Alleged 9/11 plotter 'unfit to plead guilty'
Lawyers for alleged 9/11 terror massacre conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui today argued that he is incompetent to plead guilty to crimes that carry a possible death sentence.
The filing came just hours ahead of a hearing before United States District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who earlier in the week met Moussaoui and determined he was competent to enter such a plea.
In the latest twist in a case that has been full of them, Moussaoui’s lawyers filed papers under seal at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, entitled, ”Sealed Suggestion of Defence Counsel as to Defendant’s Incompetence to Plead Guilty and for a Sentence of Death””
Moussaoui’s lawyers declined to comment but previously had said such a filing was planned.
Moussaoui, a French citizen, is the only person charged in the US in connection to the terror massacres on September 11, 2001, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
The hearing was scheduled after Moussaoui sent Brinkema a letter saying he wanted to plead guilty.
The mercurial Moussaoui still could change his mind about pleading guilty, which he did once before.
Arrested a month before terrorist hijackers crashed four jetliners into New York’s World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, Moussaoui is symbolic of a conflict different from any the US has ever fought.
Massaoui is of Moroccan descent and was the product of a broken family.
His path to one of Osama bin-Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan apparently began when he moved to England and became involved with radical Muslim clerics.
“In London, he was far away from me” and “I was his only safeguard,” Abd Samad Moussaoui wrote of his younger brother in a book, “The Making of a Terrorist.”
Picked up in August 2001 after arousing suspicion at a Minnesota flight school, Moussaoui was transformed from an immigration violator into a terrorist defendant three months after 9/11.
“Moussaoui was a missed opportunity for the United States,” Tim Roemer, a member of the September 11 commission, said Friday on NBC’s “Today” show.
Roemer said better communication by various agencies about Moussaoui “might have unveiled parts of this plot” before the attacks.
Moussaoui’s criminal trial was to have been an evidentiary showcase detailing the horror of al-Qaida. Those plans would be scuttled by Friday’s scheduled guilty plea to a six-count indictment.
Jumping past a trial, the lawyers Moussaoui tried to fire would eventually be defending him in a penalty phase proceeding, a sort of mini-trial before 12 jurors who will decide whether to spare his life.
Some legal experts say Moussaoui’s decisions seem to make no sense, unless he wants to die.
One possibility is that “he was deprived of his martyrdom and feels the only way he can achieve that lofty state is simply to admit to the crimes,” Washington defence attorney Richard Hibey suggested.
It’s an outlook that says “trust to Allah that he will be granted what he wants through the pronouncement of a court”.
Criminal defence attorney David Schertler says Moussaoui ”defies any conventional sense of what a defendant is and what a defendant is trying to accomplish. It seems that he is using the system to make a political statement regardless of what implications it has for him.”
Moussaoui’s scribbled diatribes attacking Brinkema, his own lawyers and the US government litter the record of his court case and are posted on the Internet for all the world to see.
Moussaoui is charged with conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism, commit aircraft piracy, destroy aircraft, murder government employees and destroy property. The first four charges carry a maximum sentence of death.
