Moussaoui trial revisited on the eve of Sept. 11 anniversary

[Kid Berwyn]

AP brings up the case of the only terrorist tried for direct participation in 9-11 plot.



He was arrested in August, 2001, several weeks BEFORE the hijackings and attacks.

Moussaoui trial revisited on the eve of Sept. 11 anniversary

By MATTHEW BARAKAT
September 9, 2019, Associated Press

FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP) — Zacarias Moussaoui remains the only person ever convicted in a U.S. court in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks. A behind-the-scenes look at the trial Thursday from its lead participants demonstrated how hard it was to bring it to justice.

Snip…

Moussaoui was arrested in August 2001, before the attacks, when his efforts to obtain advanced flight training drew suspicion. He was charged in December as being a member of the al-Qaida conspiracy that carried out the attacks that killed 3,000 people.

It took years to work through various pretrial procedural issues, including a period where Moussaoui served as his own lawyer and filed handwritten screeds against the judge and others under the guise of legal motions. Appellate courts weighed in several times on how to handle classified evidence, including statements from al-Qaida leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, which were obtained under enhanced interrogation techniques that many said were equivalent to torture.

Moussaoui actually pleaded guilty to the charges against him, so the 2006 trial was simply to determine whether his sentence would be life in prison or death. In the first phase of the trial, prosecutors had to prove that Moussaoui's role in the conspiracy led to the deaths of Sept. 11 victims, making him eligible for the death penalty.

Snip…

Moussaoui's exact role in the Sept. 11 conspiracy remains imprecise. In broad strokes, Spencer said, Moussaoui's guilt was obvious: He was receiving flight training that he had no rational reason to be taking, and he received $10,000 from Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a key member of the Sept. 11 plot, a month before the attack.

Continues…

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/moussaoui-trial-revisited-on-the-eve-of-sept-11-anniversary/ar-AAOgNeH?ocid=Peregrine

Hmm. That’s odd: This AP story missed the part where the FBI BLOCKED its own agents from looking at his laptop.



We talked about it on DU at the time:

Know your BFEE: The Stench of Moussaoui Permeates the Octopus

Snip…

FBI Was Warned About Moussaoui

Agent Tells Court Of Repeated Efforts Before 9/11 Attacks

By Jerry Markon and Timothy Dwyer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 21, 2006; A01

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

Agent Harry Samit told jurors at Moussaoui's death penalty trial that his efforts to secure a warrant to search Moussaoui's belongings were frustrated at every turn by FBI officials he accused of "criminal negligence." Samit said he had sought help from a colleague, writing that he was "so desperate to get into Moussaoui's computer I'll take anything."

SNIP…

Samit said he also sent an e-mail to the FBI's bin Laden unit but did not receive a response before Sept. 11, 2001. By late August, the agent had concluded that Maltbie and other FBI officials were no longer interested in investigating Moussaoui. Samit acknowledged that he told the Justice Department's inspector general's office that his supervisors engaged in "criminal negligence" and were trying to "run out the clock" because they wanted to deport Moussaoui rather than prosecute him.

Most portions of the inspector general's report dealing with Moussaoui have never been made public.

CONTINUED…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/20/AR2006032000240.html

If the FBI etc bosses had looked into the guy who wanted to learn how to turn a 747, but not learn how to take off or land, we might have avoided September 11 and the resultant war for 20 years.

[crickets]

1. We never did get to the bottom of what led up to Sep 11.

It's one of the many reasons I dread the anniversary every year.

[Kid Berwyn]

2. No, we didn't. And many who could tell us have departed.

While Bush vacationed, 9/11 warnings went unheard.

The Out-of-Towner

While Bush vacationed, 9/11 warnings went unheard.

By Fred Kaplan

In an otherwise dry day of hearings before the 9/11 commission, one brief bit of dialogue set off a sudden flash of clarity on the basic question of how our government let disaster happen.

The revelation came this morning, when CIA Director George Tenet was on the stand. Timothy Roemer, a former Democratic congressman, asked him when he first found out about the report from the FBI's Minnesota field office that Zacarias Moussaoui, an Islamic jihadist, had been taking lessons on how to fly a 747. Tenet replied that he was briefed about the case on Aug. 23 or 24, 2001.

