Psychologist: Moussaoui schizophrenic 

updated 8:27 p.m. ET April 17, 2006

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - A defense psychologist testified Monday that Zacarias Moussaoui is a paranoid schizophrenic with delusions, as defense lawyers presented additional evidence the confessed Sept. 11 conspirator believes he will be freed from prison by President Bush.

Psychologist Xavier Amador testified Moussaoui displays symptoms of the brain disorder, including delusions and disorganized thoughts and speech.

Moussaoui’s court-appointed defense lawyers believe he has lied on the witness stand twice about having a role in the nation’s worst terrorist attack in order to achieve martyrdom through execution or an enhanced role in history.

Amador has never examined Moussaoui, who refused to see him. He said his diagnosis is based in part on conclusions of other mental-health professionals and an analysis of Moussaoui’s actions and writings, including numerous rambling and abusive legal motions Moussaoui filed during the 18 months he represented himself.

Last week, in his second appearance as a witness, the 37-year-old Frenchman reiterated his stunning earlier testimony that he was to hijack a fifth jetliner on Sept. 11 and fly into the White House — a plan he had said for years was intended for a later date.

Defendant’s after-trial plans
He added that he has dreamed Bush will release him before leaving office in 2009 as part of a prisoner exchange for U.S. troops captured abroad, and said he is convinced that will occur.

One of Moussaoui guards at the Alexandria Jail, called by the defense Monday, offered more details of Moussaoui’s vision. Sheriff’s Deputy Vikas Ohri said Moussaoui has told him that after Bush frees him, he will “fly to London, write a book, make some money and go back to the mountains of Afghanistan and be al-Qaida.”

Earlier defense witnesses described Moussaoui’s impoverished childhood with a violent, alcoholic father and his later embrace of radical Islam, after anti-Arab racism and his background thwarted his desire to become an international businessman.

Childhood traumas
They included a clinical social worker who said Moussaoui suffered a traumatic childhood that transformed him from a child with a sense of humor who made friends easily to a man who spurned his family and embraced radical Islam.

Jan Vogelsang said Monday that Moussaoui was in and out of orphanages the first six years of his life. As a teenager, she said, he was rejected as a “dirty Arab” by the family of his longtime girlfriend, with whom he lived together briefly and won dance contests.

Moussaoui was dismissive of the social worker’s analysis. He shouted “It’s a lot of American B.S.!” as he left the courtroom for the lunch recess.

The jury also heard videotaped testimony taken in France in December from Moussaoui’s sister Jamilla, who described her younger brother as “a pretty little baby, always smiling.... He was the little sweetheart of the family.” She also described the abusive atmosphere caused by their father, Omar, who repeatedly beat Jamilla and the siblings’ mother.

Life or death
Moussaoui was in jail in Minnesota during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The jury has decided that lies he told federal agents a month earlier kept authorities from identifying and stopping some of the hijackers, making him responsible for at least one death that day and qualifying him for the death penalty.

Now jurors are deciding whether Moussaoui deserves execution or life in prison.

In her videotaped testimony, Moussaoui’s sister said their father would intervene in their lives even after the parents had divorced and that “each time he reappeared in our lives, it was to traumatize us.”

“He left us completely destitute,” she testified. “He was a man who never should have had children.”

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