There’s a new audio tape supposedly from Osama bin Laden, in which he (or an amazing facsimile) says that Zacarias Moussaoui was not part of the 9/11 plot.

CAIRO, Egypt - Osama bin Laden purportedly said in an audio tape Tuesday that Zacarias Moussaoui — the only person convicted in the U.S. for the Sept. 11 attacks — had nothing to do with the operation.

“He had no connection at all with Sept. 11,” the speaker, claiming to be bin Laden, said in the tape posted on the Internet.

“I am the one in charge of the 19 brothers and I never assigned brother Zacarias to be with them in that mission,” he said, referring to the 19 hijackers.

The al-Qaida chief said the Sept. 11 hijackers were divided into two groups, “pilots and assistants.”

“Since Zacarias Moussaoui was still learning how to fly, he wasn’t No. 20 in the group, as your government has claimed,” bin Laden said. “It knows this very well,” he added.

It’s a softball pitch to the mainstream media and the “progressive” left, who will now respond by spinning this meaningless statement against Bush. The Associated Press is testing the water in the lead paragraph above.

UPDATE at 5/23/06 4:23:22 pm:

First out of the box, as always … the “progressive,” “reality-based” kids at Daily Kos, who see right through this blatant Bushitler COINTELPRO: Daily Kos: Bin Laden - Moussaoui Not Linked to 9/11. (Hat tip: Killgore Trout.)

One wonders about the timing of this AP article entitled “Bin Laden - Moussaoui Not Linked to 9/11”. We had our trial, found him guilty, imprisoned him for life. And now Bin Laden basically says, we got the wrong terrorist.

[ … ]

So, regardless of whether Bin Laden is telling the truth, now we’ll have a news cycle with Bin Laden again…just after the CATO institute releases “Power Surge” and stories swirl around Karl Rove, NSA domestic datamining of phone records and survellience [sic] of ISP usage, and other bad news for GOP. Time to go to Orange Alert?

I smell counter-intel agit prop in this. Moussaouri [sic] was our token victory of ‘justice’ over the 9/11 event. Having Bin Laden ‘reveal’ this as foolishness might incite (per Rovian logic) average Americans to want real blood, perhaps Iranian. Maybe we’ll soon get tantilizing [sic] tidbit [sic] news from highly placed sources that Osama has been frequenting Iran and is ‘on the border’ with it frequently.

It took only a few days for Zacarias Moussaoui to begin trying to work the American legal system again: Moussaoui asks for new trial. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)

Less than a week after he was jailed for life over the September 11 attacks, Al-Qaeda plotter Zacarias Moussaoui submitted a motion asking to withdraw his guilty plea so he can have a new trial.

“Moussaoui wishes to withdraw his guilty plea because when he entered the plea his ‘understanding of the American legal system was completely flawed’,” his lawyers said in the motion.

Moussaoui said in an affadavit “I now see that it is possible that I can receive a fair trial” in the United States.

In other words, he now sees what suckers we are. And he thinks we might be big enough suckers to give him another trial.

I wish I were completely confident that he’s wrong.

“Even with Americans as jurors,” he went on, “I can have the opportunity to prove that I did not have any knowledge of and was not a member of the plot to hijack planes and crash them into buildings on September 11, 2001.”

“I wish to withdraw my guilty plea and ask the court for a new trial to prove my innocence of the September 11 plot,” he said.

At Counterterrorism Blog, Walid Phares examines the lessons of the Zacarias Moussaoui trial: Wrong Court, Wrong Debate.

The debate on the Moussaoui case won’t stop, nationwide and beyond, in view of the progressive realization by most Americans and many citizens of other democracies that this case will be a benchmark in the history of the judicial front with Terror. Therefore, it is important to avoid Byzantine debates and reserve the energies to the center of the crisis, not its peripheries. Consider for example how the “martyrdom” affair plays in the Salafist chat rooms: “These Kuffars (infidels) are easy to dupe,” said a cadre in the al-Ansar Paltalk room few months ago. “All you have to do is to play their akhlaq (ethics) or lead them to believe that we are busat’a (simple minded).”

