By Zafir Jamaal | JUS Reporter

The case of Zacarias Moussaoui raises many questions. Questions about the conduct of the US Supreme Court in appointing court lawyers to represent him even though he had the resources to pay for his own Muslim counsel at the time, questions about his treatment in nearly eight months of incarceration where he is kept in near solitary confinement 22 hours a day, but the most concerning of all is the question of why the FBI and other US intelligence agencies failed to take action against him in the period leading up the September 11 if he can be implicated in the bloodiest attack in American history?

Moussaoui was arraigned January 3 on six counts of conspiracy to commit murder and terrorism in the September 11 attacks. A French-born man of Moroccan Arab descent, Moussaoui, 33, shocked the court by refusing to enter a plea "in the name of Allah". He is currently awaiting trial that is set to begin in October in Alexandria, Virginia, only a few miles from the Pentagon where 189 people were killed during the attacks. Four of the six charges against Moussaoui carry the death penalty, although he was arrested a month before the September 11 attacks and therefore could not have played any active role in the mass murder.

Moussaoui was arrested in Minnesota August 16, 2002 after officials of a flight school, the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, a suburb of Minneapolis, tipped off the FBI that he was seeking flight training on a Boeing 747 jumbo jet.

His conduct apparently aroused suspicion because his attitude was belligerent, he was evasive about his personal background, he declined to speak French with an instructor who knew the language, and he paid the $6,300 fee in cash. He insisted on training to fly a jumbo jet despite an obvious lack of skill even with small planes. The prospective student reportedly did not want to learn how to take off or land, only how to steer the jet while it was in the air.

The instructor and a vice president of the flight school briefed two Democratic congressmen from the Minneapolis area in November, 2001 about their repeated efforts to get the FBI to take an interest in Moussaoui's conduct. Their accounts were first reported in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, then in the New York Times December 22, 2001.

The vice president of the flight school, who briefed Minnesota Congressmen James Oberstar and Martin Sabo, said it took four to six phone calls to the FBI to find an agent who would help. The instructor became so frustrated by the lack of response that he gave a prescient warning to the FBI that "a 747 loaded with fuel can be used as a bomb." Even after all of this, the FBI failed to act.

Moussaoui was detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service on charges of violating the terms of his visa. Local FBI investigators in Minneapolis immediately viewed Moussaoui as a terrorist suspect and sought authorization for a special counterintelligence surveillance warrant to search the hard drive of his home computer. This was rejected by higher-level officials in Washington, who claimed there was insufficient evidence to meet the legal requirements for the warrant.

FBI agents tracked Moussaoui's movements to the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, where he logged 57 hours of flight time earlier in 2001 but was never allowed to fly on his own because of his poor skills. This alone should have set off alarm bells, since the self-proclaimed Al-Qaida operative, Abdul Hakim Murad, had trained at the same school, as part of preparations for a suicide operation on CIA headquarters. Murad testified about these plans in the 1996 trial of Ramzi Ahmed Yusef, the principal organizer of the 1993 World Trade Center car-bombing.

On August 26, FBI headquarters was notified by French intelligence that Moussaoui had ties to the Al-Qaida organization and Osama bin Laden. Even this report did not spur the agency to action. A special counterterrorism panel of the FBI and CIA reviewed the information against him, but concluded there was insufficient evidence that he represented any threat, despite his refusal to answer questions and the French allegations. Moussaoui was not even transferred from INS detention to FBI custody until after September 11.

The French warning arrived on the day after the first two suicide hijackers purchased their one-way, first class tickets for flights on September 11. More tickets were purchased on August 26, 27, 28 and 29, while the FBI was refusing to pursue a more intensive investigation into Moussaoui or search his computer. The New York Times commented December 22 that the Moussaoui case "raised new questions about why the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies did not prevent the hijackings."

FBI officials responded indirectly to this criticism, flatly denying the account of the warning given by the flight school personnel. "The notion of flying a plane into a building or using it as a bomb never came up," one senior official to the Washington Post January 2. "It was a straight hijacking scenario that they were worried about."

This issue is of critical importance, and the flight school instructor, unlike the FBI, has absolutely no reason to lie. In the wake of September 11, FBI Director Robert Mueller flatly declared that the FBI had no indication that terrorists were seeking to use hijacked airliners as flying bombs. His assurances were accepted uncritically by the American media even though the account given by the flight school shows that these assurances were just plain lies.

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