Convicted Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui says he lied on the witness
stand about being involved in the terrorist plot and wants to withdraw his
guilty plea and go to trial. The judge turned him down.
Moussaoui said he was "extremely surprised" that he was sentenced to life in
prison instead of execution and now believes he can get a fair trial from an
American jury.
In a motion filed Monday, Moussaoui said he testified on March 27 that he was
supposed to hijack a fifth plane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White
House "even though I knew that was a complete fabrication."
A federal court jury spared the 37-year-old Frenchman the death penalty last
Wednesday. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema gave him six life
sentences, to run as two consecutive life terms, in the federal supermax prison
at Florence, Colo.
As she handed down the sentence, Brinkema told Moussaoui that he could appeal
the life term but that she doubted he would win. "I believe it would be an act
of futility," she said.
The judge also pointed out that, although he could appeal the sentence, he
had lost his right to appeal his conviction when he pled guilty in April 2005.
"You waived that right," she said.
On Monday, Brinkema said his request to set aside his guilty plea and go back
to trial on the facts of the case was "too late" under federal rules and must be
rejected.
Explaining his latest reversal, Moussaoui said in an affidavit:
"I had thought I would be sentenced to death based on the emotions and anger
toward me for the deaths on Sept. 11. But after reviewing the jury verdict and
reading how the jurors set aside their emotions and disgust for me and focused
on the law and the evidence ... I now see that it is possible that I can receive
a fair trial even with Americans as jurors."
Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers told the court that they filed the motion
even though a federal rule "prohibits a defendant from withdrawing a guilty plea
after imposition of sentence." They did so anyway, they said, because of their
"problematic relationship with Moussaoui" and the fact that new lawyers have yet
to be appointed to replace them.
The defense lawyers were not immediately available for comment Monday.
Brinkema said they would be replaced after they filed any appeal Moussaoui might
want.
The motion said Moussaoui told his lawyers Friday that he wanted to withdraw
his guilty plea because when he entered it his "understanding of the American
legal system was completely flawed."
In an attached three-page affidavit, Moussaoui cited his new opinion of
American jurors and wrote that he now believes he has a fair chance "to prove
that I did not have any knowledge of and was not a member of the plot to hijack
planes and crash them into buildings on Sept. 11, 2001."
"I wish to withdraw my guilty plea and ask the court for a new trial to prove
my innocence of the Sept. 11 plot," Moussaoui wrote. "I have never met (lead
9/11 hijacker) Mohammed Atta and, while I may have seen a few of the other
hijackers ... (in Afghanistan), I never knew them or anything about their
operation."
Explaining his twists and turns, Moussaoui said, "Solitary confinement made
me hostile toward everyone, and I began taking extreme positions to fight the
system."
Moussaoui said that, coupled with his inability to get a Muslim lawyer, led
him to distrust his lawyers when they told him he could be convicted of being an
al-Qaida member but acquitted of involvement in 9/11.
Moussaoui wrote that he pleaded guilty because he mistakenly thought the
Supreme Court would immediately review his objection to being denied the
opportunity to call captured enemy combatant witnesses to buttress his claim of
not being involved in the 9/11 plot.
An appeals court agreed with the government that national security would be
at risk if captured operatives like 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
testified or were even questioned by Moussaoui's lawyers. Instead, statements
taken from their interrogations were read to the jury.
Shaikh Mohammed's statements said Moussaoui was never considered for the 9/11
plot, only a later attack.
Moussaoui shocked the courtroom at his sentencing trial when he recanted his
four-year-old claim of having nothing to do with 9/11. When he pleaded guilty in
2005, he had explained that he was to hijack a 747 jetliner and fly it into the
White House at some later date if the United States refused to release a radical
Egyptian sheik who is serving a life term for terrorist acts in New York.
But when he testified, Moussaoui claimed that the 747 was to be a fifth plane
hijacked on Sept. 11 and that Richard Reid, now imprisoned for a December 2001
shoe bombing attempt aboard a trans-Atlantic flight, was to be on his hijacking
team.
That testimony revived the government's flagging case in the first part of
the sentencing trial.
On April 3, the jury found Moussaoui eligible for the death penalty. It
apparently accepted prosecutors' arguments that by withholding information from
federal agents who arrested him on Aug. 16, 2001, he bore responsibility for at
least one death on 9/11 by preventing the agents from identifying and stopping
some hijackers.
Nevertheless, the same jury was unable to unanimously find that Moussaoui,
who was in jail on 9/11, deserved execution. Three jurors wrote on the verdict
form that they doubted he knew much about the 9/11 plot.
After Moussaoui's testimony, his lawyers made clear in court that they
thought he was lying to achieve martyrdom through execution. Prosecutors even
stipulated that the government doubted Moussaoui's claim that Reid was part of
his team. And the judge told lawyers, out of the jury's hearing, that she
doubted his testimony about how much he knew about the 9/11 plot.
