Words from 9/11 flight rivet courtroom
FBI knew years earlier of al-Qaida's plans, agent testifies

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Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Michael J. Sniffen
Associated Press

Alexandria, Va. -- Reading from radiophone transmissions, a federal prosecutor transfixed the courtroom at Zacarias Moussaoui's sentencing trial Tuesday with a minute-by-minute account of al-Qaida's hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11 and the plane's journey into the north tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

"We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low," flight attendant Amy Sweeney told ground controllers who had asked at 8:44 a.m. where the plane was. Then a few seconds' pause, and finally: "Oh my God, we are way too low!" The phone went dead at 8:46 a.m. as the Boeing 767 jetliner hit the tower in the first of four crashes by hijacked jetliners that day.

Moussaoui, the confessed al-Qaida conspirator who is facing a life-or-death decision, was as electrified as the jury and the audience.

As a recess was called moments later, the 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent surged from his chair, pumped his right fist in the air and shouted: "Allah Akbar! God curse America! Bless Osama bin Laden!" He usually mutters these invocations when leaving court.

The actual audio recordings of radiophone calls by flight attendants on Flight 11 have been played in public before. But to avoid inflaming the jury at this sentencing trial, prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed instead to read an account of the flight, including major sections of the phone call transcripts.

Nevertheless, the reading by Assistant U.S. Attorney David Raskin riveted the jury and audience -- all the more so because it came after two hours of intricate testimony by FBI agent James Fitzgerald about how the bureau tracked the hijackers after Sept. 11.

Around the courtroom, heads had been left nodding by Fitzgerald's detailed and precise description of innumerable hotel receipts, phone call records and financial transactions for 19 men with unfamiliar Arab names, which the FBI gathered to reconstruct how they circled the globe and arrived in the United States.

Nearly all communicated with an al-Qaida cell in Hamburg, Germany, and got money wired to them in this country from one of three al-Qaida operatives.

At some point, prosecutors will bring on witnesses to show that Moussaoui also got money from the same source, but Fitzgerald never mentioned Moussaoui in his testimony.

Nor did he say there was any contact between Moussaoui and the 19 hijackers, a point the defense has already stressed.

Earlier, defense attorney Edward MacMahon got FBI agent Michael Anticev to acknowledge on cross-examination that the FBI was aware years before Sept. 11 that al-Qaida had plans to fly airplanes into prominent buildings. Moussaoui's lawyers are portraying him as a pathetic loner who dreamed of becoming a terrorist but was shut out of Sept. 11 planning and considered by one al-Qaida leader "cuckoo in the head."

Moussaoui pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with al-Qaida to hijack planes and commit other crimes. The jury will choose between execution or life in prison without possibility of release.

To obtain the death penalty, prosecutors must first prove Moussaoui took an action that led directly to deaths on Sept. 11. Moussaoui denies he had any role in Sept. 11 and says he was training for a possible future attack on the White House.