The September 11 attacks placed all kinds of characters—some sinister, some sympathetic—in the public eye, both making careers and ending others. It helped conspiracy theorists attract followings, terrorists earn life sentences, rescue dogs win medals, and patriotic country music stars gain crossover fans. Let's check in with some of the folks (and dogs) for whom 9/11 became a watershed personal branding moment, whether they intended it to or not.

Are you ready for a what will become the most enraging and omnipresent pseudoscandal of the next, say, year? Attorney General Eric Holder once acknowledged that we cannot be completely safe as long as we remain an open democracy.

Brooklyn-born Jose Padilla was arrested on suspicion of terrorism-liking in May of 2002. We tortured him for three years in a South Carolina brig, without charging him with anything, until people starting getting kind of upset about that whole mess and the Government sent him to Miami to be tried for some boring old counts of conspiracy. He's been sentenced to 17 years in prison, a tad short of the life sentence the government sought for Padilla's signing his name on a piece of paper that someone wrote "al-Qaeda" on or whatever the fuck he actually did. Anyway, one liberal pet cause down, now we can all refocus on freeing Mumia from Gitmo. [AP]