Prosecutor used transcript to aid witness

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunhera...s/14090242.htm

MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN
Associated Press
3/13/2006

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - The government lawyer who has jeopardized the prosecution of al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui used a transcript of the first day of the trial to try to shape future testimony to meet or deflect possible defense attacks, court documents indicate.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema suspended Moussaoui's sentencing trial Monday when she learned from prosecutors of e-mails sent to upcoming witnesses by Carla J. Martin, an attorney in the Transportation Security Administration.

Arguing that Martin's e-mails tainted three government and four defense witnesses beyond repair, the defense has asked the judge to dismiss the government's bid to execute Moussaoui, the only person charged in this country in connection with al-Qaida's Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Martin could not be reached for comment.

The judge sent the jury home until Wednesday and called a hearing Tuesday with Martin and the witnesses to decide what to do. Meantime, she ordered Martin's e-mails released to the public because "if the death penalty winds up being dismissed, the public has a right to know how and why it happened."

Prosecutors had asked that the full text of the e-mails be kept from the public and the defense.

In the 16 pages of e-mails, Martin criticizes the government's opening statement about how the Federal Aviation Administration would have responded to prevent the 9/11 attacks if Moussaoui hadn't lied about his terrorist connections when arrested at a Minnesota flight school Aug. 16, 2001.

She told upcoming government witness Lynne Osmus the prosecutors' opening statement left gaps "the defense can drive a truck through."

Martin concluded the government was going to mistakenly argue that if Moussaoui had told agents about buying short-bladed knives, like those used by the 9/11 hijackers, the FAA could have kept all of them off airplanes by airport screening with X-ray and magnetometer machines.

"There is no way anyone could say that the (airline) carriers could have prevented all short-bladed knives from going through," she e-mailed Osmus. "Dave MUST elicit that from you and the airline witnesses on direct, and not allow the defense to cut your credibility on cross, (just as they did yesterday with the FBI witness). ..."

Prosecutor David Novak told Brinkema on Monday that this was a harmless e-mail because the government never intended to claim airport screening was 100 percent effective.

In an e-mail to government witness Claudio Manno, Martin notes that FAA did not know that FBI agents had found radical Middle Easterners taking flying lessons in Phoenix before 9/11 or that CIA Director George Tenet was briefed on Aug. 23 that an Islamic extremist named Moussaoui was taking pilot lessons.

"The defense will exploit the fact that the FAA was not clued in to what was going on," Martin e-mailed Manno. "You need to assert that we did not necessarily need to wait until we got all available information, that we acted independently, indeed, we had a statutory mandate, to follow up on any issue that we thought was a threat to civil aviation."

In several e-mails, Martin said, "Today, the FBI agent on the stand got tripped up" by defense lawyer Edward MacMahon. FBI agent Michael Anticev first asserted "I don't think anybody was looking at using aircraft as weapons." But MacMahon got him to acknowledge that the FBI knew before 9/11 that al-Qaida operative Abdul Hakim Murad arrested in the Philippines in 1995 told investigators of plans to fly a plane into CIA headquarters.

She e-mailed Manno: "I've asked Matt to pull any unclass. Information on Murad - as I know we ran down this issue, deemed it not to be credible ... . Dave will need to go over that with you."

Prosecutor Novak told the court he first learned of the coaching, which he called "horrendously wrong," in a voicemail from Martin last Friday evening. He told the judge he spent the weekend investigating what Martin did and gathering her e-mails.

He said that six of the seven upcoming witnesses had read her e-mails and two of them had read the attached trial transcript. He was unable to locate one of the defense witnesses.

Martin was admitted to the bar in 1990. She graduated from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and got a law degree from the Washington College of Law. She worked in the FAA chief counsel's office but now works as a lawyer for TSA. After 9/11, Congress transferred responsibility for aviation security from FAA to the newly created TSA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and a number of FAA employees transferred to TSA.