Pre-Emptive Detention

The first conviction for Islamist terrorist offences in Scotland will probably be quashed next week. The offences in question included owning CDs, linking to websites, plotting to fly to Lahore and "causing a breach of the peace at Glasgow Metropolitan College by threatening to become a suicide bomber", for which Mohammed Atif Siddique received an eight-year sentence at the age of twenty. He is "thought to have been held in isolation for his own protection for much of the time he has been in jail"; apparently nobody knows for certain, and Britain's leading liberal newspaper is certainly not the one to find out. One of the appeal judges said that some of the directions to the jury by the trial judge, Lord Carloway, constituted a "material misdirection", although it is not clear whether the responsibility for this lies ultimately with the noble lord himself or with the Blairite flexibility of Britain's anti-terror laws, which have been used for such diverse purposes as preventing the commemoration of lives lost in Iraq and clawing back money from failed Icelandic banks. On the bright side, Scotland does not fall within the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police, so at least Siddique was not shot.