FBI agent warned of possible hijacking before September 11

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An FBI agent said his bosses repeatedly disregarded warnings that
September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui was a "very dangerous"
terrorist who could hijack an airliner.

Agent Harry Samit testified at the French Al-Qaeda acolyte's death
penalty trial that he became "desperate" after
"criminally negligent" superiors blocked his probe into what he thought
was a wider plot.

The admissions, extracted under cross-examination by lawyers for
Moussaoui, came as the case resumed after a week in peril of being
thrown out by the judge over a witness-coaching scandal.

"You needed people in Washington to help you out?" defense counsel
Edward MacMahon asked Samit, who arrested Moussaoui after he attracted
suspicion at a flight school, weeks before the September 11 attacks.

"They didn't do that, did they?"

Samit answered: "No."

Moussaoui is the only man tried in the United States in connection with
the September 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

Prosecutors want to prove he should be executed because his "lies" to
investigators allowed the suicide hijackers time to carry out the
strikes on New York and Washington.

Defense lawyers say the government knew far more than Moussaoui about
the looming threat, and failed to act on plentiful clues to stop it.

Samit said he referred to Moussaoui as a "terrorist" 70 times in
communications to superiors.

He said Moussaoui seemed to be in a hurry to finish his flight training
on a jumbo jet simulator at a ground school in Minnesota when he was
arrested.

"You wanted the people in Washington to know that because you were
concerned that Moussaoui was going to try to hijack a plane right?"
MacMahon asked Samit.

"Yes sir," the agent replied.

Samit also said he pleaded with his supervisors to warn the US Secret
Service, which protects the president, after learning Moussaoui had
planned trips to New York and to look at the White House in Washington.

That revelation was especially alarming, because he discovered Moussaoui
had told his flight simulator instructor to show him how to complete a
flight between London Airport, and New York.

"If he seized an airliner flying from Heathrow to New York City, it
would have enough fuel on board to reach (Washington) D.C.," he said he
told a supervisor in Washington -- but got no word that the warning was
ever passed on.

Reluctance among superiors to go hard after Moussaoui continued despite
an August 30 memo from the US embassy in Paris, relating a report by
French intelligence in which a source described him as "extremely
cynical" and "potentially very dangerous."

Samit admitted that he accused his superiors of "criminal negligence"
and "careerism" in a US government inquiry into their failure to act
upon his warnings.

The FBI agent was shown a memo he sent to FBI headquarters in Washington
on August 18, 2001, parts of which were sent across the federal
government.

In the document, Samit warned the 37-year-old Frenchman was learning how
to steer a 747-400 airliner, had a portable GPS navigation system, was
an Islamic fundamentalist who approved of martyrdom, and was armed with
small knives and learning martial arts.

If he is not sentenced to death, Moussaoui, in jail on September 11,
2001, will spend the rest of his life in prison, after confessing last
April to conspiring to fly airliners into prominent US buildings.

He has said he was planning to fly a plane into the White House in a
follow-up strike to September 11.

Samit also said superiors in FBI anti-terrorism units in Washington had
stopped him from applying for a criminal search warrant or to a special
intelligence court, so he could search Moussaoui's belongings.

MacMahon, who hopes to sow reasonable doubt among jurors that
Moussaoui's failure to talk directly allowed the September 11 to go
ahead, got Samit to agree such obstruction was a "bureaucratic bind"
frustrating his investigation.

Samit, who also said he believed that Moussaoui must have some unknown
co-conspirators as he would not be able to seize a jetliner alone,
finally got a criminal warrant on September 11, 2001 hours after the
lethal attacks.

The trial resumed Monday after a week-long break, while Judge Leonie
Brinkema probed how many witnesses had been contaminated by coaching
from government lawyer Carla Martin.

She threw out half the prosecution case, but relented on Friday,
allowing prosecutors to seek new, uncontaminated witnesses.