Posted on 03/29/2006 6:46:41 PM PST by NormsRevenge
ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Prosecutors said al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui killed Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, by lying to federal agents weeks earlier to keep the plot secret. Defense attorneys called him an "al-Qaida hanger-on" who only dreamed he had a role in the worst terrorist attack in the nation's history.
Summarizing 10 days of testimony in a tumultuous sentencing trial, lawyers painted sharply divergent views of whether the 37-year-old Frenchman was responsible for any of the nearly 3,000 deaths on Sept. 11. Then a jury of nine men and three women retired to decide whether he should be eligible for the death penalty.
They went home after an hour of deliberations.
Prosecutor David Raskin told the jurors they could be sure of Moussaoui's lethal intent "because he admitted it right here in this courtroom" in bombshell testimony Monday. Defense attorney Edward MacMahon countered that Moussaoui had told "a plethora of lies to aggrandize himself. You can't believe anything this man says."
MacMahon said FBI headquarters refused to investigate what one "tremendous" field agent discovered about Moussaoui after his Aug. 16, 2001, arrest at a Minnesota flight training school. Agents also ignored far better leads about the Sept. 11 plotters during the summer of 2001, he said.
"There's no evidence the government would have behaved any differently than it actually did no matter what Moussaoui said or what he did," MacMahon said.
On rebuttal, prosecutor David Novak responded, "We're not here to tell you FBI headquarters did a good job." But he said the verdict form does not ask jurors to "grade the FBI (or) ... grade the CIA."
"All Moussaoui had to do is say, 'I'm al-Qaida,'" Novak argued. The prosecutors said they had showed that if Moussaoui had confessed, when he was arrested, to the facts he admitted when pleading guilty four years later, the FBI would have identified 11 of the 19 hijackers within weeks and the Federal Aviation Administration would have kept them off airplanes.
Moussaoui watched the closing arguments impassively but shouted "Victory to Moussaoui! God curse America!" after the judge and jury had left for a brief recess.
If this jury unanimously decides Moussaoui is eligible for the death penalty, it will reconvene to hear more testimony about whether he actually deserves to be executed. Their only other choice is life in prison without possibility of release. That second phase would be a forum for aggravating and mitigating evidence about his role, including the testimony of families of Sept. 11 victims.
An unresolved issue is what would happen if the jury is unable to agree on death-penalty eligibility. Defense attorneys say that should lead to an automatic life sentence; prosecutors argue it should result in a mistrial, which would allow them to retry Moussaoui with another jury. Judge Leonie Brinkema has appeared to favor the defense view on this but has not ruled.
Moussaoui's dramatic courtroom testimony Monday — that he was supposed to hijack a fifth jetliner on Sept. 11 along with would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid and fly it into the White House — was a major focus of the closing arguments.
MacMahon read the jury what Moussaoui said last April when he pleaded guilty to six conspiracy counts and signed a confession. "Point out a single paragraph where it says I'm part of 9/11," Moussaoui told the court at that time. "Everybody knows I'm not 9/11 material." Moussaoui said then that his plot was different; he was to fly into the White House later if the U.S. did not release radical Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, imprisoned for other terrorist crimes.
MacMahon noted that captured Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other top al-Qaida operatives had said in written testimony that Moussaoui had nothing to do with Sept. 11. He called Moussaoui an "al-Qaida hanger-on and a nuisance" to al-Qaida leaders who argued over who would pay the bill for sending him away.
Listing missing elements that he said showed Moussaoui was lying about his role in Sept. 11, MacMahon said, "He doesn't have a team, he doesn't know where they are, he was never told to go to an airport, he has no airplane tickets, nobody's called to try to find him." Shaikh Mohammed said the attack date wasn't set until after Moussaoui was arrested, MacMahon said.
Raskin began his closing this way: "Zacarias Moussaoui came to this country to kill as many Americans as he could. You have learned from the defendant himself that that's exactly what he did."
"The defendant's lies are as much a part of this plot as anything else. It's terrorist training 101," Raskin added. "Al-Qaida trains its people to lie: Don't give up the plot."
Raskin tried to deal with a continuing defense argument that the Fifth Amendment protected Moussaoui from having to incriminate himself by confessing upon arrest.
"He had a constitutional right to remain silent," Raskin said. "Once he started talking he had an obligation to tell the truth."
MacMahon countered that "the government cannot prove a hypothetical — what would have happened if Moussaoui had not lied — and certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt."
But he stressed that instead of sending agents on a wild goose chase, Moussaoui gave them his correct name, prompting them to learn from French intelligence he was a radical Islamic fundamentalist who had recruited a fighter for Chechen rebels allied with Osama bin Laden. "That's not a wild goose chase. That's bingo," MacMahon said, but the FBI would not open a full investigation.
Likewise, MacMahon argued, no one can know for sure what would have happened if the government had aggressively tried to locate two of the hijackers that it knew 18 months before 9/11 were linked to terrorists and were in the United States.
The arguments followed a disclosure Tuesday that Moussaoui offered last month to testify for prosecutors against himself at his death penalty trial, the firmest evidence he was seeking martyrdom through execution.
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Associated Press writers Matthew Barakat and Pete Yost contributed to this report.
Good new is that we know his brother has joined a radical group in Lebanon. Let's hope intelligence runs in the family.
Good thing we didn't torture him.
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