The VLW Blog

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed today the conviction and life sentence of Zacarias Moussaoui on charges related to the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Moussaoui pleaded guilty to the charges but contended that the pleas were involuntary because he had been deprived of the right [...]

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A Virginia man convicted of plotting to kill President George W. Bush was sentenced to life in prison yesterday.
The Washington Post reports that Ahmed Omar Abu Ali of Falls Church was convicted in 2005 of joining an al-Qaeda conspiracy to mount a series of attacks and assassinations in the United States. The U.S. Court of [...]

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The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, long considered the most reliably conservative of the federal appellate courts, is beginning to look more like the U.S. Supreme Court, at least on terrorism issues.
Nine judges who participated in the case of Ali al-Marri, the American resident and Qatari citizen who has been designated an enemy combatant, [...]

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Self-promotion, especially on a matter of public interest, makes it very tough to win a libel case. That’s the clear, if hardly new, message from the 4th Circuit in Hatfill v. The New York Times Co.
The suit was based on a series of five columns in 2002 by Times writer Nicholas Kristof taking the FBI [...]

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A criminal defendant whose character and connections generated more fan mail than an Alexandria federal judge has seen in 25 years won a reduction of his guidelines sentence for obstruction of justice and lying to a grand jury and to an FBI agent about his activities in Pakistan and alleged contacts with a jihad training [...]

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