In Moussaoui’s case, delays, legal wrangling and courtroom outbursts turned the test case into a bizarre spectacle punctuated by the suspect’s outbursts and volatile behavior. Moussaoui’s mental state was the prime consideration before the U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who issued her decision after a one-hour private meeting with Moussaoui Wednesday morning.

The meeting was convened two weeks after Moussaoui wrote to the judge indicating that after more than three and a half years in prison he was willing to plead guilty to conspiracy and terrorism, even though these admissions would carry the death penalty.

According to some reports, Moussaoui’s decision arose from his conviction that that would enable him to move immediately toward an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court. However, his court-appointed lawyers argue that he is unfit to stand trial, and they have objected to his decision.

But, two years after stripping Moussaoui of the right to conduct his own defense, Brinkema evidently was persuaded that he was mentally competent. It also appears that Brinkema received assurances that Moussaoui would not reverse his decision, as he did in 2002 when he withdrew a guilty plea after one week.

If he does decide to stick with his decision and plead guilty Thursday, he faces the very real possibility of a death sentence, since it is unlikely that the prosecutors will relent on their demand for the ultimate penalty.

Moussaoui, 36, a French citizen of Moroccan extraction, was arrested a month before the Sept. 11 attacks. U.S. prosecutors believe that he is the so-called 20th man, the missing hijacker who was to have joined the 19 others who commandeered the aircraft that flew into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

Moussaoui admits to membership in al-Qaida, but maintains he was training for a different operation. His trial has been delayed on three occasions and marked by arguments over his demands to interview other al-Qaida members in U.S. custody, who he says could clear him.

In the harsher of two attacks on Putin’s reforms since her appointment, she told reporters Tuesday that “trends [in Russia] have not been positive on the democratic side.” The secretary of state had been expected to water down her past criticism of the Kremlin as the United States attempts to draw Russia closer to the West with trade incentives.

She will meet Putin Wednesday to smooth the way for a summit meeting between him and Bush when the U.S. president attends the 60th anniversary Victory Day celebrations in Moscow on May 9.

Speaking aboard her aircraft as she flew to the Russian capital, she told reporters: “The centralization of state power in the presidency at the expense of countervailing institutions like the Duma [lower house of Parliament] or an independent judiciary is clearly very worrying.”

Rice’s arrival in Moscow Tuesday night was lent added drama when her motorcade was diverted to the U.S. Embassy after a bomb threat at the hotel where she was to stay. It was a false alarm.

The Kremlin has faced criticism since Putin approved plans to replace elected regional governors with his appointees. His allies claim the reforms will strengthen state control in the fight against Chechen terrorism, but the U.S. and Britain have warned that the Russian electorate is being sidelined.

Rice also condemned the growing state manipulation of Russia’s broadcast media, saying: “The absence of an independent media on the electronic side is clearly very worrying.”

The Kremlin and the Foreign Ministry refused to comment on the accusations.

Her comments appeared to be a fresh sign of Washington’s crusading attitude to spreading democracy in all its bilateral relations. Rice signaled a toughened U.S. stance on Russia shortly after her appointment in January, when she called on Moscow to “make clear to the world that it is intent on strengthening the rule of law, strengthening the role of an independent judiciary, [and] permitting a free and independent press.”

In U.S. eyes, the prosecutions of Mikhail Khodorkovsky (a billionaire critic of Putin) and other executives of the Yukos oil company have raised doubts about the Kremlin’s commitment to democracy. Another concern is the state’s increasing domination of television channels. Soon after meeting Rice in Turkey two months ago, Russia’s smooth-talking foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, gave her a CD with a compilation of Russian TV reports. His attempt to prove a plurality of coverage has clearly failed. Rice said Tuesday that the lack of media freedom was her “principal concern.”

Her comments appeared to answer the pleas of Reporters Without Borders, an international media protection organization that had urged her to condemn the narrowing of press freedom in Russia.

Relations between Moscow and Washington have cooled since their high point of cooperation in the “war on terror” after Sept. 11, 2001. At their last summit in Slovakia in February, Putin responded to Bush’s overtures by stressing that Russia would follow its own “history and traditions” in pursuit of democracy.

Despite her harsh comments, Rice admitted after her arrival in Moscow Tuesday night that there was a “considerable amount of individual freedom” in Russia. “One can’t imagine reverting back to Soviet times,” she said.

