Who Is Bin Laden Really Trying To Exonerate?

The irrationality of the Zacarias Moussaoui saga finally seems to have gotten to his boss. Well, make that his purported boss. An audio recording on an Islamist website supposedly of Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden denies Moussaoui, the only person convicted over the 9/11 attacks, was involved in the operation.
Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, pleaded guilty in April 2005 to
six charges of conspiracy over the hijacking attacks on New York and Washington.
When a U.S. court jailed him for life without parole for his role in the attacks earlier this month, it only left room for endless speculation.
From the outset, the prosecution had called for the death penalty, arguing that “there is no place on this good Earth” for him. The defense recommended “the long slow death of a common criminal” in prison, rather than martyrdom through execution.
And Moussaoui himself? At first, he protested vigorously that he had nothing to do with, and knew nothing about, the 9/11 attacks. Then suddenly he claimed to be a central figure in the plot. He had planned, he claimed, to fly a fifth suicide mission into the White House that day, and would certainly have done so had he not already been behind bars, arrested four weeks earlier on a minor immigration charge. His alleged co-hijacker, Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber” U.S. officials arrested after the 9/11 attacks, laughed off that story.
During the final six weeks of hearings, Moussaoui virtually lusted for the death penalty. He let it be known that he had “no regret, no remorse.” In fact, he wished that it could be September 11th every day.
Then he seemed to recognize that life imprisonment would be “a greater punishment than being sentenced to death.” When the jury at last handed down its verdict on May 3, he still could not help crying out defiantly: “America, you lost!”
In closed session with trial lawyers, Leonie Brinkema, the presiding judge, said she herself did not believe Moussaoui’s claim that he knew details of the plot in advance.
Was Moussaoui a star player or just a paranoid schizophrenic with grand delusions with perhaps no knowledge of the main plot? The word of Jihad Inc. CEO should have been the last. “I am the one in charge of the 19 brothers and I never assigned brother Zacarias to be with them in that mission," the purported voice of Bin Laden says. The man in the recording also said that none of the Guantanamo Bay detainees were connected to the attacks.
Delve deeper and the argument on the tape gets a bit tenuous. “Since Zacarias Moussaoui was still learning how to fly, he wasn't No 20 in the group, as your government claimed,” the man said to be Bin Laden says. Moussaoui confessed because of pressure caused by over four years in prison, the tape went on.
But wasn’t Moussaoui arrested a month before the attacks. Had he continued, he might as well have completed that training and become the 20th hijacker. So what was the purpose of the latest tape? Did the man purporting to be Bin Laden want to exonerate Moussaoui or exonerate himself for having chosen someone who bungled it all the way to the end?