The following comments are excerpted from editorials commenting on Jose Padilla’s conviction on terrorism-related charges Thursday.

Detroit Free Press: The five-year saga of Jose Padilla highlights both the best and worst of the Bush administration’s efforts to prosecute the war on terror.

Padilla was finally convicted Thursday, by a jury of his peers, of terrorism conspiracy charges that could earn him a life sentence in prison. That’s the American criminal justice system working the way it was intended.

But Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested on American soil, also spent 3 ½ years in prison, uncharged, without access to a lawyer, and allegedly tortured because the administration unilaterally decided he was an enemy combatant with virtually no rights under the Constitution. That represented a tragic departure from the rule of law, America’s most noble distinction and the moral foundation for this country’s global crusade against tyranny … .

Washington Post: … The administration finally agreed to prosecute Padilla in federal court only when the U.S. Supreme Court seemed ready to repudiate the government’s treatment of Padilla and order his transfer to the federal courts.

Does the orderly disposition of Padilla’s court case prove that every terrorism prosecution can and should be channeled through U.S. courts? No, although civil libertarians will make that case, there will be genuine enemy combatants who may not belong in civilian courts. But every person held by the government – U.S. citizen or not – must have due process to challenge that detention. The presumption must be that U.S. citizens can rely on the federal courts to oversee their prosecutions. And Padilla’s abhorrent disappearance into limbo should come to be remembered as an aberration never to be repeated.

New York Daily News: Oh, what a grievous blow it must be to those who kept braying that the Bush administration was keeping poor, hapless Jose Padilla in enemy-combatant status solely because it couldn’t possibly sustain any charges against him in an actual court of law.

Turns out that Padilla, per a Miami federal jury’s verdict Thursday, is every bit the dangerous terrorist rat his captors alleged him to be all along.

The original sensational claims against him – he was going to blow up apartment buildings via gas leaks, he was going to plant dirty bombs every which way – did get significantly reduced, but that was largely because the government didn’t care to reveal where every piece of actionable intelligence had come from. The lesser conspiracy counts on which he was convicted still amount to plenty scary stuff.