That’s what Zacarias was able to achieve, alone against the whole American political culture: First, he dramatized his personal life to the extreme, leading some to believe that his past was the root cause for his violent choices. While in fact the ideology that recruited him was responsible for the Jihad he chose to practice. Second, he dramatized his stance to the limits by threatening to throw himself into the death row and force the jury to retreat into psychological guilt. Indeed, one al Qaida man, initial member of the 9/11 Ghazwa (terror-raid) single handedly outmaneuvered the jury, the court and potentially the public. By transforming the judicial challenge into a debate about “death penalty” and all the American psychological consequences that follows, Zacharias Moussaoui deflected the attention from the real mammoth in the courtroom: The ideology of Salafi Jihadism. Instead of trying the “criminal ideology” he acted on behalf, America fell into the trap of struggling with itself as a merciful or revengeful society.

Moussaoui feels he won all the way, even if he got life in prison. He played the martyrdom card till his audience nauseated. He then played his personal life card till he obtained the mitigating factor. He played it tight, close, and smartly. His colleagues brought down towers five years ago, but Moussaoui administered another type of strike against his foes: Defeating them through their own system.

What the court room in Virginia missed in its trial of the decade was the factory that produced Moussaoui’s mind. A life sentence is not necessarily a bad choice in democracies, or the wrong message to send when needed, if the nation the jury came from is enabled to cast a death sentence on the ideologies of hatred.

They’re telling us that these will be Zacarias Moussaoui’s final public words: Moussaoui: U.S. Will Never Catch Bin Laden.

“God save Osama bin Laden — you will never get him,” Moussaoui declared moments after walking into the courtroom flashing a victory sign.

“You have branded me as a terrorist or a criminal or whatever,” he said. “Look at yourselves. I fight for my belief.” He spoke for less than five minutes; the judge told him he could not use his sentencing to make a political speech.

And meanwhile, France is getting ready to demand that Moussaoui serve his sentence with them:

French authorities said Thursday they may eventually press the United States to have Moussaoui serve his life sentence in France under two conventions on the transfer of convicts. They were waiting to hear the conditions of his sentencing.

Moussaoui’s mother Aicha El Wafi, pressed for her country to intervene. “My son will be buried alive because France didn’t dare contradict the Americans,” she said.

The lawyer for Zacarias Moussaoui’s mother says, “The fight isn’t over — far from it.”

The lawyer for Zacarias Moussaoui’s mother expressed delight Wednesday that the Frenchman was spared the death penalty, and vowed to lead a legal battle to bring the al-Qaida conspirator home.

A federal jury in Alexandria, Va., on Wednesday decided Moussaoui should spend life in prison for his role in the Sept. 11, 2001 attack, rejecting the government’s appeal for death. Moussaoui, a Frenchman of Moroccan descent, is the only person charged in the United States in connection with the four suicide jetliner hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people.

“We will pursue unrelentingly a request to French authorities that they demand a return of Zacarias Moussaoui to France,” said Patrick Baudouin, the lawyer for Moussaoui’s mother, Aicha El Wafi. “So the fight isn’t over — far from it — it is only beginning.”

El Wafi, who recently returned home to France from the United States, did not plan to speak publicly about the verdict until a news conference Thursday, Baudouin said. “I am delighted that the American jury did not hand down the death penalty despite the pressure of public opinion, the aggression of prosecutors and the legitimate emotion of the victims,” Baudouin told The Associated Press.

While a death penalty “would have only added barbarity upon barbarity,” Baudouin said that the life sentence was also “extremely severe and disproportionate.”

“I can’t be happy with the sentence handed down — life in prison is extremely severe and disproportionate to the acts that can really be attributed to Zacarias Moussaoui,” he said.

