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So, “foreign terror suspect”, “C”, gets his Get Out Of Jail Free card with no conditions attached. He’s out of prison with, hopefully, his sanity intact.

Expect smears in the tame press, by which I mean the Sun, that “C” is still a dangerous man it’s just that he had good liberal bleeding-heart lawyers who played the system.

Just why it’s taken three years to decide that this man is no danger to the public hasn’t been explained. Maybe, just maybe, he should have been out earlier. Picture the scene of Charles Clarke going through his desk drawers after being promoted to the Home Office and finding an old, yellowing to-do list of David Blunkett’s saying:

1. Undermine Civil Rights
2. Wind up liberals
3. Impregnate married woman
4. Fight for access to resulting “little lad”
5. Release “C”

Or maybe Charles just dug deep and found the last vestiges of his humanity, the last dregs that hadn’t been hollowed out after years of sacrificing his principles in return for a bolstered ego and power without purpose.

I still don’t get the argument that we must fight terrorism that wants to undermine our way of life by undermining our way of life. Flying in the face of logic, the argument is put that because some unspecified bogiemen want to take away our freedoms we must do away with our freedoms to stop them taking away our freedoms.

It’s an argument you can consider for only so long before you feel giddy and vaguely nauseous. There are very few people, like the Prime Minister for instance, who are able to hold two contradictory concepts in their heads and argue them both valid without their brains beginning to leak out of their ears.

Do our civil liberties, much as Tony Blair, have an “irreducible core”? Like the layers of an onion, can you peel away our freedoms until we’re left with the right to breathe, eat and procreate? The message is sent that civil rights can be sloughed away like so much dead flesh.

But who are the ones shedding their rights? Not Tony or Charles or Jack or Gordon. Not even David Blunkett who is still enjoying his chauffeur and grace-and-favour flat despite having resigned before Christmas. To paraphrase SNP leader Alex Salmond, New Labour are happiest when gambling with other people’s chips

But then, it may be worse than you think. As V says to the cowed hordes surviving under a totalitarian government in V for Vendetta:

Since mankinds dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves.

By doing so, they took our power.

By doing nothing, we gave it away.

We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.

How long will it be before New Labour, and then the press and then us, stops counting – like we’ve stopped counting (if some of us ever did) dead Iraqis – the number of “foreign terror suspect” slowly rotting, insane, in Belmarsh, Broadmoor, Woodhill or whichever fresh hell Charles Clarke can create?

This can’t be allowed to stand. All the “tough on terrorism” headlines in the world aren’t worth even one man’s life. But we all know men and women have been sacrificed on more trivial altars than that by this government.

In losing their humanity, Blair, Clarke and their grisly crew would rob us of ours.