A VICTIM OF LIFE'S CIRCUMSTANCES:

THE TWENTIETH MAN: Has the Justice Department mishandled the case against Zacarias Moussaoui? ( SEYMOUR M. HERSH, 2002-09-23, The New Yorker)

In February, 2001, Moussaoui showed up at the Airman Flight School, in Norman, Oklahoma. He was now thirty-two, and had continued to travel in pursuit of fundamentalist causes. He had been in Afghanistan (where he is alleged to have spent time in an Al Qaeda training camp), in Pakistan, and in Malaysia, while maintaining a base of sorts at a radical mosque in North London. When he arrived in America, two weeks after returning to London from a trip to Pakistan, he told customs he had thirty-five thousand dollars in cash. His sudden interest in flying had led him to pay five thousand dollars, in advance, for a series of lessons that should have allowed him to earn a pilot's license. Over the next three months, Moussaoui took fifty-seven hours of flight instruction, far more than the twenty hours most students need before flying solo. But he left the school in late May without a license. [?]

The evidence that the government has presented thus far is largely circumstantial. The search of Moussaoui's computer-a warrant was granted on the afternoon of September 11th-apparently yielded nothing that would have foretold the attack or tied him to it. The indictment depicts Moussaoui as having followed a pattern of activity similar to that of many of the hijackers. Like them, he spent months in flight training, he bought flight-deck videos for commercial airplanes from a pilots' store in Ohio, and he joined a gym. Two of the hijackers are also said to have visited the flight school in Oklahoma the year before Moussaoui did. In the fall of 2000, Moussaoui had been given a letter stating that he was being retained as a "marketing consultant" by Infocus Tech, a Malaysian company; the company's managing director was later linked in press reports to some of the hijackers.

The most specific evidence in the indictment linking Moussaoui to the September 11th conspirators is that, in August, 2001, someone using the name of Ahad Sabet wired fourteen thousand dollars to him from train stations in Hamburg and Düsseldorf. Ahad Sabet is the alias of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a known Al Qaeda intermediary, who also funnelled money to at least one of the hijackers and was named as a co-conspirator in the Moussaoui indictment. He had sought four times before September 11th to get a visa to the United States, and, in a broadcast on Al-Jazeera on the day after the anniversary of the attacks, he claimed that he was meant to be the twentieth hijacker. The indictment also notes that Moussaoui and al-Shibh were in London at the same time, in December, 2000, just before Moussaoui flew to Pakistan. The government's theory is that al-Shibh's visa problems forced the conspirators to turn to Moussaoui. Through careful detective work, German police were able to recover al-Shibh's fingerprint on a Western Union receipt for a payment sent to Moussaoui in Ahad Sabet's name, helping to establish that the men were one and the same. [?]

If the government's case is built on the similarities between Moussaoui's activities and those of the known hijackers, it must account for the fact that, though he shared their allegiance to Al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, his behavior in America was strikingly different from theirs. The government has found evidence of e-mails and meetings among the nineteen, but none between any of them and Moussaoui. The hijackers tried to fit in to American life-drinking in bars, for instance. Moussaoui, while in Oklahoma, remained largely aloof, although he was voluble about his Islamic beliefs. He criticized members of a mosque in Norman for not lowering their gaze when meeting women and for looking at lightly clad cheerleaders. "He went around making a nuisance of himself everywhere he went," Frank W. Dunham, Jr., the federal public defender in charge of Moussaoui's defense team, said. "He was not flying under the radar by any means." Another Moussaoui attorney depicted him as "wearing his fundamentalism on his sleeve," and said, "He was incredibly argumentative-always."

Perhaps Mr. Hersh could use Occam's Razor. Here is what one has to believe to accept the premise of his story, that Zacarias Moussaoui was not involved in 9-11:
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 28, 2002 2:13 PM