apparently accepted prosecutors' arguments that by withholding information from federal agents who arrested him on Aug. 16, 2001, he bore responsibility for at least one death on 9/11 by preventing the agents from identifying and stopping some hijackers.

Nevertheless, the same jury was unable to unanimously find that Moussaoui, who was in jail on 9/11, deserved execution. Three jurors wrote on the verdict form that they doubted he knew much about the 9/11 plot.

After Moussaoui's testimony, his lawyers made clear in court that they thought he was lying to achieve martyrdom through execution. Prosecutors even stipulated that the government doubted Moussaoui's claim that Reid was part of his team. And the judge told lawyers, out of the jury's hearing, that she doubted his testimony about how much he knew about the 9/11 plot.

Gold9472
05-08-2006, 06:50 PM
"Um, yeah... I don't want to go to prison for the rest of my life, sitting in a hole with no sound. I'd like to withdraw my plea. Ok, well... see you guys later."

Gold9472
05-08-2006, 07:54 PM
"Release of the document responsive to plaintiff's FOIA request would threaten to interfere with the criminal prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person to be brought to trial in the United States for the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. The process of selecting prospective jurors for the penalty phase of Moussaoui's trial is expected to begin in late 2005. Therefore, the FBI withheld the responsible record, a CD-ROM of time-lapse images from Pentagon security cameras, pursuant to Exemption 7(A) because its release could reasonably be expected to interfere with that law enforcement proceeding. Federal prosecutors may ask the Court to impose the death penalty. Widespread dissemination of this record could present significant harm to the government's criminal case."

That is the reason given to Scott Hodes of www.flight77.info as to why they won't release the videos of the Pentagon. That reason no longer has merit because as we just found out, "to avoid inflaming the jury at this sentencing trial, prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed instead to read an account of the flight, including major sections of the phone call transcripts".

They're not going to be needing the tapes, so why not release them?

http://www.flight77.info/order1.jpg
http://www.flight77.info/order2.jpg

Gold9472
05-14-2006, 12:06 PM
Convicted 9/11 conspirator appeals life sentence

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-05/13/content_4541197.htm

WASHINGTON, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Convicted Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui appealed on Friday the life sentence imposed on him earlier this month.

Moussaoui, 37, who was spared the death penalty on May 4, also appealed against the judge's refusal to allow him to change his guilty plea on the six conspiracy charges.

Moussaoui is the only person to have been charged and tried in the United States for the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

His court-appointed lawyers said in a one-paragraph notice of appeal that Moussaoui wanted the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the final judgment and sentence he received last week at a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, and the judge's refusal of his request to withdraw his guilty plea.

On May 8, Moussaoui filed a motion to withdraw his guilty plea, saying that he lied when he testified last year that he was involved in the plot even though he knew that was a "complete fabrication."

He said he wanted to withdraw his guilty plea because he now believed he could get a fair trial.

Moussaoui, a Frenchman of Moroccan descent, was arrested in August 2001. He was to serve his life sentence in the federal supermax prison at Florence, Colorado.

Gold9472
06-19-2006, 11:26 AM
Rowley Criticized Over Moussaoui Probe

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5896704,00.html

By MATTHEW BARAKAT
Monday June 19, 2006 3:16 PM

WASHINGTON (AP) - The former FBI whistle-blower who urged the agency to probe terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks was criticized Monday in a government report for her own role in the case.

Coleen Rowley, a former lawyer in the FBI's Minneapolis field office who is now running for Congress, received both praise and criticism in the report prepared by the Justice Department's inspector general.

The report credits Rowley overall for blowing the whistle on mistakes at FBI headquarters in its failure to aggressively investigate Moussaoui. "Her complaints resulted in an important reassessment of how the FBI handled this matter," it said.

But the report faults Rowley for failing to pursue investigative avenues, such as a traditional criminal search warrant. Her focus instead was on obtaining a search warrant from a special intelligence court that operates in secret.

"At the outset, she assumed that (the U.S. Attorney's Office) would not support a criminal warrant," the report states. "Contrary to the implication in her letter, which placed the blame for failing to seek a warrant solely on FBI headquarters, she advised the field agents not to seek a criminal warrant."

