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Moussaoui mocks victims, says 9/11 wasn't enough

Confessed al-Qaeda member Zacarias Moussaoui said he wished the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had happened many more times over and expressed his willingness to kill Americans "any time, anywhere," in testimony at his trial on Thursday.

"I wish it had happened not only on the 11th, but the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th," Moussaoui said of the attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, according to television news broadcaster CNN.

Moussaoui mocked the tearful testimony of Sept. 11 victims and their families and said he wished for similar attacks every day until the US falls. He gave a detailed explanation of his hatred for the US, flipping through a Koran on the witness stand trying to find justification for his views.

Moussaoui's testimony on Thursday at his death-penalty trial came as defense lawyers sought to show he was crazy and prosecutors sought to show he was simply evil.

Both sides made their point at various times, but the most visceral testimony came as Moussaoui again reveled in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, just one day after the jury concluded a week of gut-wrenching testimony from 9/11 families and victims.

Moussaoui called an Army officer who crawled on his belly to safety beneath searing smoke "pathetic" and ridiculed a Navy officer who wept as she described the loss of two colleagues.

"I think it was disgusting for a military person" to cry, Moussaoui said of the testimony of Navy Lieutenant Nancy McKeown. "She is military, she should expect people at war with her to want to kill her."

Asked if he was happy to hear her sobbing, he said, "Make my day."

Prosecutor Rob Spencer asked Moussaoui: "So you would be happy to see 9/11 again?"

"Every day until we get you," the 37-year-old Frenchman responded with gusto.

At other times, Moussaoui espoused beliefs that simply seemed bizarre. He insisted that US President George W. Bush would free him from prison some time before his term ends in 2009, perhaps as part of a prisoner exchange. He said it was revealed to him in a dream, just like his plan to fly a plane into the White House.

Spencer tried several times to get Moussaoui to say he didn't really think it would happen, but Moussaoui was resolute.

"I haven't doubted it for one single second," Moussaoui said.

Moussaoui said he didn't think his previous testimony on March 27, in which he said publicly for the first time that he was to have piloted a fifth plane on 9/11, would hurt him with the jury.

That testimony put Moussaoui at the center of the 9/11 plot in a way that prosecutors hadn't even hoped to prove at the trial's outset.

Moussaoui said Allah would protect him as long as he tells the truth, no matter what the jury thinks of him.

Pressed by defense lawyer Gerald Zerkin if he thought he was helping his case, Moussaoui responded: "I was putting my trust in God, so from an Islamic point of view, yes," acknowledging that non-Muslims might view his testimony as harmful.

He denied that he was secretly sabotaging his case as a means to achieve martyrdom through execution. "I want to fight," he said.

He said that if he were in charge of his own defense he might have played up the notion that he could have been used as part of a prisoner exchange for captured US troops.

The trial resumes on Monday.
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