The jury, at least, did not convict. A pity we shall never know (their deliberations being secret) whether this was that they found the evidence lacking, or the whole prosecution ludicrous. But it is perhaps some comfort, that if you are entrapped by a newspaper into discussing the purchase of an entirely fictional substance, and prosecuted with the Attorney General's permision on inchoate Terrorism Act charges drafted to be hard to rebut, you can still escape gaol.

Whether this will be of much comfort for the three men just acquitted in the red mercury trial I doubt. They have been in custody as "terrorist suspects" since 2004, and had to find the funds to defend a trial that cost the prosecution £1,000,000 in taxpayers money. I only hope they have a million or so left to sue the News of the World and its "fake sheikh" agent provocateur, Mazer Mahmood.

Even if they were successful in that, of course the police, prosecutors, and their secret witness, B, are likely to go unpunished. It will be said they acted in good faith. It will be ignored that the waste of public resource and the injury to the defendents' lives, was dealing with a 'threat' that could only ever have been fictional. It will be said that this is valuable and valid because it "sends a message" to all the real terrorists (200... 2,000... whatever the estimate is this week) that they were not investigating while they were wasting their time - and three families' lives.

I have noted before that British justice (in a number of areas, not just terrorism) has started to take on the characteristics of a witch-hunt, with accusation the philosophers' stone that transmutes ordinary objects and actions into evidence of guilt. But at least the persecutors of the witch-crazes purported to believe in witchcraft.