| By culhavoc on News By JULIA PRESTON
Published: April 20, 2006
NY Times More than four years after charges were filed, a Jordanian college student went on trial yesterday in Manhattan federal court, accused of lying to a grand jury that was investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. The trial tests the government’s practice of long detention of witnesses in terror cases. The student, Osama Awadallah, is accused of misleading the grand jury about his dealings with two Sept. 11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, who were on American Airlines Flight 77, the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. When he first testified under oath in New York in October 2001, Mr. Awadallah said he did not know the name of Mr. al-Midhar and denied having written it in a school notebook. “He made a choice: he decided not to honor his oath and he lied,” said Brendan McGuire, an assistant United States attorney, in his opening argument yesterday.
In part what is on trial is the government’s treatment of Mr. Awadallah. He was detained as a material witness in San Diego on Sept. 21, 2001, and held incommunicado for 20 days in maximum security solitary confinement, although he was not charged with a crime. Mr. Awadallah has said he was terrified and disoriented by a long, severe detention. During his grand jury testimony, Mr. Awadallah was also handcuffed to his chair, a practice generally reserved for potentially dangerous witnesses. His defense lawyers have argued that the shackling impeded him from leaving the room to consult with his lawyers, who were not allowed inside the grand jury room but were waiting outside. The trial also tests whether the jury can remain focused on the narrow perjury charges against Mr. Awadallah in a case that the government will illustrate with images of the Sept. 11 hijackers and evocations of the attacks, in a courthouse just blocks from ground zero. Mr. Awadallah has never been charged with any role in the attacks. After denying that he knew Mr. al-Midhar, Mr. Awadallah returned to testify before the grand jury five days later and said he did recognize photographs of the hijacker and recalled his name. He also acknowledged his handwriting in the notebook, which referred to “Khalid.” In an opening statement yesterday, one of Mr. Awadallah’s lawyers, Jesse Berman, said that his client “was just so confused and exhausted and embarrassed and shackled” during his first grand jury appearance. “He just got it wrong,” Mr. Berman said, “and he corrected it right away.” If convicted, Mr. Awadallah, 25, is facing a maximum sentence of five years on each of two counts of perjury, as well as deportation. He has waited — out on bail for much of the time — as his fiercely contested case made an odyssey through the courts. It was dismissed once by the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, then reinstated by the appeals court. With a jury chosen and ready to sit last May, the prosecution held up the trial, accusing Judge Scheindlin of bias and filing an appeal to remove her from the case, which failed. The same jurors were recalled this week, and some new ones were substituted for those who persuaded the judge they could no longer serve. The case harks back to the tumultuous days after the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Awadallah, a Muslim from a Palestinian family that raised him in Jordan, was studying English at a junior college near San Diego. He has testified that he met Mr. al-Hazmi in 2000 when they briefly worked together at a San Diego gas station. Mr. Awadallah said that he saw Mr. al-Hazmi on several occasions accompanied by a friend, who turned out to be Mr. al-Midhar. A phone number marked with the name “Osama” was found on a scrap of paper in the car that Mr. al-Hazmi parked at Dulles airport before he boarded Flight 77. Also found in the car was a document belonging to Mr. al-Midhar. Mr. Berman said Mr. Awadallah used the telephone number for only three months in 2000, and it was then reassigned to an office of the San Diego city government. He said the last time Mr. Awadallah had seen Mr. al-Midhar was in August 2000 and his last encounter with Mr. al-Hazmi was in early 2001. After an interview with F.B.I. agents, Mr. Awadallah was detained as a material witness on Sept. 21. Barred from communicating with his family, he was held in solitary confinement and denied his Muslim diet, Mr. Berman said. Over the next three weeks, he was taken from San Diego through a county jail in San Bernardino, to Oklahoma City and then to the federal detention center in Manhattan. He was shackled, Mr. Berman said, in what the marshals call a “three-piece suit” — chains that bind ankles, wrists and waist. Mr. Awadallah complained of bruises from his handling by guards. “This is the type of torture, for lack of a better word, that he had to endure for 20 days,” Mr. Berman said. In his first grand jury appearance, Mr. Awadallah repeatedly denied knowing anyone named Khalid. Prosecutors showed him an examination booklet they discovered at his college. In it was written: “One of the quietest people I have met is Nawaf. Another one, his name is Khalid.” Mr. Awadallah at first said that some of the handwriting was not his. When he returned to the grand jury on Oct. 15, he said that he recognized it as his writing and that he did know a friend of Mr. al-Hazmi’s named Khalid. Mr. Berman said Mr. Awadallah had written the sentence in response to a grammar question on an English test, with the hijackers’ names in mind because of the news about the Sept. 11 attacks. He said that Mr. Awadallah, already shaken by his detention, was further confused because at first he was shown a fax copy, not the original. Mr. McGuire, the prosecutor, recalled the frantic efforts to piece together any information about the attacks, amid fears of new ones. “Every detail mattered,” Mr. McGuire said of the grand jury’s investigation. In recent years, Mr. Awadallah has been a student at San Diego State University, where he is scheduled to graduate next month. Yesterday, the first image that prosecutors showed the jury was a mug shot of Mohamed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker. (source) | 
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