For the past six years, sensationalist stories of the terrorist threat to our way of life have become a staple of our news diet and a justification for our relinquishment of basic civil liberties in the name of security.  With yesterday’s sentence of former Taco Bell employee, Jose Padilla, to 17 years, 4 months, for  engaging in “a global conspiracy to wage violent jihad,” as prosecutors described it with no shortage of hyperbole, reality is beginning to set in.

United States District Court Judge Marcia Cooke could have easily gone along with the government’s war of words against terrorism, substituting rhetorical heat for evidentiary substance.  No one would have blamed her.  In fact, most people would have thought her bold and forceful for imposing the requested life sentence on Padilla and his co-conspirators.  It would have been nothing more than a result consistent with the carefully calculated impression given the public for years.  We would have understood and embraced such a decision.

But Judge Cooke found herself constrained by the law and reality.  Unlike us, she had to sit through Padilla’s trial and sentence.  Judge Cooke knew things that we did not.  The most important thing that she knew was that Jose Padilla, despite the government’s effort to throw every colorful adjective in the book at him, was never the threat he was made out to be.  This is significant, because our public attitude toward the terrorist threat has been framed by these stories and the understandings they engendered.  We now know that it was decidedly less than we thought.

From the New York Times,

In explaining her decision, Judge Marcia G. Cooke of Federal District Court in Miami acknowledged the gravity of the crimes Mr. Padilla had committed. But she questioned the range and impact of the conspiracy, saying that there was no evidence linking the men to specific acts of terrorism anywhere or that their actions had resulted in death or injury to anyone.

You may recall that Jose Padilla, an American citizen, spend 3 ½ isolated in a South Carolina Navy Brig, subject to secret interrogation, before being “allowed” the rights afforded Americans in a court of law.  He was nicknamed the “Dirty Bomber,” because the government told us that he was planning to detonate a nuclear weapon on American soil in his violent jihad.  At the time, this news was shocking and deeply disturbing.  His purported threat evoked grave fear in Americans, and his capture as an “enemy combatant” made us appreciate all that the government was doing to protect us from this terrible threat, and made us feel justified in turning over our personal freedoms to the government so that it could fight the war on terrorism.

Judge Cooke now tells us that our fears were overstated.  Judge Cooke also tells us that we turned over our rights to the government and received very little in return.  Jose Padilla was never a real threat to anyone.  He made a great poster boy, but only as long as we didn’t know too much about him.  

And then there’s the issue of how the United States, a nation committed to freedom and the rule of law, treated one of our own in the process.

Over the objections of prosecutors, Judge Cooke gave Mr. Padilla credit for time served during his 3 1/2-year detention in a South Carolina military brig following his arrest in 2002 on suspicions that he had been involved in the “dirty bomb” plot, allegations the government eventually discarded.

By calling it “time served,” it diminishes the significance of what happened to Jose Padilla. This wasn’t the stuff that we imagine Jack Bauer defeating in 24 hours, but a threat that was at most idle and stupid chatter by a foolish kid.  Jose Padilla did not have, and never would have, the ability to put action to his bravado.  The most that our government could gain by torturing Jose Padilla was the recipe to the Taco Bell secret sauce.

This case also gives rise to question how the conspiracy to commit terrorism, yet another nuclear weapon in the prosecutors’ arsenal of empty threats, allows for conviction of thought crimes.  The government could not, and did not, prove that Jose Padilla came anywhere close to actually doing anything that had any potential to harm anyone.  While Padilla, a former gang member who converted to Islam, was no model of good behavior, neither was he a model of a terrorist threat.  He “sympathized” with al Qaeda, and perhaps if given a chance, might have done something to aid them in their Jihad.  He just hadn’t done anything yet.  This is what conspiracy had become when the word “terror” is invoked. 

While Jose Padilla is hardly a person who we will remember for having ever done anything good for anyone else in his life, he legacy will prove important.  Without the Jose Padilla’s, we wouldn’t get to look under the majestic robes worn by our important government officials as they tell us all the ways in which they are protecting and helping us.  We would never recognize that the stories of threats have been greatly exaggerated.  We would never come to realize how we’ve sold our birthright as American’s for some flashing rhetoric, over-blown stories and empty threats.  Thanks to Judge Cooke, and to Jose Padilla, we now know better.  It’s now up to us to appreciate the message.