Rowley, in an interview with The Associated Press, said Monday that she simply advised that seeking a warrant through the intelligence court was a better option. She said agents eventually came up with another idea: deporting Moussaoui, which would have allowed immigration agents to search his belongings.

Moussaoui was already scheduled for deportation when the attacks occurred.

Rowley maintained that, in a pre-9/11 environment, prosecutors demanded an exceedingly high standard before they would ask a judge for a warrant.

"I will stand by that to the day I die," Rowley said.

Moussaoui was arrested in Minnesota on Aug. 15, 2001, on immigration violations after his efforts to obtain flight training drew suspicion. A search warrant of his belongings was not obtained until Sept. 11, after the suicide attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives.

At Moussaoui's trial earlier this year, prosecutors convinced a jury that a full investigation of Moussaoui prior to Sept. 11 could have yielded the investigative clues necessary for federal agents to thwart or at least minimize the attacks.

Rowley said she is proud that her memo resulted in the 450-page inspector general report, which provides in many places a stinging assessment of the FBI's handling of terror investigations prior to 9/11.

Most of the inspector general's report was publicly released last year, but the chapter about Moussaoui was redacted in an effort to protect Moussaoui's right to a fair trial.

Moussaoui was convicted earlier this year of aiding the Sept. 11 plot and sentenced to life in prison. He jurors on the witness stand that he was to have piloted a fifth plane on Sept. 11 and fly it into the White House.

The report singles out other individuals at FBI headquarters for sharper criticism than Rowley, including David Frasca, then head of the FBI's radical fundamentalist unit, and his subordinate, Michael Maltbie. The failure of Frasca and Maltbie to heed the Minneapolis bureau's concerns about Moussaoui were a major issue at Moussaoui's trial.

YouCrazyDiamond
06-19-2006, 04:13 PM
"The inquiry is "the largest criminal investigation in our nation's history, which is still ongoing."

According to who? CERTAINLY not the Government. Ok, if the investigation is still ongoing, then why won't you accept the MOUNTAINS of evidence we have collected?
And why is there physical evidence from the crime scene sitting on Donald Rumsfeld’s desk, looking more like a war trophy than anything else I can think of? Pictures of grieving survivors, etc. on the wall would be a memorial, but baubles on the desk are just ghoulish.

And tampering with evidence from a crime scene is criminal, no?

Gold9472
11-30-2006, 09:41 PM
Familes of 9-11 victims seek Moussaoui evidence

http://www.wdbj7.com/Global/story.asp?S=5750666&nav=S6aK

11/30/2006

RICHMOND, Va. The Richmond federal appeals court heard arguments today on whether some families of the Nine-Eleven victims should be given evidence from the trial of al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui for civil lawsuits.

District Judge Leonie Brinkema (LAY'-eh-nee BRINK'-eh-mah) of Alexandria has ordered the government to give the plaintiffs non-sensitive information that prosecutors turned over to Moussaoui's attorneys, but which was never used at his trial.

Moussaoui was sentenced to life in prison earlier this year.

Justice Department lawyer Steven Lane urged a three-judge panel of the Fourth U-S Circuit Court of Appeals today to overturn that ruling.

Lane said the case is about the procedures for obtaining the evidence, not whether the victims' families are entitled to it.

Nathan Lewin (LOO'-win), attorney for the plaintiffs, argued that Brinkema was correct in allowing access to the evidence in "an unusual case."

The victims' families are suing parts of the airline industry and those alleged to have financed the terror group that hijacked airplanes and crashed them on September 11th, 2001.

Gold9472
03-19-2007, 10:08 PM
Court says 9/11 families do not have right to Moussaoui trial evidence

http://www.cantonrep.com/index.php?ID=341982&Category=23

6:14 PM, Wednesday, March 14, 2007

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) A federal appeals court ruled today that the government does not have to turn over evidence from the trial of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui to family members of those killed in the terrorist attacks.

