Finally, a court ruling in a terrorism trial that isn’t completely brain dead: Court upholds conviction in Bush al Qaeda plot.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Friday upheld the conviction of an American citizen for plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush and conspiring with al Qaeda, rejecting his claims that he had been tortured into confessing by the Saudi police.

As part of its ruling, the appeals court based in Richmond, Virginia, overturned Ahmed Abu Ali’s 30-year prison sentence on the grounds it was unreasonably lenient and sent the case back for resentencing.

“In this case, we are satisfied that Abu Ali received a fair trial, though not a perfect one, and that the criminal justice system performed those functions which the Constitution envisioned for it,” the three-judge panel concluded.

A side note: Reuters is now using some Javascript at their site that apparently attempts to prevent copying and pasting sections of articles. It’s clearly aimed at stopping blogs from quoting their articles.

Good luck with that, guys. This is the kind of foolish, self-defeating idea that gets foisted on companies who don’t know any better, because they don’t understand the internet.

UPDATE at 6/6/08 5:59:38 pm:

Not only is this new Reuters code foolish, in the Mac version of Firefox 3 it throws serious errors, then goes into an endless loop that stops the page from loading. Good work!