Mahle’s years at the agency, described in her new book, “Denial and Deception: An Insider’s View of the CIA From Iran-Contra to 9/11,” were full of such what-ifs. Some are deeply personal, involving the choices Mahle made between career and family. Other choices were not of her making, but haunt her just as fiercely — like the bureaucratic wrangling that allowed the escape of al-Qaida leader Khalid Sheikh Muhammad just as Mahle was closing in on him.

Now under interrogation by the CIA at an undisclosed location, Muhammad was the destructive visionary behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The original terror plot called for the simultaneous hijacking of 10 aircraft; Osama bin Laden clipped Muhammad’s wings, telling him his plans were too ambitious.

In 1995, while Mahle was working in the Middle East, a man fitting Muhammad’s description turned up in Qatar. At the time, Muhammad was a shadowy figure, and his exact importance to al-Qaida was relatively unknown — as indeed was bin Laden’s. But the CIA believed Muhammad was involved in a bungled plot in the Philippines and in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. “He wasn’t in the top 10, but he had still killed Americans,” she says.

Mahle was assigned the task of hunting him down, verifying his identity — the CIA had a set of fingerprints — and putting him under the control of the U.S. authorities. In her reports back to CIA headquarters, Mahle was all for a “snatch,” spiriting Muhammad out of the country in secret. She says she feared officials in the Qatari government sympathetic to extremists would tip off Muhammad if a formal request were made for his arrest.

She argued her case to the highest reaches of the National Security Agency, where she was eventually overruled. The United States lodged a request with local authorities for Muhammad’s extradition, and almost immediately the man Mahle had been hunting disappeared. Had she had her way, she believes, the post-Sept. 11 world might have been a very different place. “He had these two ideas in his mind as early as 1994. If he had been removed from the operational environment there might still have been a 9/11, but I doubt it would have [been] multiple airplanes crashing into an iconic building,” she says.

At a time when the CIA has yet to recover from the colossal failure of the World Trade Center attacks, Mahle’s is one of three female spies to come in from the cold with books on the world of espionage. Her book was published at the same time as a novel by Stella Rimington, the first woman to head MI-5, and a critical memoir by another former CIA agent, Lindsay Moran.

The publishing boom comes at a time when the CIA is braced for yet more uncomfortable revelations — this time about discrimination within its ranks. Last week, Janine Brookner, a former station chief in Jamaica, began efforts to file the first class-action suit against the agency on behalf of women agents who say they lost their jobs because of sexism. This has caused a frisson in Washington, which, despite Rimington’s example, does not appear entirely comfortable with the idea of female spies. In a recent TV appearance, Mahle was asked by CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer: “If you’re roaming around Ramallah or Jericho or Nablus on the West Bank, in any of these towns, an attractive American woman, a blonde, all these guys probably think you’re out there, you’re coming on to them.”

Such attitudes have occasionally eclipsed the criticisms Mahle has made of the agency. In her view, the CIA was hobbled over the years by low morale and budget cuts, which made it slow to react and overly bureaucratic. In a changing world, the agency was also fatally blinkered — a last preserve of white, middle-class men.” I can’t tell you how many minority applicants — Arab Americans, Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, Indian Americans — whom I lost to security or suitability,” she writes in her book.

Women who made it past those gates weren’t entirely welcome, either, especially out in the field, where there was a stubborn belief that women were not fit to recruit agents or run spy networks. They would be fatally handicapped by their gender, the old adage went, especially in the Middle East or Latin America, where they would not be granted full respect.

Mahle had a different experience. “I found the Arab male infinitely more predictable and manageable than Near East Division management,” she writes. “With the latter, I always felt that I was walking on eggs. I sensed that at the first mistake, my career would be ended, because I did not have protectors in the old-boy system.”

Her years at the CIA coincided with a period of great upheaval at the agency. She was recruited from university in the mid-’80s, soon after the Iran-Contra affair, a time when public distrust of the spy agency was at its height. Mahle, studying Middle East politics and international relations at graduate school, needed a job; the CIA needed an Arabic speaker.

She fell into the spy game, immersing herself in a shadowy world where lying to friends and relations was routine. In the old days, agents were barred from revealing what they did for a living; nowadays it is compulsory for agents to tell their spouses they work at the CIA. In Mahle’s time, it was discretionary. She told her husband and her father, but did not dare tell her mother until she went abroad, fearful of the anxiety it would cause her.

Soon after Mahle moved to East Jerusalem in the late 1990s, a bomb went off near her house. “My mother was apoplectic,” she says. “I can only imagine what she would have thought if she knew I was chasing terrorists rather than just avoiding them.” But maintaining the deception was exhausting. “I am very close to my mother, and this was a very big piece of my life to keep secret,” she says.

