Doing Justice to Zacarias Moussaoui

Policy Review, Dec 2007/Jan 2008 by Rosenthal, John

A would-be martyr?

ON MARCH 27, 2006, the defense's case for sparing Zacarias Moussaoui the death penalty crumbled. While it had conceded, in accordance with the defendant's guilty pleas and the Statement of Facts signed by him in April 2005, that Moussaoui was an al Qaeda member and had entered the United States as part of a conspiracy to commit terrorist acts, a principal pillar of the defense's case involved denying that he had any direct connection to the 9/11 plot in particular. The defense thus narrowly construed the 9/11 plot as involving preparations for just such attacks as in fact occurred or were supposed to occur on September 11, 2001. On March 27, 2006, however, Zacarias Moussaoui, defying the counsel of his court-appointed lawyers, took the stand - and affirmed the contrary.

Asked by defense lawyer Gerald Zerkin whether he was supposed to be the "20th Hijacker," as he was commonly known at the time - i.e. the "missing" fifth member of the team that hijacked United Flight 93 - Moussaoui responded: "No, I was not" (2310). He explained that he had signed the Statement of Facts as "20th Hijacker" just as "a bit of fun": "because everybody used to refer to me as the 20th hijacker." Zerkin, who had had no contact with his nominal client over the past four years, may have been relieved by the response. Thus far, despite the defense's apprehensions, the questioning seemed to be going in its favor. Then Zerkin asked Moussaoui, "Before your arrest, were you scheduled to be a pilot in the operation that was ultimately run on September 11 of 2001?" Based on Moussaoui's own previous declarations, Zerkin might have expected him to say "no." In the very April 22, 2005 plea hearing in which he had submitted his guilty pleas, Moussaoui had made a point of insisting that the "broader conspiracy" of which he admitted having been a part was, nonetheless, "a different conspiracy than 9/11" (28). "You can't point to me a single statement here which say Mr. Moussaoui came into the United States to participate into the 9/11, okay," he added, ". . . that's not my conspiracy" (29).

Now, however, Moussaoui answered: "Yes." "I was supposed to pilot a plane to hit the White House," he said. "And that was in addition to the other planes that, in fact, struck targets on September 11; is that correct?" Zerkin asked. "That's correct," Moussaoui responded, before carefully specifying, "I only knew about the two plane[s] of the World Trade Center in addition of my own plane" (March 27, 2006; 2311). The major news organizations - which only two weeks previously had been eagerly anticipating a mistrial following the Carla Martin incident - could hardly miss the significance of this admission. The biases of their own reporting made Moussaoui's admission seem indeed much more startling than in fact it was. In his April 2005 plea hearing, after all, Moussaoui had already admitted that he had been planning to fly a plane into the White House. That he had been personally approved for such a mission by Osama Bin Laden was part of the Statement of Facts to which he had agreed.11 In the plea hearing, moreover, he offered numerous additional details of the planned attack - without even being asked!