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.
Mathematically: Mr Blair is a Christian Fascist; the rest follows.
Me am got blue kryptonite. Kills bizarro superman.
Me am telling everyone I got it so someone can use it for secret terrorist attack on bizarro planet.
Will threatening an imaginary place with attack with an imaginary substance get me arrested?
Or is the bizarro planet real? Are we living on it?
Anyone know where I can get hold of the deadly narcotic Cake so I can put it in the water-supply?
Come on copper, arrest me. I dare you.
You’ll just get yourself done for wasting your own time.
How long before we are told that terrorism trials are too complicate for juries?
Not too complicated, too secret. Can’t have anyone unvetted seeing the evidence…
Already been tried on once by this government, in the last parliament. And of course “control order” and SIAC hearings are secret, with secret evidence, government-picked advocates, and a lowered burden of proof.
PS – I find it really quite scary that the Guardian report cited above has a banner-ad for boxed DVD sets of the vile 24. If those reading articles about terrorism law in a left-liberal newspaper are a good audience for fantasies about the brilliant efficacy and utilitarian moorality of arbitrary violence by the secret police, then we really are in trouble. Let us hope the ad is not that well targeted…