U.S. Must Submit Papers to Moussaoui Team

A federal judge has ordered the government to give admitted terrorist conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui's defense team documents describing what officials knew before Sept. 11, 2001, about al-Qaida threats and some of its hijackers.

With a trial to determine Moussaoui's sentence set to begin next month, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema granted part of a Jan. 20 defense motion for documents without waiting for the government's response.

"Several of the categories of information are so critical to the issues in this case that the court can address some of the requests without a response," Brinkema wrote. "Moreover, given the increasingly shortening time before the start of the trial, discovery issues must be resolved quickly."

Granted Tuesday under seal, her order was released Wednesday after government censors blacked out about five lines of it.

She ordered the government to immediately turn over any threat assessments, especially those completed in the year before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Keep in mind that one response to flight77.info was that the videos of Flight 77 could not be released as they would take away from the shock affect of showing them at this trial. I am guessing that if any such videos are shown they will not be within the public realm of scrutiny, but we will have to wait and see.