[JURIST] The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit [official website] on Friday denied [text, PDF] a petition for rehearing in the case of Wadih El-Hage [GlobalSecurity profile] who was convicted of the 1998 bombing of two US embassies [PBS backgrounder] in Tanzania and Kenya. El-Hage's petition for rehearing contended that the circuit court's earlier decision [opinion, PDF, JURIST report] 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. [citations omitted]

In March 2008, the US government also charged [charge sheet, PDF; JURIST report] Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] detainee Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani [BBC profile] with several terrorism-related counts for his alleged involvement in the bombings. In 2005, Kenya dropped charges [JURIST report] against three other men charged in connection with the attack in Nairobi that killed 224 people.