Talk:Zacarias Moussaoui

The following has been relocated from the main article Zacarias Moussaoui because it was copied (by me !) from "Zacarias Moussaoui" posted at rotten.com. Although the information may be correct, none of it is referenced at rotten.com. Artificial Intelligence 09:16, 21 Mar 2006 (EST)

He is a Moroccan born 1968 in France and who grew up and attended college in the United Kingdom. According to his indictment, Moussaoui holds a master's degree. Moussaoui is described as a "late bloomer," taking "the traditional terrorist route in 1998 with a trip to Afghanistan, where for more than a decade, Osama bin Laden's suicide factories mass-produced homicidal lunatics by the gross. In 2000, Moussaoui traveled to Malaysia, where he is accused of having met with al Qaeda operatives, who provided him with money and travel documents." 

"Moussaoui came to the U.S. in 2001, and enrolled in a flight school in Norman, Oklahoma. He was a poor student and dropped out before his by-no-means-certain graduation. His visa expired in May [2001], a fact to which he was seemingly oblivious. He finally found another flight school in Minnesota, and traveled there in August." 

"Moussaoui received tens of thousands of dollars from al Qaeda commanders to fund whatever the hell they thought it was he was doing. He paid cash for his Minnesota flying lessons, and told his instructors he had no interest in learning how to take off or land, only steer. His erratic behavior led school officials to contact the FBI, which arrested in mid-August." 

"But the FBI's headquarters brushed the case off as insignificant and threw legal hurdles in front of the field agents who were barred even from looking at Moussaoui's laptop computer -- which contained unimportant trivia like the names and phone numbers of al Qaeda commanders and September 11 hijackers.

"While Moussaoui cooled his heels in a prison cell, his pals pulled off the single biggest terrorist attack of all time, hijacking four jets and crashing three of them into the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon. While most investigators agree the leads probably wouldn't have been enough to stop September 11, 2001 from happening, they might very well have prevented at least one of the hijackings." 

Moussaoui's court case "didn't start until after the government decided to make an example of him, filing the only U.S. charges to date directly connected to the 9/11 attacks and seeking the death penalty for Moussaoui, who didn't actually succeed in doing anything.

"Moussaoui decided to represent himself" and he "distinguished himself as a legal scholar by innovating several new and exciting legal arguments."