Moussaoui Wants to Testify Against the Saudi Banks
Zacarias Moussaoui sent a letter to the judge presiding over a lawsuit against Jordanian Arab Bank, offering to testify against that bank and several Saudi banks that he says supported 9/11.
I want to testify against financial institutions such as Arab Bank, Saudi American Bank, the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia for their support and financing of Usama bin Laden and Al Qaeda from the time of the Eastern Africa embassy bombing, U.S.S. Cole bombing and 9/11.
As Alison Frankel — who broke this story — noted, Moussaoui’s testimony would be inappropriate in the case in question, which found that Arab Bank funded Hamas.
But that’s not the most interesting part of her report (and Moussaoui’s letter). He claims the lawyers for the 9/11 victims have tried to meet with him in the SuperMax at Florence, CO, and also claims he sent a letter to the judge presiding over that case, where his testimony would be on point.
Moussaoui said that plaintiffs’ lawyers representing victims of the Sept. 11 attacks have requested permission to meet with him but that prison officials have denied the request. Moussaoui also claimed that he has previously offered to testify about al Qaeda financing in letters to the judge overseeing the Sept. 11 victims’ consolidated litigation, U.S. District Judge George Daniels of Manhattan, but that he does not know if the prison has mailed them. The docket in that case does not show any communications from Moussaoui, who was once named as a defendant by Sept. 11 victims.
The implication is that the Special Administrative Measures to which Moussaoui is subject may be preventing his letters from getting out or plaintiffs lawyers from being able to meet with him.
I’m not convinced Moussaoui would really have known about the financing of the 9/11 attack; from reports, al Qaeda kept the operation much better compartmented than that, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed reportedly had real questions about the competence of Moussaoui (which is why he got others for the mission). Plus, Moussaoui’s been in solitary so long, it’s unclear how cogent he can be (though his letter sounds more cogent than some of what he sent during his own trial).
Still, I am curious whether the government has been using the SAMs imposed on Moussaoui as yet another way to bury larger Saudi complicity in the attacks.
The Saudis claim they want the missing pages brought into light. Could M. be back-dooring that? If Saudi banks are complicit only because of covert cooperation with likely suspects, the focus of 9/11 families could blow some lids off.
(Quote): “Moussaoui’s been in solitary so long, it’s unclear how cogent he can be”
Solitary, even solitary confinement, does not render persons incoherent. Some minds may become unbalanced, some temporarily, fewer, and those usually with other instability problems not related to solitarism, more or less permanently.
Adherents to religions who memorize long passages of their religion’s scriptures are particularly unsusceptible to solitary-product problems.
One could wonder where the “urban-legend” that confinement in solitary drives crazy, or incoherent, until one spends some time observing American youth and takes into account their apparent addictions to having sounds in their ears (to deaden their minds?). Now those, confronted with their own thoughts (and a sort of desert-landscape of those, for having never planted, or watered togereminate anything) one may easily imagine backing away from their silence until they hit the wall, and then panicking.
There is, of course, the British cultural practice of “sending to Coventry”, where fellow workers, soldiers, group members, whatever, aggressively ignore a victim, pretending he is not there while he is. But that, for being aggressive, and a thing done, is a different thing.
In real life, Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany’s Third Reich suffered no damages from being isolated, and Muslims should be pretty much immune, too, for the same reasons, for having thoughts to think and advisings to connect them to.