Her departure in 2002, during the aftermath of 9/11, was a forced exit. Mahle is barred from discussing the circumstances beyond the fact that she lost her security clearance for “lack of candor” about her contacts with Palestinians.

Her last posting outside the U.S. for the agency was in Israel and the occupied territories, and much of her job focused on building up the Palestinian security services and keeping tabs on militant groups — although CIA regulations barred her from making direct contact with militants. She was also responsible for broader security arrangements, which meant that in 1998, she found herself making arrangements for a presidential visit from a hospital delivery room. Mahle went into labor six days before President Clinton made his historic visit to Israel and the territories. But there was no question of switching off her duties.

“There were a lot of security details that needed to be nailed down, and it was a high-threat environment,” she says. “I had meetings scheduled. I had places to be. The Secret Service was in town.” Mahle’s daughter was born in the morning. By evening she was back on the job. “I remember thinking it was poor planning on my part,” she says. But she had little choice; the CIA did not have maternity leave.

Other choices she confronted were heartbreaking. Soon after the Palestinian intifada erupted in September 2000, her daughter was just a toddler. Mahle, charged with assessing the dangers posed to U.S. citizens by the rising violence, advised the evacuation of all Americans from East Jerusalem. That included her daughter, but she could not leave her post to bring the child to safety. “Jerusalem was still smoldering from the riots and it was very difficult to navigate. I remember thinking that it was my job to go to my family at this time, and I couldn’t do it. I had to send my [bodyguards] instead,” she says.

She phoned home, and told the nanny to pack the baby photographs. “It was just one of those moments where you have to choose, and I made a decision based on my work. I felt I had failed my family.”

Now, after more than a decade roaming the Middle East, Mahle lives in an affluent suburb of Washington with her husband and daughter. But she retains the habits of her former life, arriving early for meetings to scope out the surroundings, choosing restaurant tables with a clear view of the exit.

She no longer has to worry about swathing herself in dark robes and head scarf — her method for disappearing into the crowd in the Middle East. When we meet at Washington’s Union Station, Mahle, who is tall, carries a bright pink tote and matching handbag.

Even among Indian reservations, Red Lake is a particularly close community, one of only two reservations in America where all lands are held in common. The tribal government has sole jurisdiction over the community’s 850,000 acres, and there are very few non-Indians living among the reserve’s 5,100 members. Located in a secluded area of northern Minnesota, the reservation sits remote and desolate amid vast plains of farmland, on the snow-covered banks of the frozen Lower Red Lake. But Tuesday the isolation was abandoned as police officers, federal investigators, counselors and journalists descended on the reservation in its time of grief.

“There will not be one soul who isn’t touched by this tragedy here in Red Lake,” Floyd Jourdain, chairman of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, told a press conference. “It still hasn’t sunk in.”

At Red Lake High School where the killings took place, Weise was known as a misfit and a loner, the product of a deeply troubled family. His father committed suicide four years ago, and his mother was in a nursing home in Minneapolis more than 200 miles away after suffering brain injuries in a car crash. Classmates described him Tuesday as “weird” and “antisocial.” Relatives said he was regularly teased. But it was unclear what knowledge his classmates or the authorities in Red Lake had about Weise’s inner life, which he pursued on a number of neo-Nazi Web sites, according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

In his postings, Weise showed strong identification with Hitler and ideas of racial supremacy, calling himself Native Nazi as well as Todesengel. “I guess I’ve always carried a natural admiration for Hitler and his ideals, and his courage to take on larger nations,” said one of his postings last year. He vented his impatience with those who did not share his fascination with Hitler, singling out his teachers for rebuke. “The only ones who oppose my views are the teachers at the high school, and a large portion of the student body who think a Nazi is a klansman, or a white supremacist thug.”

On Monday, that frustration with his teachers and classmates came pouring out in a murderous rampage. But he apparently had another score to settle first — with his grandfather, Darryl Lussier, a known figure on the reservation where he had served as a police officer for three decades. After shooting dead his grandfather and the grandfather’s companion, Weise stole his grandfather’s police-issue bulletproof vest and official car, as well as two handguns and a shotgun, and drove toward the red-brick schoolhouse, arriving at about 3 p.m., FBI officials told a press conference Tuesday.

