I can't improve on Glenn Greenwald's piece on the vindictive, brutal decision by far right judges on the 11th Circuit – so go read it. An American citizen, seized and tortured for four years, is eventually given a trial where all evidence of his torture is withheld, and where the original charges – being involved in a "dirty bomb" plot – were completely dropped by the government. His 17 year sentence – on top of four years of torture that reduced him to a shell of a human being - is nonetheless too lenient for the Republican right. So the men who authorized his torture go on The View, and the victim of torture gets extra punishment.
Look: Padilla is a bad guy, who got involved in Jihadist circles, but was never pinned to any actual terror plot. He deserves to be in jail. But no US citizen deserves to be tortured without a trial – and then all but framed by the rules applied to it, and now doubly punished by what can only be called judicial cruelty. And no US citizen deserves to have the label "dirty bomber" attached to him by CNN and ABC News when no such charges were ever brought against him, let alone proved.
The Dish 