Zaccarias Moussaoui case goes to the jury

Contradicting all his previous statements about his role in Al Qaeda, Moussaoui repeatedly agreed with suggestions by a federal prosecutor that he had been a major figure in the 9/11 conspiracy, and that after his arrest in early August 2001, he had lied to federal agents with the conscious intention of ensuring that the suicide-hijacking plan went forward successfully.

The death penalty trial was ordered by Federal District Judge Leonie Brinkema after she accepted Moussaoui’s guilty plea last year, despite pleas by his attorneys that the prisoner was mentally incompetent. The judge and the prosecutors had accepted each new self-condemning statement by Moussaoui without any effort to square the multiple contradictions between them, and without acknowledging that they are in effect enabling him to commit suicide using the processes of the federal courts.

Moussaoui’s statement on Monday, March 27, was particularly outlandish. He claimed to have been selected as the pilot of a fifth plane to be hijacked as part of 9/11, despite the fact that, unlike the pilots of the other four jets, he had not been able to complete the necessary training. He also said that one of the four-man team assigned to help him carry out the hijacking was Richard Reid, the British citizen of Jamaican birth who was arrested in December 2001 while attempting to detonate a shoe-bomb aboard a transatlantic flight. Reid’s involvement in 9/11 is highly unlikely, since he was never in the United States at any time during the preparation of the hijackings.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/apr2006/mous-a01.shtml