The Death Penalty for Moussaoui. . .

is looking less and less likely.

The problem is, he didn't actually do anything. He might have. He was trying to learn to fly planes. But he was in custody on September 11, 2001.

He can get the death penalty, though, if the prosecution can prove that if he had not withheld information, the plot would have been uncovered and all those lives saved. That never would have been that easy. It got a lot harder thanks to Carla Martin.

And today it got even less likely.

The F.B.I. agent who arrested and interrogated Zacarias Moussaoui just weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks told a jury on Monday how he had tried repeatedly to get his superiors in Washington to help confirm his certainty that Mr. Moussaoui was involved in an imminent terrorist airline hijacking plot.

But, said the agent, Harry Samit, he was regularly thwarted by senior bureau officials whose obstructionism he later described to Justice Department investigators as "criminally negligent" and who were, he believed, motivated principally by a need to protect their careers.

Mr. Samit's testimony added a wealth of detail to the notion that officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation played down, ignored and purposely mischaracterized the increasingly dire warnings from field agents in the Minneapolis office that they had a terrorist on their hands in Mr. Moussaoui.

"I accused the people in F.B.I. headquarters of criminal negligence" in an interview after Sept. 11, Mr. Samit acknowledged under intense questioning by Edward B. MacMahon Jr., Mr. Moussaoui's chief court-appointed lawyer.

And get this: he was a witness for the prosecution! Sheesh!