Witnesses said that Weise had a grin on his face and waved to fellow students as he walked along the school corridor, emptying his guns. He was challenged by Derrick Brun, a 28-year-old unarmed security guard, and shot him dead before resuming his rampage. “Mr. Weise continued to roam through the school, firing randomly,” the FBI spokesman, Michael Pabman, told the press conference.

Reggie Graves, 14, told the Associated Press that teachers herded students from one room to another, trying to move away from the sound of the shooting. Some students crouched under desks. Another student, Ashley Morrison, said she heard shots, then saw the gunman peering though a door window of a classroom where she was hiding with several others. “I can’t even count how many gunshots you heard; there [were] over 20 … There were people screaming, and they made us get behind the desk,” she said.

Armed tribal police soon arrived to confront the teenager, forcing his retreat into a classroom, where he shot dead five students and a 52-year-old teacher, Neva Rogers, before turning his gun on himself.

According to the Associated Press, three of the students were shot in the head at close range. “You could hear a girl saying, ‘No, Jeff, quit, quit. Leave me alone. What are you doing?’” one student, Sondra Hegstrom, said.

That remained unclear Tuesday, with the FBI struggling to piece together a motive for what they believed was a premeditated attack. Some of those clues may eventually be provided by Weise himself, from his involvement with neo-Nazi Web sites. In a posting last year, he admitted that he was questioned by police after a threat against the school, in what could have been a possible warning sign.

“By the way, I’m being blamed for a threat on the school I attend, because someone said they were going to shoot up the school on 4/20, Hitler’s birthday, and just because I claim being a National Socialist, guess whom they’ve pinned,” he wrote in comments posted at 11:41 p.m. on April 19, 2004.

The newspaper added that Weise was subsequently cleared, and quoted him as saying: “I’m glad for that. I don’t much care for jail; I’ve never been there and I don’t plan on it.”

For the people on the Red Lake reserve, the killing spree was “the darkest hour in the history of our tribe,” said Jourdain. “Our community is devastated by this. We have never seen anything like this in the history of our tribe.”

“We would like to know why this audit report — and audit reports on nine additional task orders — are being withheld from Congress,” they wrote. “We also want to know what steps you are taking to recover these funds from Halliburton.”

In a second public letter Tuesday, Waxman accused Bush administration officials of deliberately withholding information on overcharges by Halliburton from U.N. auditors — at its behest. Some $1.6 billion of the $2.5 billion Halliburton contract was funded from Iraqi oil revenues overseen by the U.N.

“The evidence suggests that the U.S. used Iraqi oil proceeds to overpay Halliburton and then sought to hide the evidence of these overcharges from the international auditors,” the letter says.

The audit, released by the congressmen on Monday, offers the most definitive glimpse so far of overbilling by Halliburton, once run by Vice President Dick Cheney. In the most startling transaction, it charged the Pentagon $27.5 million to ship $82,100 worth of cooking and heating fuel to Iraq from Kuwait — 335 times the actual cost of the liquefied petroleum gas, a charge the Pentagon auditors said was “illogical.”

The firm and its subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root, face several investigations, including a fraud inquiry by the Justice Department. A preliminary Pentagon audit, focused on the immediate aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion, found that KBR overcharged the Pentagon by $61 million for kerosene and other fuels.

Critics of Halliburton are convinced this represents just a fraction of the overcharges. The audit released this week covers only one of 10 task orders undertaken under the $2.5 billion no-bid contract awarded immediately after the invasion of Iraq. The overcharges identified in the single task order already dwarf the $61 million in previously discovered overcharges. Halliburton charged the Army Corps of Engineers $875 million to supply fuel from May 2003 to March 2004. Auditors questioned $108.4 million of those costs.

As the congressmen note, the auditors criticized charges in nearly every area, saying the firm misled auditors and failed to supervise subcontracts. “Halliburton failed to demonstrate its prices for Kuwaiti fuel were ‘fair and reasonable,’” the auditors say. They also note that Halliburton refused repeatedly to provide information on costs of obtaining fuel from Turkey and Jordan, or to reveal how it selected its contractors in Kuwait.

A Halliburton spokeswoman, Wendy Hall, said it was forced into paying, and charging, high costs because of the security situation following the war. “Transporting fuel into Iraq was a mission fraught with danger, which increased the prices that firms were willing to offer for transportation,” she told reporters. “The report fails to take into account the fact KBR performed an urgent mission at the Army’s request and the mission took place in a wartime environment.”

The lawyer for an Army Corps of Engineers whistle-blower said that his client was set to be interviewed for a second time by Pentagon investigators on April 4 over her claims of contracting abuse involving KBR.