Pensito:

The jury's decision yesterday to give wannabe terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui life in prison instead of the death penalty was a public relations disaster for the Bush Administration who were hoping to kill Moussaoui so that he could show progress in ridding the world of evildoers. The jury heard convincing evidence that Moussaoui was shunted aside by al Qaeda big wigs well before 9/11 because he was a mentally deranged loose cannon.

Moussaoui was small fry but the administration has two of al Qaeda's top leaders in custody and while it might seem obvious that they could salvage something out of the Moussaoui disaster by trying, convicting and frying the genuine coup plotters, it ain't gonna happen.

Yesterday on CNN, terrorism expert Peter Bergen explained that the high-ranking terrorists will never be tried in a court of law because the Bush team permanently tainted any testimony they might provide by subjecting them to torture...

So let me see if I got this right... Moron AQ reject gets life in Prison and Conservative Blogsphere has baby over it. Top Dogs from AQ, the actual Masterminds of 9/11, wont even be tried because of the idiotic Pro-Torture policies of the Bush Administration.

So these dudes will end up like Sean Connery in The Rock, stashed away in some secret prison and Americans will never know the real truth... Convienent...

But it gets scarier:

A central contradiction in the Bush administration's fight against terrorism is that bit players often have been put on trial, while those thought to have orchestrated the plots have been held in secret for questioning.

The difference in treatment, government officials say, stems from the view that gathering intelligence from suspected terrorists is more important than publicly punishing them.

That's why Muslim men from Portland, Ore., Lackawanna, N.Y., and Lodi, Calif., have been prosecuted and imprisoned for having attended training camps in Afghanistan or entering the country intending to do so. Facing charges such as conspiracy and providing "material support" to terrorists, they had little of substance to reveal to U.S. intelligence authorities.

Similarly, the Bush administration sought life in prison for John Walker Lindh, the California-born Muslim convert who went to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban government prior to the U.S. invasion in late 2001. He pleaded guilty in exchange for a 20-year sentence.

But it was a different matter when the FBI arrested Jose Padilla in Chicago in 2002. The Brooklyn native, a convert to Islam, was suspected of leading a plot to set off a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States.

Rather than file terrorism charges against him, the government branded him an "enemy combatant" and confined him to a military brig for three years. He was not allowed to speak to his family or to a lawyer while interrogators pumped him for information about the supposed plot.

Government lawyers said they were reluctant to charge Padilla with a crime, because that would entitle him to a lawyer. And a lawyer undoubtedly would tell him not to talk to government investigators.

Late last year, after Padilla had legal representation and as the Supreme Court was deciding whether to hear his challenge to President Bush's assertion of power to detain without due process Americans deemed to be enemy combatants, the administration changed course. He was charged with several minor terrorism-related crimes, but not with plotting to set off a dirty bomb.

Enquiring minds really want to understand how the War on Terror is being fought in our names... From appearances... Not very effectively, and perhaps equally important... illegally. Torture, ignoring human rights, hell sounds to me like a flashback to the Dirty Wars in Latin America a few years back.

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