Sentencing trial for terrorist trainee Moussaoui to start

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- More than four years ago, Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested by the FBI while taking pilot training in Minnesota. He was still in custody when al-Qaida hijackers attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

After a torturous trip through the legal system, the 37-year-old Frenchman admitted last April that Osama bin Laden ordered him to train to fly a jetliner into the White House. He pleaded guilty to conspiring with the Sept. 11 hijackers but claimed not to know their plans.

On Monday, a federal court begins picking a jury to decide whether Moussaoui, the only person charged by the United States in the nation's most deadly terrorist attack, will be executed or spend life in prison.

Prosecutors contend Moussaoui could have prevented the Sept. 11 attack by telling investigators what he knew when arrested. The defense argues that Moussaoui knew less about 9/11 than the government, citing investigations that turned up multiple missed opportunities to possibly prevent the attacks.

Opening statements in the sentencing trial are set for March 6, and the trial is expected to last one to three months.

--Once thought to be a missing 20th hijacker, he generated only a false alarm: The nation's 3,500 crop-dusters were temporarily grounded based partly on what FBI agents found on his computer. But Moussaoui is no longer believed to be a 20th hijacker, and the government deleted references to his interest in crop-dusters from its indictment.

--His case was central to the finger pointing, investigations and reforms that followed the attacks. An obscure FBI lawyer in Minneapolis made the cover of Time magazine as a person of the year for her whistleblowing complaint that the bureau dropped the ball in investigating Moussaoui.

--One of the nation's most efficient federal courthouses, proud to be nicknamed the "Rocket Docket," has been slowed to a crawl by a defendant with no legal training serving largely as his own lawyer.

The pace picks up Monday when 500 potential jurors show up at the courthouse in Alexandria to fill out detailed questionnaires about their knowledge of the case and feelings about the death penalty. Opening statements in the sentencing trial are set for March 6, and the trial is expected to last one to three months.

Prosecutors contend Moussaoui could have prevented the Sept. 11 attack by telling investigators what he knew when arrested. The defense argues that Moussaoui knew less about 9/11 than the government, citing investigations that turned up multiple missed opportunities to possibly prevent the attacks.

Those investigations were fueled in part by FBI agent Coleen Rowley's public complaint that the FBI failed to aggressively investigate Moussaoui after his August 2001 arrest. Selected as a Time Person of the Year in 2002, Rowley is now running for Congress.

Defense lawyers have indicated they will introduce testimony about Moussaoui's difficult personal life in hopes of persuading a jury to show leniency. Moussaoui was part of a broken family of Moroccan descent with a history of mental illness, Moussaoui's lawyers said in court papers. The Moussaouis maintained only a superficial connection to Islam when Zacarias was growing up.

His turn toward militant Islam came in the 1990s when he moved to London and fell under the influence of radical clerics at a time when his personal life was in disarray, according to the lawyers.

"When Moussaoui went to London, he effectively severed his ties to the only anchors he had in his life," the defense team wrote in pretrial motions.

The criminal case against Moussaoui began in August 2001. He initially was picked up on immigration charges after arousing suspicion as a student at a Minnesota flight school. In December, three months after the Sept. 11 attacks, he was charged with conspiracy to commit aircraft piracy and other crimes.

Four months later, the case began veering off course when Moussaoui demanded to serve as his own lawyer. He flooded the court with scrawled, handwritten legal motions insulting the judge and his own lawyers, glorifying bin Laden and gloating over the Sept. 11 attacks, with occasional serious legal arguments mixed in.

He first tried to plead guilty in July 2002 but eventually withdrew his plea when told it would be construed as an admission of guilt in the Sept. 11 attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

At one point, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema barred prosecutors from seeking the death penalty or even mentioning the Sept. 11 attacks at Moussaoui's trial as a penalty on the government for refusing to allow Moussaoui to question senior al-Qaida members in U.S. custody who may have information helpful to him.

An appeals court lifted Brinkema's sanctions, saying national security interests override Moussaoui's right to question al-Qaida witnesses. Instead, he was allowed access to government-prepared summaries of statements they provided interrogators.

Brinkema ended Moussaoui's self-representation in November 2003 after he ignored her warnings to stop filing inflammatory motions.

Moussaoui's lawyers have been in charge since, but they could not dissuade him from pleading guilty last April. The plea included an admission that Moussaoui "knew of al-Qaida's plans to fly airplanes into prominent buildings in the United States and he agreed to travel to the United States to participate in the plan."

Moussaoui insisted he was not involved with Sept. 11 but was training for a later attack on the White House.