Posted on 07/27/2009 7:54:21 PM PDT by HokieMom
Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a Falls Church man and a member of al Qaeda who admitted he was planning to assassinate then-President George W. Bush, was sentenced to life in prison Monday at federal court in Alexandria.
Abu Ali was originally sentenced in 2005 to 30 years in prison.
U.S. Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of the U.S. District Court for eastern Virginia ruled Monday that Abu Ali should spend life in prison partially because he never renounced his al Qaeda ties.
After the initial sentencing, both sides filed appeals. Abu Ali completed some of his sentence in solitary confinement at a Supermax prison in Colorado, where, his lawyers said, he suffered from physical and mental trauma.
Abu Ali’s lawyers, Ashraf Nubani of McLean and Joshua L. Dratel of New York, argued the original sentence was too harsh.
U.S. attorneys argued that Abu Ali’s sentence was not long enough, given he “knowingly and willfully committed extremely serious offenses jeopardizing the national security of the United States,” a government statement says. “Given the nature of the defendant’s offense and the intended consequences, the government submits that few cases present a more compelling argument for a life sentence.”
The 28-year-old was born in Houston, lived most of his life in Alexandria, graduated valedictorian from the Islamic Saudi Academy in Fairfax County and planned on joining al Qaeda for years, court documents show.
He finally joined the group while in Saudi Arabia in 2002.
“ ‘It was decided that I would go [to the United States] and live a normal life [overtly] to keep attention away from me, marry a Christian woman, and at the same time I would prepare as best I could for operations,’ ” Abu Ali said in his written confession.
He emulated Mohammed Atta and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, key players in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the documents show. While in prison, Abu Ali requested “The Audacity of Hope” and “Dreams of My Father,” both books by then-Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, but was refused them.
A Bureau of Prisons notification states “ ... the referenced pages contain information which have been determined to be potentially detrimental to national security,” according to court documents.
Maybe Hussein’s first Presidential pardon??
Yeah....that was reported here a week or so ago...??
Perhaps, I miss a lot posted. His sentencing was today.
Hopefully, the sentence will stick.
Someone’s paying attention.....
;-)
Eric Holder will be sure to destroy whoever is responsible, I’m afraid.
this guy was way too close for comfort for me
in 2002 and 2003 Abu Ali and an unidentified coconspirator [ZUBAYR AL-RIMI aka SULTAN JUBRAN SULTAN AL-QAHTANI] discussed plans for Abu Ali to assassinate Bush. They discussed two scenarios, the indictment said, one in which Abu Ali “would get close enough to the president to shoot him on the street” and, alternatively, “an operation in which Abu Ali would detonate a car bomb.”
-————Virginia Man Charged With Conspiring to Assassinate President Bush
AP/ABC ^ | Feb 22, 2005 | MATTHEW BARAKAT, Associated Press Writer
JUNE 2003 : (SAUDIS ARREST AHMED OMAR ABUL ALI —sEE BLEEDINGHEARTATTACK) He claimed that he was tortured while detained in Saudi Arabia since June of 2003 and offered through his lawyer to show the judge his scars. -————Virginia Man Charged With Conspiring to Assassinate President Bush
AP/ABC ^ | Feb 22, 2005 | MATTHEW BARAKAT, Associated Press Writer
2003 : (SAUDI ARABIA : AL QAEDA OPERATIVE AHMED OMAR ABU ALI INTERROGATION REVEALS AL QAEDA DESIRE TO ASSASSINATE US PRESIDENT W BUSH USING OPERATIVES DISPATCHED TO HIM BY ALI AL-FAQASI ; ALSO HIJACKING PLOT— SEE ABU FARAJ, AUSTRALIA, UK) Indeed, Abu Faraj is by no means the only Al-Qaida commander who has coveted President Bush and the White House as a primary target. During his 2003 interrogation by Saudi security forces, convicted American Al-Qaida operative Ahmed Omar Abu Ali admitted that top Saudi Al-Qaida leaders “talk[ed] to me about killing Bush one time and another time about [suicide hijacking] operations by planes that take off from Britain and Australia that transit America. This way, the passenger will not need an American visa. The plane would then crash in America.” Specifically, in order to kill President Bush, Abu Ali would use either snipers or “martyrdom” volunteers dispatched to him by Ali al-Faqasi.—— “Target: White House,” Posted by Evan Kohlmann at 04:42 PM, December 23, 2005
http://counterterror.typepad.com/the_counterterrorism_blog/2005/12/target_white_ho.html
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