According to this AP release at the Jerusalem Post, France is offering Zacarias Moussaoui consular protection.

The French government is offering Zacarias Moussaoui the consular protection he deserves as a French national, but so far the al-Qaida conspirator has not asked for it, the French Embassy said Wednesday.

In a press communique, the embassy said it had dispatched the consul general from Washington and an embassy official to every session of the trial in US District Court at Alexandria, Virginia, south of Washington.

Allahpundit’s going through the juror answers in the Zacarias Moussaoui death penalty trial, and he’s found the only two mitigating factors that a majority of jurors agreed the defense had proved: He had a rough childhood.

UPDATE at 5/3/06 6:16:23 pm:

I wonder what sort of childhood this person (no way to know for sure whether it’s a man or woman) had:

In January 2002, I wrote this about the decision to try Zacarias Moussaoui in a criminal court:

A criminal trial is too good for the likes of Zacarias Moussaoui, who by any definition of the words has to be considered a spy and a saboteur. But he will now be afforded all the rights and privileges of a US citizen, in a trial that has a good possibility of becoming a fiasco. This is a very misguided decision, and I hereby predict that it’s going to come back and bite someone on the ass.

Ouch!

UPDATE at 5/3/06 4:36:44 pm:

My point is not so much that Moussaoui should have received the death penalty (although I don’t know if anyone in our country’s history has ever deserved it more), but that he never should have been allowed to exploit the criminal justice system, as he has done—and as he will now continue to do, for the rest of his life. He should have been tried as an enemy combatant.

But having gone through our courts, a death sentence would have been a more just outcome. Moussaoui is much more valuable to the global jihad (and its Western enablers) as a living symbol of Western “oppression” than he would be as a failed attacker, ignobly executed by infidels.

As several LGF readers have commented, it won’t be long before we see “Free Moussaoui” signs at moonbat rallies.

UPDATE at 5/3/06 5:35:10 pm:

Count on the Kos Kidz to be ahead of the kurve: Daily Kos: moussouai [sic] is innocent! (Hat tip: Killgore.)

UPDATE at 5/3/06 5:38:42 pm:

Rudy gets it right: New York politicians disappointed by Moussaoui verdict.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said he was disappointed that Zacarias Moussaoui was not sentenced to death for the September 11 attacks, but other US politicians hailed the verdict as fair.

“I believe the death penalty was appropriate in this case,” said Giuliani, who was mayor of New York in 2001 when two planes flown by Al-Qaeda hijackers smashed into the World Trade Center twin towers.

Had Moussaoui told the FBI about the plot, Giuliani told MSNBC television, “all those wonderful people would be alive and children that I know don’t have fathers would have fathers.”

Moussaoui Gets Life in Prison.

A federal jury decided Wednesday al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui deserves life in prison for his role in the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history, on Sept. 11, 2001. On the seventh day of deliberation, the jury of nine men and three women informed Judge Leonie Brinkema that it had reached a decision. The verdict was announced at 4:30 p.m. EDT.

UPDATE at 5/3/06 2:11:05 pm:

Note: in radical Islamic ideology, being captured by infidels and executed does not equal martyrdom. It equals humiliation. The ‘72 virgins/raisins’ fantasy is reserved for those who die ‘gloriously’ in battle, preferably in the act of murdering defenseless women and children.

And Zacarias Moussaoui will game the system to the best of his abilities. Don’t be surprised to see him get his own Koran, halal food, a prayer rug, and an arrow pointing toward Mecca.

UPDATE at 5/3/06 2:25:55 pm:

At CNN.com:

“America, you lost,” Moussaoui stated as he left the courtroom. “I won.”

Here are the documents and photo exhibits used by the government in their case against Islamic terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, including some photos of 9/11 never shown by mainstream media: Moussaoui trial exhibits and documents. (Hat tip: RaiderDan.)

Warning: some disturbingly graphic pictures.