The three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said a Virginia judge lacked authority to order the government to provide the evidence for use in lawsuits against the airline industry and others.

Last April, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria said the families were entitled to nonsensitive information that prosecutors shared with Moussaoui’s attorneys but never introduced at his trial.

The appeals court ruled unanimously that Brinkema had exceeded her authority, saying a federal court in New York has exclusive jurisdiction over civil actions arising from the Sept. 11 attacks.

“We, like the district court, have great sympathy for the victims of September 11 and their families,” Judge Karen Williams wrote. “But regardless of how much respect and compassion this court has, we must ensure that the federal courts in our jurisdiction — no matter how well intentioned — do not exceed their legal power.”

Moussaoui, a confessed al-Qaida conspirator and the only person in the United States charged in the attacks, was sentenced to life in prison in May after a jury found him responsible for at least one death on Sept. 11.

Gold9472
11-20-2007, 11:02 PM
Moussaoui judge questions government

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071120/ap_on_re_us/terror_paintball

By MATTHEW BARAKAT, Associated Press Writer Tue Nov 20, 6:55 PM ET

McLEAN, Va. - A federal judge expressed frustration Tuesday that the government provided incorrect information about evidence in the prosecution of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and raised the possibility of ordering a new trial in another high-profile terrorism case.

At a post-trial hearing Tuesday for Ali al-Timimi, a Muslim cleric from Virginia sentenced to life in prison in 2004 for soliciting treason, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said she can no longer trust the CIA and other government agencies on how they represent classified evidence in terror cases.

Attorneys for al-Timimi have been seeking access to documents. They also want to depose government witnesses to determine whether the government improperly failed to disclose the existence of certain evidence.

The prosecutors have asked her to dismiss the defense request. The government has denied the allegations but has done so in secret pleadings to the judge that defense lawyers are not allowed to see. Even the lead prosecutors in the al-Timimi case have not had access to the information; they have relied on the representations of other government lawyers.

After the hearing, the judge issued an order that said she would not rule on the prosecutors' motion until the government grants needed security clearances to al-Timimi's defense lawyer, Jonathan Turley, and the lead trial prosecutor so they can review the secret pleadings.

Brinkema said she no longer feels confident relying on the government briefs, particularly since prosecutors admitted last week that similar representations made in the Moussaoui case were false.

In a letter made public Nov. 13, prosecutors in the Moussaoui case admitted to Brinkema that the CIA had wrongly assured her that no videotapes or audiotapes existed of interrogations of certain high-profile terrorism detainees. In fact, two such videotapes and one audio tape existed.

Moussaoui, who had pleaded guilty to terrorism charges, was sentenced to life in prison last year. Because Moussaoui admitted his guilt, it is unlikely that the disclosures of new evidence would result in his conviction being overturned.

Turley, al-Timimi's defense lawyer, praised Brinkema for taking a skeptical view of the government's assertions in addressing al-Timimi's case.

"We believe a new trial is warranted," he said in a phone interview. "We are entirely confident that there are communications that were not turned over to the defense. These are very serious allegations."

Al-Timimi challenged his conviction in 2005 after revelations that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to conduct certain types of domestic surveillance without a search warrant. Turley contends that the program is illegal and that any evidence obtained from such surveillance should have been turned over to defense lawyers.

He is confident that al-Timimi, a prominent U.S. Muslim cleric who was known to keep close ties with radical Saudi clerics would have been a target of the surveillance program.

Brinkema made no rulings during the brief, 20-minute hearing in Alexandria, but her displeasure at the government was apparent. Prosecutors did not have the opportunity to speak during the hearing, except to note their appearance for the record.

Al-Timimi, a born U.S. citizen from Fairfax, was convicted after prosecutors portrayed him as the spiritual leader of a group of young Muslim men from the Washington area who played paintball games in 2000 and 2001 as a means of preparing for holy war around the globe.

After Sept. 11, they said, al-Timimi told his followers that the attacks were a harbinger of a final apocalyptic battle between Muslims and nonbelievers and exhorted them to travel to Afghanistan and join the Taliban to fight U.S. troops.

