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Second Circuit denies defense bid for rehearing in 1998 US embassy bombing case

By Bernard Hibbitts (editor) and University of Pittsburgh School of Law students.

[JURIST] The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Friday denied a petition for rehearing in the case of Wadih El-Hage who was convicted of the 1998 bombing of two US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. El-Hage's petition for rehearing contended that the circuit court's earlier decision on Fourth Amendment challenges omitted any consideration of whether challenged searches were supported by probable cause and that the court failed to consider whether the searches could be conducted at all. In denying the petition, the court said:Contrary to the petitioner's claim, our reasonableness inquiry was not confined to the execution of the searches, but more broadly considered whether the searches comported with Fourth Amendment standards. As noted, the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review performed a substantially similar "totality of the circumstances" analysis, when faced with a similar challenge, to determine the reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment of the surveillance in question. That court's reasonableness inquiry, like our own, considered both the circumstances giving rise to the decision to conduct the surveillance and the breadth of the surveillance that was subsequently conducted.In March 2008, the US government also charged Guantanamo Bay detainee Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani with several terrorism-related counts for his alleged involvement in the bombings. In 2005, Kenya dropped charges against three other men charged in connection with the attack in Nairobi that killed 224 people.

Full post as published by JURIST - The Paper Chase on January 23, 2009 (boomark / email).