Moussaoui: 'No regret, no remorse'

ALEXANDRIA, VA. - In testimony that almost seemed designed to seal his fate, Al-Qaida operative Zacarias Moussaoui told a jury on Thursday that he has "no regret, no remorse" for concealing the Sept. 11 attacks.

In a matter-of-fact tone, he said he is willing to kill Americans "any time, anywhere." A prosecutor asked Moussaoui why he smiled during anguished testimony from a widow and military officers over the deaths on Sept. 11 of soldiers at the Pentagon.

"Make my day," he shot back.

Testifying for a second time in the trial to decide whether he should be executed, Moussaoui dealt new blows to a defense team devastated by his earlier admission that he was training, when arrested, to fly a plane into the White House on Sept. 11.

Yet in a bizarre twist, Moussaoui also said he is certain that a dream he had that President Bush will release him from prison will come true.

For 2½ hours, Moussaoui took advantage of what could be his last public stage before being relegated for life to a "super-max" prison or a cell on death row. He lambasted his court-appointed lawyers, assailed U.S. support for Israel and read from the Qur'an in predicting that Muslims will overthrow the United States.

After Moussaoui's testimony, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema huddled with lawyers. She then told jurors the final phase of the case is moving so quickly that deliberations could begin early next week.

'I can go on and on'

Chief prosecutor Robert Spencer asked Moussaoui whether he regretted lying to federal agents in Minnesota to conceal the Sept. 11 operation.

"No regret, no remorse," Moussaoui said. "I just wish it had happened the 12th, the 13th, the 14th, the 15th, the 16th, the 17th. I can go on and on ... There's no remorse for justice."

As for oft-tearful testimony from more than 30 Sept. 11 survivors and victims' relatives, Moussaoui said: "I find it disgusting that some people will come here to share their grief so they can obtain somebody else's death."

His testimony exposed more sharply than ever his deep rift with the lawyers assigned to try to keep him alive. Moussaoui, who was allowed to represent himself for about six months in 2002, said on Thursday that he never trusted his court-appointed lawyers, because they were only seeking "fame."

Moussaoui said he had wanted to work with Charles Freeman, a Muslim lawyer from Texas who visited him in his cell early in the case. Later, he acknowledged that Freeman has died.

He said he wanted a two-pronged defense: to try to persuade jurors, as occurred in the case of the 1998 African embassy bombings, that execution would allow terrorists to die as martyrs.

And he said keeping him alive would give the U.S. government a "bargaining chip."

But he acknowledged that he never shared those ideas with his lawyers.

Explaining the hatred

Defense lawyer Gerald Zerkin asked Moussaoui repeatedly whether he thought his lawyers were in a plot to kill him, apparently to support defense psychiatric findings that Moussaoui is a paranoid schizophrenic.

Moussaoui conceded he didn't really believe that the White House would secretly ask defense lawyers to arrange his killing because "there's a lot of Deep Throats, a lot of Woodward-Bernsteins."

Zerkin asked him to explain his hatred of Americans. After reading a passage from the Qur'an, Moussaoui pointed to a 1,400-year-old conflict between Western religions and Muslims.

"From an Islamic point of view, we have to be a superpower and we have to be above you and you have to be subdued," he said. Referring to attacks on Muslims, he said: " ... I want you to share the pain."

Calling Israel "a missing star in the American flag," he said Islamic fundamentalists would someday be "the exterminators" of American Jews. "For Christians," he said, "we will accommodate them if they don't fight us" and if they "pay X amount."

Greg Gordon is a correspondent in the Star Tribune Washington Bureau.