Prosecutors: Case Against Massaoui Is Weak

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 July 20, 2002







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Text Version


Following is an article from today's New York Times.  After I semt a
contribution to the list defending the presumption of innocence in
Massaoui's case, someone asked me what the prosecution's evidence was.  I
realized I didn't know anything.  Apparently, however, there wasn't a lot to
know.  Fred Feldman




Evidence Against Suspect From 9/11 Is Called Weak
By DAVID JOHNSTON and PHILIP SHENON


ASHINGTON, July 19 - Since December, when the government indicted Zacarias
Moussaoui as the first man charged in the Sept. 11 attacks, an unusual gulf
has opened between what prosecutors have charged in court and what
investigators are saying privately about what they can prove about him.
Prosecutors have charged that Mr. Moussaoui played a direct role in the
Sept. 11 hijackings, and some officials have said they believe he was
supposed to be on one of the four planes. But investigators now say the
evidence is not so clear. In fact, they say they believe he may been in the
United States to take part in a different plot.
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That gap has opened wider in recent days with Mr. Moussaoui's rambling,
combative and often confusing statements in court. He has declared his
allegiance to Al Qaeda and asserted that, if allowed to plead guilty, he
would provide a grand jury with an authoritative insider's account of the
hijacking plot - even though at other points he said he was not involved.
If the judge in his case, Leonie M. Brinkema, allows Mr. Moussaoui to plead
guilty at a hearing scheduled for Thursday, Mr. Moussaoui would follow John
Walker Lindh, the Taliban warrior, in short-circuiting the prosecution. If
that happens, each case would have begun with broad assertions that were
never proven in court.
Government officials say they have no direct evidence that Mr. Moussaoui had
a role in the hijackings. From the beginning the evidence has been
circumstantial. Now, some government officials, in interviews, are saying
that prosecutors overreached when they charged that Mr. Moussaoui was a
direct participant with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in the conspiracy to
kill thousands of people on Sept. 11.
With Attorney General John Ashcroft's counterterrorism team anxious to
demonstrate its aggressive approach, federal prosecutors have dismissed the
internal criticisms, saying that the case against Mr. Moussaoui is strong
and that prosecutors had won convictions in jury trials with less evidence
than they have against Mr. Moussaoui.
But Mr. Moussaoui's erratic recent performances in court proceedings have
upset the Justice Department's effort to bring him to trial in an orderly
legal process. Instead, Mr. Moussaoui has managed to raise even more doubts,
not only about his emotional and mental competence to stand trial and act as
his own lawyer, but also about whether someone with his apparent
instabilities could provide a credible account of his own activities.
Government trial lawyers and F.B.I. agents often disagree about the weight
of evidence in criminal cases, but usually it is the Federal Bureau of
Investigation that is arguing for a tougher charge. In this case, some
prosecutors have said that the F.B.I. has been especially eager to depict
Mr. Moussaoui as a minor figure, in part, because the bureau hoped to dampen
the controversy about whether it acted properly last summer, when it refused
to seek a warrant to search Mr. Moussaoui's laptop computer. The computer
was not searched until after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The government has yet to produce a witness against Mr. Moussaoui. What they
do know is that he received a wire transfer from Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a
Yemeni who, according to the indictment, acted as a financial conduit for
the plot. In addition, Mr. Moussaoui's movements in the months before he was
arrested were almost identical to those of the 19 hijackers.
But investigators have said they have failed to find evidence that Mr.
Moussaoui ever met Mohamed Atta, the plot's ringleader, or any other
hijacker - or that he communicated with any of them by e-mail, telephone or
letter. Still, Mr. Moussaoui's associate, Hussein al-Attas, has told the
authorities that Mr. Moussaoui had said it was acceptable to kill civilians
who harmed Muslims.
Investigators have said they have no precise understanding of why Mr.
Moussaoui entered the United States, although they are convinced he was a
Islamic militant who arrived to take part in some kind of terror operation.
The investigators have speculated that whoever recruited him may have not
told him anything about the operation he was to take part in.
Some officials still suspect that Mr. Moussaoui was meant to be the 20th
hijacker on Sept. 11 and was recruited late in the plot when Mr. al-Shibh
failed to obtain a visa to enter the United States. If so, he would probably
have been a fifth man on the hijack team that seized United Airlines Flight
93, which crashed in Pennsylvania with four hijackers on board; the other
planes were comandeered by five hijackers. But this remains little more than
a suspicion.
Lately, some other investigators suspect that Mr. Moussaoui might instead
have been recruited for a different, still unknown, operation, speculating
that the Sept. 11 hijack teams had already been selected before Mr.
Moussaoui entered the United States. Because he had taken flight lessons and
had information in his computer about crop-dusting aircraft, these
investigators suspect that he was meant to take part in an attack involving
one of those planes.
In his court appearance this week, Mr. Moussaoui's often ranting statements
seemed to support that theory. He confessed that he was part of Al Qaeda,
was loyal to Mr. bin Laden and had joined in terrorism conspiracies. But he
repeated his claim that he had "no participation" in the Sept. 11
conspiracy.
Nonetheless, Mr. Moussaoui, who is acting as his own lawyer, has offered to
testify before a federal grand jury to reveal what he knows about the Sept.
11 conspiracy and Al Qaeda.
But prosecutors and the judge in the case have treated his offer with
skepticism, especially given his initial demand - now dropped - that the
appearance be televised and that he be accompanied into the jury room with a
Muslim lawyer of his choosing.
Edward B. MacMahon, one of the team of court-appointed lawyers that Mr.
Moussaoui has tried to dismiss, said in an interview that in the course of
representing Mr. Moussaoui, the Justice Department had never approached the
defense team with a request that Mr. Moussaoui submit to an interrogation or
consider a plea bargain that would require his cooperation.
That, Mr. MacMahon said, suggested that the department understood that Mr.
Moussaoui was a low-level conspirator who knew little, if anything, about
the terrorist network.













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