In a Brooklyn courtroom, the Yemeni sheik and his assistant sit in seats at a defense table occupied in thousands of past cases by mobsters, drug dealers and con artists. But if the lives of those defendants may have been exotic to the judges and jurors who decided their fates, these two men, charged with financing terrorism, sometimes seem to be from a different world entirely. The sheik, in his silk hat and flowing robes, has been heard in hours of secretly recorded videotapes talking in a convoluted style seldom heard in America. His meanings are elusive. His style is indirect.Out of the blue, sometimes, will come tales from the Koran or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, the applicability of which can be obscure. In a conversation about a man who seemed to be offering a big donation to Muslim causes, the sheik, Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, started a discourse on a battle from the time of the prophet. "The reason for the conquest of Badr is this," he said to a visitor in a bugged hotel suite in Frankfurt, "because the prophet, may the peace and the blessing of God be upon him, took the camel herd of Quraysh." In the courtroom, no one has yet offered to explain the relevance of the taking of the camel herd.
The unfamiliar, combined with a staccato presentation by prosecutors, has meant that the sheik and his
| Hard to get inside the mind of a lunatic, isn't it? |