Sites set for viewing Moussaoui sentencing
Sept. 11 victims, kin to watch broadcast
WASHINGTON -- A federal judge has selected six sites for survivors and relatives of victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to watch the death penalty phase in the case against Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged in the United States in the 2001 plot.
The proceedings will be broadcast via closed-circuit television to federal courthouses in Manhattan and Long Island, N.Y.; Newark, N.J.; Philadelphia; Boston; and Alexandria, Va., US District Judge Leonie Brinkema said in an order yesterday.
The selection of the sites is the latest development in the case against Moussaoui, 37, who pleaded guilty in April to being part of a broad, radical Islamist conspiracy to fly planes into US buildings.
Brinkema also ordered prosecutors to give Moussaoui's defense team the classified version of a report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, who investigated the FBI's handling of intelligence about Al Qaeda and terrorism before the attacks.
The latest court filings also indicate that the case's judge and lawyers are continuing to struggle to find ways to summarize classified evidence from detained Al Qaeda operatives and present it to the jury.
Brinkema gave defense lawyers an extra week, until Dec. 7, to file descriptions of the evidence they believe the captives could provide to bolster Moussaoui's defense.
The Justice Department is seeking the death penalty against Moussaoui, who has pleaded guilty to six conspiracy charges.
Prosecutors intend to argue that the FBI might have been able to thwart the Sept. 11 hijacking plot if Moussaoui had told agents he was in the United States taking flight lessons as part of his training for a second wave of Al Qaeda attacks.
Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, said in April that he should not be sentenced to death because he was ''not 9/11 material" and that the hijacking of four commercial jets was ''not my conspiracy." He was in jail in Minnesota for immigration violations when the four planes crashed in New York, Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon. 