London — Earlier this week, a British jury convicted three British Islamists of conspiracy to murder, acquitted one, and failed to convict four more. This resulted from the investigation of the 2006 summer plot to blow up seven transatlantic airliners between Britain and the U.S. by detonating explosives packed in soft-drink bottles.

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The discovery of this plot changed the way we all fly, with restrictions imposed on what we can take on board a plane. It was the biggest counter-terrorism case in British history. Yet it ended in a near-debacle. The essence of the case remains unproven, because the jury failed to agree that the aim of the conspiracy was to blow up transatlantic planes.

Prosecutors cannot understand how a jury could have failed to grasp this, given the overwhelming evidence presented to the court. At the time of this writing, it is not clear what caused this mess. Was it the fact that American nervousness at the discovery of the plot forced the Pakistani police to arrest a key conspirator, thus bringing the British investigation to an abrupt halt before all necessary evidence could be collected? Was it incompetence in the way the trial was conducted? Or was it a rogue jury?

While the first two factors may well have played a role, the last is most disturbing. For it is certainly possible that this jury contained some individuals who don’t take the terrorism threat seriously. Indeed, the verdict encapsulates Britain’s mood on this seventh anniversary of 9/11, three years after terrorists attacked London’s own transport system.

A significant constituency still believes that “Blair/Bush lied, people died” by using false and politicised intelligence. They believe, therefore, that the terror threat has been exaggerated to justify the Iraq War — and so they refuse to believe anything the intelligence world tells them, unless it is that America’s War on Terror has made the world a more dangerous place.

So when MI5 say there are at least 2,000 known Islamic terrorism supporters in Britain — and maybe double that number — and that a dirty bomb in Britain is not a matter of “if” but “when,” a lot of people just suck their teeth.

Now prosecutors are talking of a retrial in the airline case — precisely because the security establishment has to rely on guilty verdicts in terrorist trials to prove to the disbelieving British the true seriousness of the terror threat facing their country.

More than 20 Islamist terror plots in Britain have now been thwarted; more than 1,000 people have been arrested under terrorism laws, and more than 200 of them convicted. These figures certainly suggest that the British security world has raised its game. But they also demonstrate the enormous scale of Britain’s home-grown problem with Islamic radicalism — a problem that the security and political establishment is actually deepening through its refusal to correctly identify the threat it is fighting.