Two UK terror trials came to an end this week.

Al Qaeda operatives used invisible ink to write down key phone numbers. This pen was found by police during a house search

On Tuesday, a jury in London convicted Bilal Abdulla of conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosions. Abdulla was one of two people who tried to detonate car bombs in London and then, on a suicide mission, drove a jeep filled with gas canisters into Glasgow airport. His partner, Kafeel Ahmed, died in the second attack.

The trial rightly received plenty of coverage. But the case itself failed to open up much, if anything, in the way of links to Al Qaeda, or any other terrorist organisation. It was, it appears, a stand-alone operation.

Far more interesting, I think, was the result from Manchester this afternoon. For the first time in the UK, a jury convicted a man, Rangzieb Ahmed,  of directing terrorism. Not only that, they also convicted him, and his co-defendant, Habib Ahmed, no relation, of belonging to Al Qaeda.

We talk a great deal about people or plots being AQ-linked or AQ-inspired. Well here's a case, according to Greater Manchester Police head of counterterrorism, Tony Porter, that's indisputably AQ-core.

In many ways, the Manchester case was the polar opposite of the London one. It didn't have any plot or planned attack per se, but it had links to all manner of interesting people and plots. 

Here's a few:

Phone links between Rangzieb Ahmed and Yassin Omar, one of the failed London bombers.

Habib Ahmed named as a fellow traveller by Mohammed Junaid Babar, the supergrass whose testimony helped convict the fertiliser bomb plotters in May 2007.

Phone links with Abdul Rahman, who pled guilty last year to recruiting people in the UK to go and fight coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Habib Ahmed married by Omar Bakri Mohammad, founder of Al Muhajiroun, the UK's highest profile organisation supporting bin Laden ideology.

Finally, there are the links with a man at one time credited with being bin Laden's number three, Hamza Rabia.

The investigation itself included bugged conversations in Dubai, a luggage intercept at Amsterdam Schipol, and phone numbers written in invisible ink.

For a taster of the story, click here.

LONDON, England –The jury hearing the inquest into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes has returned an open verdict. That means they were unable to decide upon a cause of death.

Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead after being mistaken for a would-be suicide bomber

The family of de Menezes has described proceedings as a whitewash. They were furious when the coroner, in his directions to the jury, told them they could not return a verdict of unlawful killing.

De Menezes, a Brazilian electrician, was shot dead in a subway train carriage in late July 2005, after being mistakenly identified as a would-be suicide bomber. The shooting happened one day after four men had attempted to detonate explosives on the London transport system.

The case is tragic in so many ways. And there's a terrible irony at the heart of it, when one considers what happened to Yassin Omar, one of the would-be bombers police were hunting at the time of de Menezes's death.

Omar had been traced to Birmingham, central England, after the failed attacks of July 21, 2005. At five in the morning, armed police stormed a house in the city and found Omar standing in the bath with a rucksack on his back.

One of the police officers involved, speaking at Omar's subsequent trial, said: "I put my barrel to the back of his head. During that time his right hand had disappeared and he brought it down to his chest... I took the safety catch off my weapon and put pressure on the trigger."

But Omar survived.

"I can say in all honesty, to this day I still don't know how I didn't shoot him," the officer said.

With Barack Obama preparing to assume the Presidency, it's a good time to cast around for neat descriptions of a changed world.

Gilles Kepel, author of 'Beyond Terror and Martyrdom'

Gilles Kepel, a noted French scholar of Islam, has a succinct delineation of how things have changed in the seven years since 9/11, in a new book, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom.

Both of the grand narratives at work since the attacks on New York and Washington have run into the ground, he argues.

Those narratives were the Global War on Terror, the project of George W. Bush and the neocons, and the Global Jihad, as authored by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Both these narratives were intended to swing public opinion behind them – creating mass support within their respective constituencies for a highly aggressive, combative posture. Violence first; politics, maybe, later.

Both narratives, Kepel argues, foundered on the same issue: the occupation of Iraq. The United States succeeded in creating a new army of jihadists able to cripple all efforts at rebuilding the country, at least until the twin developments of the military surge and the Sunni Awakening, by which time the U.S. had long since lost the argument anyway.

And for Al Qaeda, the bloodshed unleashed by its leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was such that jihad became fitna. Put crudely, holy war became civil war. The horrendous violence between Sunni and Shi'a had a profoundly alienating effect across the Muslim world and support for bin Laden declined sharply.

The great irony resulting from this mutual ideological knockout is the rise of a foe shared equally by AQ and the US: Iran.

Kepel's not the first to put forward this line of argument but it is, among other things, a very tidy encapsulation of the law of unintended consequences. Otherwise known as the cock-up theory of history.