By Pete Williams, NBC News Justice Correspondent

Government documents made public Tuesday shed new light on the FBI's interest in Dr. Steven Hatfill, the former government scientist who was an early focus of much of the government's energy in investigating the 2001 anthrax mail attacks.

The government later ruled him out and agreed to pay him nearly $6 million to settle a lawsuit alleging violations of his privacy. The documents were drawn up to seek court approval for searching Hatfill's home, car, and storage locker, and the apartment of his girlfriend. They show that the FBI was deeply interested in Hatfill's background and what it considered an inconsistency in his statements about his activities around the time the letters were mailed.

By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

Ziad Jarrah will forever be known as the 9-11 hijacker who deliberately crashed United Flight 93 into a field in Pennsylvania, killing a plane full of people just as they were bravely storming the cockpit.

But now videotape obtained by NBC News appears to confirm that Jarrah was stage-managed--and at times even prodded along by al-Qaida--during the early stages of the terrorist’s training.

The unlikely jihadist
The 9-11 Commission found that Jarrah was an odd fit for al-Qaida. The Beirut-born student was Westernized, and almost backed out of the plot at the last minute. “Jarrah clearly differed from the other hijackers in that he maintained much closer contact with his family and continued his intimate relationship with” his German girlfriend, the 9-11 Commission wrote. “These ties may well have caused him to harbor some doubts about going through with the plot, even as late as the summer of 2001.”

The videotape was shot in Afghanistan in late 1999 or January 2000, when investigators know that Jarrah and other members of the Hamburg cell traveled to Osama Bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan for training and plot instructions. The unedited tape is meant to be Jarrah’s “martyrdom” video, in which he explains why he’s committed a terrorist act and killed himself and others.

But Jarrah frequently stumbles through his own martyrdom tape, and often can't maintain a serious tone. His al-Qaida handlers coach him, off-screen, to be more dramatic.

"This speech requires passions and enthusiasm," one of them scolds Jarrah off camera. “Start again!" the man scolds a bit later.

"Why didn’t you try a different approach? I mean another style," a second man chimes in. “Something for the Muslim youths…”

By Aram Roston, NBC News Producer

A notorious international arms dealer was convicted in federal court in Manhattan Thursday, in what's likely to be the end of the colorful career of the so-called "Prince of Marbella," a man who sold weapons to rogue regimes around the world. The conviction of the flamboyant 63-year-old Syrian, Monzer Al Kassar, was a victory for the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration, whose agents had pursued him for more than 15 years. 

Al Kassar's lavish lifestyle and his dealings with unsavory terrorists made him seem like the villain in a James Bond movie. A federal jury convicted him of conspiring to kill U.S. nationals and conspiring to acquire and ship anti-aircraft missiles. He had been caught in a sting operation, in which DEA informants posed as representatives of the Colombia FARC insurgent group. FARC is designated a terrorist group.

I met Al Kassar at his 15-room palace overlooking the Mediterranean in 2006, well before he was indicted in the current case. In an exclusive interview, shortly after he was accused of supporting insurgent groups in Iraq in a separate case, Al Kassar showed off his palace - with its spiral staircases, glass-domed ceiling and lavish carpets. He swore loudly to me that he was simply a "legal arms dealer."

By Pete Williams, NBC News Justice Correspondent

Three members of the U.S. Supreme Court today expressed concern about the growing use during death penalty trials of elaborate victim impact statements and video presentations.

Just 20 years ago, the Supreme Court set a strict limit in death penalty cases against any evidence that "described the personal characteristics of the victims and the emotional impact of the crimes on the family." The reason the court gave at the time was that because death is an irreversible penalty, a jury's verdict must be based strictly on reason and not emotion.

But just a few years later, bowing to the growing victims' rights movement, the court reversed itself and said testimony from a victim's mother helped inform the jury about the harm caused by the crime.

By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

With the election coming to a close, it's clear there won't be any "October Surprise" as many pundits had predicted.

The political term gained currency most recently in 2004, when Osama Bin Laden popped up in a videotape four days before the Bush-Kerry presidential election. "Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al Qaida," Bin Laden warned in late October 2004, in his first videotaped address in three years. "Your security is in your own hands." Sen. John Kerry has said that the 11th-hour videotape heightened Americans' fear, and persuaded many undecided voters to stay with President Bush.

Radio Silence
But this election season, there's been almost complete radio silence from al-Qaida and its terror affiliates. There have been no threatening tapes from Bin Laden, and no election-related messages from his verbose deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, or from Adam Gadahn, the bellicose American-born spokesman for al-Qaida.

(There was a brief reference to the current election buried in a tape last month from Abu Yahya al-Libi, a top Taliban propagandist, asking that God "humiliate Bush and his party." But the videotape was not promoted by al-Qaida, and some intelligence experts question whether "party" meant political party or just Bush's political allies. There also have been dozens of threatening messages posted by individual bloggers active on jihadist websites, as the SITE Intelligence Group recently found, but still no official statements from al-Qaida.)

The terror group's relative silence comes as a surprise to many in the U.S. intelligence community. Just a month ago, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin to U.S. law-enforcement officials predicting more messages from al-Qaida in the weeks leading up to the election. "We expect al-Qaida to release additional messages before the election" for U.S. president," said the FBI/DHS notice obtained by NBC News. "They certainly want to be a topic of the election campaign," a senior U.S. intelligence official predicted at the time.

A word from the experts
So today we asked several NBC News terrorism experts why they think al-Qaida shied away from the presidential race, and what it means.

By NBC News

Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons announced today that he has been "cleared" by the FBI in a federal corruption investigation.

“About two years ago, false accusations about me surfaced in the midst of some contentious litigation," Gov. Gibbons said. "Now, federal investigators, including the FBI, have confirmed what I have said all along. These accusations are baseless and there is not a shred of evidence showing I did anything improper."

The FBI and Department of Justice began investigating Gibbons after the Wall Street Journal and NBC News reported that Gibbons--while a U.S. Congressman--took a luxury cruise in 2005 that was paid for by a prominent Nevada defense businessman and defense contractor, Warren Trepp.

Trepp's firm, eTreppid Technologies LLC, had received lucrative Pentagon contracts. The FBI began investigating whether Gibbons had improperly helped Trepp's firm land the multi-million-dollar federal deals.

Gibbons' criminal-defense lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement that a federal prosecutor in Washington called him Friday to say the case is over.