Unfortunately for legal reasons one cannot name 'U', an Algerian who is about to be released from six years in custody in this country. You can find out his name (although the one he habitually uses is not the one he was born with or used to enter Britain) by looking at US newspaper websites. U is a senior Al Qaeda operative, with links to Osama bin Laden. He has demonstrable connections with Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested en route to place bombs at LAX airport, and with the European cell that plotted to kill shoppers at Strasbourg's Christmas market. Unfortunately Mr Ressam withdrew testimony against U that was crucial to U's extradition to the US to face charges of conspiracy. Unfortunately too, the conclusion of the trial of the Strasbourg conspirators means that U can't be extradited either to Europe. That left Algeria where U was a senior figure in the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat that killed some 200,000 people in the 1990s. The Special Immigration Appeals Commission went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that U, and other Algerians who have been repatriated to face justice, would be fairly treated, despite the efforts by well-known human rights lawyers to paint Algeria's judicial system in the darkest colours. The mechanisms it has put in place at British insistence strike this observer as pretty watertight. But no, not in the eyes of British judges who have overturned the SIAC ruling and freed U on bail. Rather thoughtfully, they've stipulated he can wander in his garden from 9am to 9pm at night. For weeks attention in this country has been focused on the issue of 42 days detention, which is designed to anticipate catastrophic circumstances, rather than for any case that the police have so far encountered. It is the legal equivalent of stockpiling vaccines. In fact, the real scandal is how our legal system positively connives at failing to deal with a major figure who was central to the original Al Qaeda organisation. We also seem to have no mechanisms for deporting a man who lied about his identity when he originally sought political asylum in the UK, and then attended military training camps in Afghanistan, before returning to recruit foreign fighters to go to Chechnya. The fact that the British media is prevented from even reporting U's name also tells you where the courts' misplaced sympathies also lie. The underlying reasons for this, and other scandals, are the persistence of the ideologue lawyers who take up the causes of U and his ilk, and a senior judiciary that regards common sense as equivalent to base mob instincts.