We show pity for Islamic extremists at our peril

The peculiarity of symbolic jail terms of between 35,000 and 43,000 years, although there's a legal maximum of 40 years that can be served, has been presented as a local curiosity.

The defendants have been pictured awaiting sentence looking bored and off-hand, if not actually sniggering - and no conclusions have been drawn about their evident contempt for the whole process and the society that maintains it.

The truth is that we find it hard enough to pay attention even when al Qaeda terrorists such as Dhiren Bharot are convicted here, let alone abroad (Bharot was sentenced to 40 years, after pleading guilty to conspiracy to murder, a year ago. Remember?) So this enormous attack - 191 people murdered, 1,800 injured, 21 terrorists now convicted, with seven suspected ringleaders having blown themselves up when facing arrest - is not considered serious, when it so plainly is.

Instead, we have, once more, rather more coverage and righteous agitation about the minutiae of our own parochial attempts to combat terrorism effectively. The Law Lords have just reviewed the "Control Orders" introduced by Charles Clarke in 2005, which allow for the monitoring and partial confinement of terrorist suspects. They are a rough and ready measure, used only either because there is not enough evidence to prosecute suspects, if they are British, or because they cannot simply be deported, if they are foreign, because their home countries are rated too dangerous.

As part of a complex judgment criticising the Control Orders, the Lords have decided that the 18-hour per day home curfew originally provided for is unlawful and only a 12-hour curfew acceptable. So far, very few of these control orders have been made, just 22 in all, undoubtedly against very serious terrorist suspects. Seven of these suspects have absconded, moreover.

Yet the Control Orders themselves - not, of course, the acts of terrorism they hope to forestall - have become the great preoccupation of campaigning groups such as Liberty. This week, they have also been made the subject of a much trumpeted two-part TV drama, Britz. And the former Guantanamo prisoner Moazzam Begg has predictably complained that the Lords did not go far enough. "Justice is still not being served," he says.

Begg writes, as though producing a clincher: "The question that should be asked is this: how much of a threat can these people be?" Perhaps he doesn't really expect an answer. But there are answers to be made. What has just reached its conclusion in Madrid supplies us with one. The scornful looks of the convicted terrorists another.