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Original Post 3/27

Zacarias Moussaoui testified today that he and Richard Reid were going to fly a plane into the White House. He said it was part of the 9/11 operation but he didn't know the details (such as when it would take place.) Is it the truth or is Moussaoui trying to hand the Government a win so he can die what he believes will be a martyr's death?

One thing that militates against believing Moussaoui's testimony is that Reid was mostly pre-occupied with scouting airline security in Israel and the middle east during the summer of 2001--and traveling between Europe and the Middle East. There is no indication he was planning anything against or in the United States at that time. I'm not done trying to find connections, but several outlining Reid's whereabouts and actions are below the fold.

A second sticking point for Mousaoui is that Shalid Sheikh Mohammed, who gave a 58 page statement from his secret overseas prison where reports are he's been tortured, exonerates Moussaoui for involvement in 9/11. Not suprisingly, he viewed Moussaoui as a loose cannon. The statement was read into evidence at Moussaoui's trial:

In testimony read by a public defender, Shaikh Mohammed said he wasn't aware that Moussaoui was in custody until after Sept. 11, and that Moussaoui's arrest on Aug. 16 would have disrupted Sept. 11 plans if he were a part of the operation.

Shaikh Mohammed also said he wanted all the second-wave hijackers to be Europeans or Asians who might face less scrutiny in a post-Sept. 11 world. But that attack never materialized, he said, because he did not anticipate the ferocity of the U.S. response to Sept. 11 and the only other pilot backed out.

Shaikh Mohammed considered Moussaoui too self-confident and too talkative. He instructed Sept. 11 planner Ramzi Binalshibh to cut off contact with Moussaoui in early August 2001 for fear that Moussaoui would get Binalshibh caught.

On the other side, one thing that lends possibility to Moussaoui's testimony is a report in the London Observer that the MI-5 were monitoring Moussaoui's phone calls in 2000 and they recorded calls between Reid and Moussaoui which abruptly ended on Dec. 9 when Moussaoui went to Pakistan en route to an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.

The Observer can reveal that MI5 agents intercepted phone calls between Reid and the suspect, Zacarias Moussaoui, which directly linked Bromley-born Reid to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda net work, but did not realise their implication until it was too late. This was condemned last night as a serious breakdown in intelligence.

The calls, made between the pair in Britain and monitored by MI5, ended abruptly when Moussaoui left Britain for Pakistan on 9 December last year to attend an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. Investigators suspect Reid, who met Moussaoui in London in the mid-Nineties and had been to Pakistan before, followed him to Afghanistan. Moussaoui returned to London last February. Reid reappeared in Britain last summer.

Scotland Yard was not informed of the security risk that Reid posed. MI5 had had Moussaoui under surveillance in the UK in the months before he left for Pakistan. He was then arrested by US authorities in August. However, Reid was not followed or picked up for questioning in Britain.....Investigators are now scouring records of flights between London and Pakistan to see whether Reid and Moussaoui travelled separately or together, and if any other suspect flew with them.

....Al-Qaeda soldiers, interrogated in Kandahar by the CIA, say Reid was a recruit in one of group's camps in southern Afghanistan, and US intelligence sources confirm this. Moussaoui and Reid 'went to the same training camp in Afghanistan where Reid has explosives training' said a US intelligence official.

Another possibly supportive item is that the Court entered an order blocking mail between Reid and Moussaoui in 2003 because the FBI said it contained encrypted messages. And in October, 2002, Reid wrote Moussaoui a letter offering to testify for him.

Washington Post: 8/9/03 (lexis.com)

The FBI has intercepted letters from alleged Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui to convicted "shoe bomber" Richard Reid -- communications that might have contained embedded or coded messages, according to court papers released yesterday.

U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema yesterday denied Moussaoui access to FBI reports supporting the assertion that Moussaoui was trying to pass secret messages to Reid. In the two-page order, Brinkema wrote that Moussaoui is not entitled to "privileged" communications with anyone other than his standby attorneys. Moussaoui, who is charged with conspiring with al Qaeda terrorists to carry out the Sept. 11, 2001, plot to fly hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has been representing himself in U.S. District Court in Alexandria.

Brinkema wrote in yesterday's order that the rules governing Moussaoui's confinement allow the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI to seize any incoming or outgoing mail if it is found to contain "overt or covert discussions of or requ