Several of his followers admitted that they traveled to Pakistan and received training from a militant Pakistani group called Lashkar-e-Taiba, but none actually joined the Taliban.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Alexandria declined to comment Tuesday.

Gold9472
02-03-2008, 12:36 PM
bump

Gold9472
02-28-2008, 09:55 AM
Moussaoui appeals, calling plea invalid
Lawyers claim he pleaded guilty without seeing secret evidence

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/nation/5573527.html

By MATT APUZZO
Associated Press
2/26/2008

WASHINGTON — Lawyers urged Zacarias Moussaoui not to plead guilty to terrorism charges. They just couldn't tell him why.

In newly filed court documents, Moussaoui argues that court-imposed secrecy undermined his ability to present an adequate defense. His new lawyers say Moussaoui's guilty plea should be thrown out and a new trial should be convened for the man who once claimed to have been a part of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist plot.

Moussaoui was not allowed to see the classified evidence against him and was shut out from closed-door hearings in which that evidence was laid out.

Defense lawyers say they were barred from even discussing with Moussaoui evidence that could help prove his innocence. They say Moussaoui faced an unconstitutional choice: plead guilty or go to trial without knowing the evidence.

"Moussaoui appeals because his plea was unknowing, uncounselled and invalid," attorneys Justin Antonipillai and Barbara Hartung wrote.

The documents, filed with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., raise a fundamental question about whether terrorism suspects like Moussaoui should be given access to all the evidence against them — access that is normally guaranteed in criminal cases.

The Bush administration has sought to avoid such conflicts by keeping most terrorism cases out of civilian courts. Instead, officials plan to try several cases before special military commissions at the Guantanamo Bay naval base, where judges have broad authority to limit what evidence detainees can see.

Because Moussaoui's appeal deals solely with civilian law, it won't directly affect the military commissions, even if he wins. But lawyers say the Bush administration increasingly cites national security concerns to justify keeping evidence from defendants in criminal cases and they see that as a flaw that persists at Guantanamo Bay.

Since being sentenced to life in prison, Moussaoui has said he lied when testifying that he was to hijack a fifth jetliner on Sept. 11. He has returned to claiming that he had nothing to do with the suicide hijackings.

Gold9472
06-03-2008, 02:12 PM
Philly 9/11 Truth Confronts Judge Leona Brinkema

Video
Click Here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu9mmZO4QJA&e) (GooTube)

Gold9472
01-27-2009, 09:44 AM
Court hears 9/11 conspirator's appeal in Va.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5giHuPtn0SwUPW7v1GMXHVicTlFiQD95V1F8OH

By LARRY O'DELL – 17 hours ago

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Zacarias Moussaoui's guilty plea in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was invalid because the government failed to turn over evidence that could have helped his defense, his attorney told a federal appeals court Monday.

Justin Antonipillai urged a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to throw out the plea and order a new trial for Moussaoui, who once claimed to be part of the 2001 conspiracy but has since changed his story. Moussaoui was sentenced to life in prison.

U.S. Justice Department attorney Kevin Gingras argued that Moussaoui, the only person to stand trial in a U.S. court in the 9/11 attacks, knew the trial judge was considering ways to get the favorable evidence to him but decided to plead guilty anyway.

"It was his choice to pull the plug on the process," said Gingras. The prosecutor said U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema "bent over backward" to ensure that Moussaoui understood what he was doing and the consequences.

The panel peppered both attorneys with questions for 90 minutes before closing the hearing for about an hour to consider matters involving classified information.

The court usually takes several weeks, or even months, to issue a decision.

In open court, Chief Judge Karen J. Williams sounded skeptical of Antonipillai's claim that Moussaoui's trial preparations were impaired by government secrecy that some of his constitutional rights were violated.

Williams wondered aloud how the court could conclude that the government would have continued to conceal the evidence had the case gone to trial. She also noted Moussaoui testified that he was supposed to hijack a fifth plane and crash it into the White House.

Antonipillai said Moussaoui had "delusions of grandeur," and his confession was contradicted by alleged 9/11 ringleader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who said Moussaoui was training for a different operation and had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

"This evidence was absolutely critical to the defense," Antonipillai said.

