Informed Speculation

There is skepticism in some quarters about the confession of Zacarias Moussaoui to being a part of the 9/11 plot. Eric at Viking Pundit says he’s making it up:

While Moussaoui was clearly up to no good, there’s no evidence he conspired with Richard Reid. Maybe the guy’s figured he can’t get a fair trial in America, so he might as well shoot for the death penalty and martyrdom.

Our good friend Fargus points us to this account of other contradictory testimony from terrorists:

Two more high-ranking al-Qaida captives asserted Tuesday that Zacarias Moussaoui had no role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, one portraying him as a misfit who refused to follow orders.

…Waleed bin Attash, often known simply as Khallad, is considered the mastermind of the 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole and an early planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, plot. He said he knew of no part Moussaoui was to have played in the 9/11 attacks.

Another captured terrorist, identified as Sayf al-Adl, a senior member of al-Qaida’s military committee, told U.S. interrogators that Moussaoui was “a confirmed jihadist but was absolutely not going to take part in the Sept. 11, 2001, mission.”

Khallad portrayed Moussaoui as something of a loose cannon during a trip to Malaysia in 2000, where he met members of a radical group affiliated with al-Qaida. Khallad said Moussaoui breached security measures and al-Qaida protocol.

For example, he called Khallad daily, despite instructions to call only in an emergency, to the point where Khallad turned his cell phone off.

Another witness, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, who served as a paymaster and facilitator for the Sept. 11 operation from his post in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, said he had seen Moussaoui at an al-Qaida guesthouse in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the first half of 2001, but was never introduced to him or conducted operations with him.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, chief organizer of the 9/11 attacks, said in testimony heard Monday that Moussaoui had nothing to do with the plot, but was to have been used for a second wave of attacks distinct from Sept. 11.

Al-Hawsawi said he provided money and tickets to four of the Sept. 11 hijackers and to a fifth man, identified as Muhammed al-Qahtani, who was to be a hijacker but was denied entry to the United States before Sept. 11 in Orlando, Fla.

In the written statement, Al-Hawsawi quoted Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as describing al-Qahtani as the last hijacker for the mission who would “complete the group.”

Thus it appeared al-Qahtani was the so-called missing 20th hijacker of Sept. 11, a role the government initially thought Moussaoui was to have played before his arrest a month earlier.

We’ve also learned of new indications that Moussaoui was seeking his own death:

Four days before jury selection began, Zacarias Moussaoui tried to negotiate a deal with prosecutors to testify against himself.

In a final day of testimony at his trial, an FBI agent said Moussaoui told prosecutors he did not want to spend the rest of his life in a Colorado federal prison.

FBI agent James Fitzgerald’s disclosure of the meeting in the Alexandria jail on February 2 between Moussaoui, prosecutors and a defence lawyer, came one day after Moussaoui turned his trial upside down by revoking previous claims that he was not part of September 11. Instead, he testified that he would have attacked the White House in a fifth plane if he had not been arrested in August 2001.

Mr Fitzgerald was called by prosecutors as a rebuttal witness after the defence rested, but his testimony seemed to support suggestions by Moussaoui’s estranged defence team that he is now lying about his role in the attacks because he wants to be executed to become a martyr.

Mr Fitzgerald said that Moussaoui, apparently fearful that his defence lawyers would not let him take the stand, asked government prosecutors to call him. Moussaoui “said he would say he was the pilot of a fifth plane”, Mr Fitzgerald said, but made it clear that he would only co-operate against himself, and would not inform on al-Qaeda operatives.

Mr Fitzgerald said Moussaoui never asked the Government to drop its death penalty claim. Instead, he said he did not want to live out his life in prison and wanted better accommodation before his execution.

Bringing Richard Reid into the plot seems a bit far-fetched, I will admit. Perhaps I credited this confession too much initially…

UPDATE 9:47 a.m.: From a transcript of a TV appearance by Steven Emerson of the Counterterrorism Blog:

LESTER HOLT: Let’s talk about the credibility of this claim and if it is true, why didn’t authorities know about this earlier?

EMERSON: The question really comes down to whether in fact he is credible. He has given many different stories before this. Obviously, as you pointed out, he had referred to the fact earlier on in his confession that he was going to be in a follow up plot. Now he is alleging that he was actually going to be part of the fifth set of hijackers carrying out an attack on the White House. There is no evidence, Lester, to suggest that there were co-conspirators in the United States at the time he was arrested that have not yet been found, and there is no evidence that Richard Reid, whom he alleged was a co-conspirator, was actually going to be in the United States at the time of the 9/11 plot.

HOLT: Let’s back up a second, Steve. We all remember the jitters we had in the days after 9/11 and theories that maybe other planes had been targeted but they were grounded before they could carry out the attacks. Just that part of his claim that there was a fifth plane with a target that day, do you totally discount that?

EMERSON: I don’t totally discount it, because in the end, he may go to his grave or to his gallows without ever confessing the final details in the same way that Richard Reid may never have fully disclosed all that he knew about the shoe bomb plot for which he was convicted in the December 2001 conspiracy. The fact of the matter is that most of the evidence suggests, Lester, that the U.S. government has not found anyone else who would have participated in this fifth set of hijackers as he has alleged.

…HOLT: We are just about out of time, but do you care to venture to guess why Moussaoui would make these claims and why he would make them now?

EMERSON: Lester, I can’t get inside his head. He is very theatrical. He wants to go to his grave. He believes in martyrdom. He hates the United States and he wants to make a big splash. He even joked about it yesterday. He is a man who is really given to histrionics and maybe that explains what happened yesterday.