Evidence Against Suspect From 9/11 Is Called Weak
Since December, when the government indicted Zacarias Moussaoui as the first man charged in the Sept. 11 attacks, an unusual gulf has opened between what prosecutors have charged in court and what investigators are saying privately about what they can prove about him.

Prosecutors have charged that Mr. Moussaoui played a direct role in the Sept. 11 hijackings, and some officials have said they believe he was supposed to be on one of the four planes. But investigators now say the evidence is not so clear. In fact, they say they believe he may been in the United States to take part in a different plot.

That gap has opened wider in recent days with Mr. Moussaoui's rambling, combative and often confusing statements in court. He has declared his allegiance to Al Qaeda and asserted that, if allowed to plead guilty, he would provide a grand jury with an authoritative insider's account of the hijacking plot — even though at other points he said he was not involved.

If the judge in his case, Leonie M. Brinkema, allows Mr. Moussaoui to plead guilty at a hearing scheduled for Thursday, Mr. Moussaoui would follow John Walker Lindh, the Taliban warrior, in short-circuiting the prosecution. If that happens, each case would have begun with broad assertions that were never proven in court.

Government officials say they have no direct evidence that Mr. Moussaoui had a role in the hijackings. From the beginning the evidence has been circumstantial. Now, some government officials, in interviews, are saying that prosecutors overreached when they charged that Mr. Moussaoui was a direct participant with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in the conspiracy to kill thousands of people on Sept. 11.

Government trial lawyers and F.B.I. agents often disagree about the weight of evidence in criminal cases, but usually it is the Federal Bureau of Investigation that is arguing for a tougher charge. In this case, some prosecutors have said that the F.B.I. has been especially eager to depict Mr. Moussaoui as a minor figure, in part, because the bureau hoped to dampen the controversy about whether it acted properly last summer, when it refused to seek a warrant to search Mr. Moussaoui's laptop computer. The computer was not searched until after the Sept. 11 attacks.

But investigators have said they have failed to find evidence that Mr. Moussaoui ever met Mohamed Atta, the plot's ringleader, or any other hijacker — or that he communicated with any of them by e-mail, telephone or letter. Still, Mr. Moussaoui's associate, Hussein al-Attas, has told the authorities that Mr. Moussaoui had said it was acceptable to kill civilians who harmed Muslims.

Investigators have said they have no precise understanding of why Mr. Moussaoui entered the United States, although they are convinced he was a Islamic militant who arrived to take part in some kind of terror operation. The investigators have speculated that whoever recruited him may have not told him anything about the operation he was to take part in.

Lately, some other investigators suspect that Mr. Moussaoui might instead have been recruited for a different, still unknown, operation, speculating that the Sept. 11 hijack teams had already been selected before Mr. Moussaoui entered the United States. Because he had taken flight lessons and had information in his computer about crop-dusting aircraft, these investigators suspect that he was meant to take part in an attack involving one of those planes.

In his court appearance this week, Mr. Moussaoui's often ranting statements seemed to support that theory. He confessed that he was part of Al Qaeda, was loyal to Mr. bin Laden and had joined in terrorism conspiracies. But he repeated his claim that he had "no participation" in the Sept. 11 conspiracy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/20/national/20MOUS.html