The prosecutor said Moussaoui knew the gist of the evidence that was being withheld and pleaded guilty against the advice of his lawyers.

Antonipillai said defense lawyers were not able to explain the reasons for their advice. He also argued that Moussaoui should not have been eligible for the capital punishment because he was not directly responsible for the Sept. 11 deaths. Although the jury spared Moussaoui the death penalty, Antonipillai said his eligibility left life in prison as the only alternative.

Gold9472
07-14-2009, 07:31 PM
New arguments ordered in 9/11 conspirator's case

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090714/ap_on_re_us/us_moussaoui_appeal_2

7/13/2009

RICHMOND, Va. – A federal appeals court ordered new arguments Tuesday in the case of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacharias Moussaoui, the only person to stand trial for the terrorist attacks in a U.S. court.

A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in the Moussaoui case in January. But one of those judges, Karen J. Williams, retired last week — effectively immediately — after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease.

Williams' departure prompted the court to schedule a rehearing, court clerk Patricia Connor said. She said the court may have to order new arguments in some other pending cases heard by Williams. However, none will have a higher profile than the Moussaoui case.

Moussaoui is serving a life sentence after pleading guilty to helping plan the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. His lawyer, Justin Antonipillai, declined to comment on Tuesday's court order.

In January, Antonipillai argued that Moussaoui's guilty plea was invalid because the government failed to turn over evidence that could have helped his defense. He asked for a new trial for Moussaoui, who once claimed to be part of the 2001 conspiracy but has since changed his story.

U.S. Justice Department attorney Kevin Gingras argued that Moussaoui knew the trial judge was considering ways to get the favorable evidence to him but decided to plead guilty anyway.

Williams sounded skeptical of Moussaoui's claims then, asking how the court could conclude that the government would have continued to conceal the evidence had the case gone to trial.

Gold9472
07-19-2009, 04:28 PM
Why a 9/11 "Plotter" Deserves a Re-Trial

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1911560,00.html?xid=newsletter-daily

By BRUCE CRUMLEY
7/18/2009

It isn't easy to have sympathy for Frenchman Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person convicted in connection with the September 11 terror attacks. During his trial, Moussaoui pledged his allegiance to Osama bin Laden and prayed that al-Qaeda succeeds in its violent jihad against the U.S; he also mocked the families of 9/11 victims and dared the court to inflict the harshest punishment for the crimes which, after veering erratically between denial and advocacy, he finally took responsibility for. In May 2006, a jury decided against the death penalty but sent Moussaoui, now 41, to life imprisonment and near total isolation in Colorado's ADX Supermax prison.

Now Moussaoui says he regrets pleading guilty. But, he has a problem: U.S. law does not allow those who have taken that route to appeal their cases. His only shot at winning a lighter sentence is the July 14 decision by a federal appeals court in Virginia to re-hear arguments that the government had failed to turn over key evidence to Moussaoui and his lawyer that might have helped in his defense. As politically untenable as it may seem, President Barack Obama should support Moussaoui's efforts to win another trial.

Why? Because justice and sympathy are different issues. Moussaoui's courtroom antics and declarations were outrageous but the prosecution of his trial was a farce nonetheless. Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema repeatedly criticized certain aspects of the prosecutors' efforts to win a guilty verdict as both underhanded and illegal. At one point in the trial, Brinkema rebuked prosecutors for illegally coaching a witness from a federal agency. She called that tampering "an egregious" and a "significant error by the government affecting the... integrity of the criminal justice system of the United States."

On one occasion Brinkema backed Moussaoui's call to cite testimony from Guantanamo prisoners and 9/11 masterminds Khaled Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh for his defense. Prosecutors resisted that demand, claiming the information was classified. (Moussaoui would win the right to use parts of statements by the 9/11 puppet masters, who described the Frenchman as too erratic and unreliable to be let in on the plot.)