Roemer then asked Tenet if he mentioned Moussaoui to President Bush at one of their frequent morning briefings. Tenet replied, "I was not in briefings at this time." Bush, he noted, "was on vacation." He added that he didn't see the president at all in August 2001. During the entire month, Bush was at his ranch in Texas. "You never talked with him?" Roemer asked. "No," Tenet replied. By the way, for much of August, Tenet too was, as he put it, "on leave."

And there you have it. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has made a big point of the fact that Tenet briefed the president nearly every day. Yet at the peak moment of threat, the two didn't talk at all. At a time when action was needed, and orders for action had to come from the top, the man at the top was resting undisturbed.

Throughout that summer, we now well know, Tenet, Richard Clarke, and several other officials were running around with their "hair on fire," warning that al-Qaida was about to unleash a monumental attack. On Aug. 6, Bush was given the now-famous President's Daily Brief (by one of Tenet's underlings), warning that this attack might take place "inside the United States." For the previous few years—as Philip Zelikow, the commission's staff director, revealed this morning—the CIA had issued several warnings that terrorists might fly commercial airplanes into buildings or cities.

And now, we learn today, at this peak moment, Tenet hears about Moussaoui. Someone might have added 2 + 2 + 2 and possibly busted up the conspiracy. But the president was down on the ranch, taking it easy. Tenet wasn't with him. Tenet never talked with him. Rice—as she has testified—wasn't with Bush, either. He was on his own and, willfully, out of touch.

A USA Today story, written right before Bush took off, reported that the vacation—scheduled to last from Aug. 3 to Sept. 3—would tie one of Richard Nixon's as the longest that any president had ever taken. A week before he left, Bush made a videotaped message for the Boy Scouts of America. On the tape, he said, "I'll be going to my ranch in Crawford, where I'll work and take a little time off. I think it is so important for the president to spend some time away from Washington, in the heartland of America."

CONTINUED...

http://www.slate.com/id/2098861

Bush was warned OBL hijacked jet threat at Genoa G-8 summit in July 2001.

So Bush avoided the hotel and slept aboard a missile destroyer in the harbor.

Here's the story from July 2001:

Why would Osama bin Laden want to kill Dubya, his former business partner?

By James Hatfield

Editor's note: In light of last week's horrific events and the Bush administration's reaction to them, we are reprising the following from the last column Jim Hatfield wrote for Online Journal prior to his tragic death on July 18:

July 3, 2001—There may be fireworks in Genoa, Italy, this month, too.

A plot by Saudi master terrorist, Osama bin Laden, to assassinate Dubya during the July 20 economic summit of world leaders, was uncovered after dozens of suspected Islamic militants linked to bin Laden's international terror network were arrested in Frankfurt, Germany, and Milan, Italy, in April.

German intelligence services have stated that bin Laden is covertly financing neo-Nazi skinhead groups throughout Europe to launch another terrorist attack at a high-profile American target—his first since the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen last October.

According to counter-terrorism experts quoted in Germany's largest newspaper, the attack on Dubya might be a James Bond-like aerial strike in the form of remote-controlled airplanes packed with plastic explosives.

Why would Osama bin Laden want to kill, Dubya, his former business partner?

CONTINUED...

http://web.archive.org/web/20060906150015/http://www.onlinejournal.org/Special_Reports/Hatfield-R-091901/hatfield-r-091901.html

FTR: Hatfield died a few days after this was published. A suicide. By hanging.

Time flies. Memory dies. Which is why the Truth matters. For instance, AG John Ashcroft stopped flying commercial that summer.

Ashcroft Flying High

CBS News
WASHINGTON, July 26, 2001

Fishing rod in hand, Attorney General John Ashcroft left on a weekend trip to Missouri Thursday afternoon aboard a chartered government jet, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart.

In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.

"There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines," an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.

A senior official at the CIA said he was unaware of specific threats against any Cabinet member, and Ashcroft himself, in a speech in California, seemed unsure of the nature of the threat.

"I don't do threat assessments myself and I rely on those whose responsibility it is in the law enforcement community, particularly the FBI. And I try to stay within the guidelines that they've suggested I should stay within for those purposes," Ashcroft said.

Asked if he knew anything about the threat or who might have made it, the attorney general replied, "Frankly, I don't. That's the answer."

CONTINUED...

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ashcroft-flying-high/

Johnny Ashcan knew. Thank you for remembering, crickets!