However, Moussaoui continued to make himself the ever-ready scapegoat in the pursuit of 9/11 justice that seemed to provide no other perpetrators to prosecute. He was, indeed, a dream come true for the prosecution. First, he fired his defense team, zigged and zagged between pleading innocent and guilty, and ranted in ways that had some observers questioning his sanity. And the circumstantial evidence against him didn't make Moussaoui look any better: he was arrested in August, 2001 while attending a Minnesota flight school. When investigators took a closer look at him after 9/11, they discovered jihadist literature and plane flying information on his computer. Further inquiry led to the discovery that Binalshibh had wired him $14,000 from Germany; a check with French officials showed that he'd long been under watch as a suspected jihadist who'd made the de rigeur trip to al-Qaeda's Afghan haven.

But Moussaoui had been in jail nearly a month when the attack occurred, meaning he couldn't have been directly responsible for it. Moussaoui was also a lousy student who flunked out of several flight schools. And, most importantly, the statements by Sheikh Mohammed and Binalshibh confirmed what anyone watching his trial already knew: Moussaoui was too big a loud-mouth and hot-head to let anywhere near a plot like 9/11. In the end, Moussaoui's conviction relied almost entirely on his own guilty plea and inconsistent admissions to having wanted to carry out terror attacks in the U.S.

His mother Aicha el-Wafi, told TIME that Moussaoui informed her that he pleaded guilty in the fatalistic belief the process had to be rigged, that no American court would ever give a sworn enemy a fair chance. American values include respecting the rights of even those who attack them. That's been a key consideration in Obama's moves to roll back many Bush administration policies in the war on terror. During a recent speech in Cairo, the U.S. President explained his decision to close the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison as part of a wider push to reverse extra-legal Bush administration security measures that stomped on long-standing principles of American civil liberty. Seeking to defend fundamental American ideas from attack in that way, Obama noted, "led us to act contrary to our ideals."

Thanks to the Virginia appeals court ruling, Obama has an opportunity to demonstrate his commitment to those ideals, as unpalatable as Moussaoui may be. The Frenchman should be re-tried for what he actually did, rather than what he says.

Gold9472
01-04-2010, 08:21 PM
US appeals court upholds Moussaoui conviction for 9/11
Zacarias Moussaoui had challenged the validity of his original guilty plea

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8440495.stm

1/4/2010

A US appeals court has upheld the conviction and sentence of 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.

The only person charged in the US over the attacks, Moussaoui had originally pleaded guilty to conspiracy.

In 2006 he was sentenced to life in prison for his role in planning the attacks that killed nearly 3,000.

The appeals court in Virginia rejected his claim his conviction was invalid as the government had failed to provide evidence he could have used in defence.

'Awareness'
"Moussaoui challenges the validity of his guilty plea and his sentences" on the various counts, the three-judge panel said in its ruling.

"We affirm Moussaoui's convictions and sentences in their entirety."

The appeals court also brushed aside Moussaoui's lawyers' claims that his guilty plea was invalid.

"The finality of the guilty plea, entered knowingly, intelligently, and with sufficient awareness of the relevant circumstances and likely consequences, stands," the court said in its statement.

During his original trial in 2005, he had testified that his role was to hijack a fifth plane and crash it into the White House.

After the verdict, Moussaoui changed his stance and denied any involvement in the attacks.

But lawyers from the US justice department told the appeal court that Moussaoui had wanted to plead guilty, even though this was against the advice of his lawyers.

Spared death
At his appeal, his lawyers also argued that his preparations for the trial had been damaged because he was not aware of classified evidence held by the government that might have helped his case.

These claims were also thrown out by the appeals court, which said Moussaoui was both aware of his rights and knew the gist of the classified evidence in question.

Moussaoui is currently serving his life sentence in a super-maximum federal security prison in Colorado.

During his original trial, the jury in Alexandria, Virginia, ruled that Moussaoui's lies to US investigators after he was arrested led directly to at least one death on 9/11.

He was convicted of several counts of conspiracy - including to commit acts of terrorism and destroy aircraft - which carry the death penalty.

Though the prosecution had requested it, he was spared death because of a single vote against the penalty by an anonymous juror.