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Wrong one down
Jul. 24th, 2005 12:28 amYou don't need me to tell you that the death—the execution—of an innocent man on the Underground is a disaster. Still, here I am anyway.
One thing I have to stand by, though, however hard it is to swallow, is the decision to fire. Jean Charles de Menezes was, at that moment, a suspected bomber, and the second he ran on to that train the officers’ range of options dwindled to a single point. It’s not the man who pulled the trigger who should bear the brunt of the shitstorm that’s about to fall—although he's almost certainly the one who'll be charged—but the people who provided the “intelligence” and “leadership” that led straight down to Stockwell’s northbound platform.
Incidentally, that’s how you get to my station from Stockwell. Oval is the next station north. That's the route New York Boy took on Thursday, when he tried to blow himself up next to a mother and child, at the station next door to where I live. This is a big part of the reason my initial reaction on hearing of the shooting was relief. Like many people—including, apparently, every single news editor—I assumed this had to be one of the suspects. Stockwell, for God’s sake, it had to be, too much of a coincidence. But then clearly the police were also operating on assumptions.
They say he emerged from a house they were surveilling in Tulse Hill. They followed him to the Tube, where they challenged him. He panicked and vaulted the barrier, and the rest, we know the rest. Was it a shared house? Had he, as he was an electrician, been working there? Were there any other conceivable reasons for his presence? If they thought he was that much of a potential threat, why didn't they intercept him before he got to a crowded Tube station? Why didn’t they surround him, then or before? How did it get so out of control so fast? I don't want to be too much of an armchair general, but these questions have to be asked. And some answers wouldn't go amiss.
If, as the Daily Mail salivated, these officers are “SAS-trained”, is that potentially more of a problem than a benefit? Possibly so, if, the first time the police’s unpublished guidelines on how to react to a suspected suicide bomber in a public place are put into action, an innocent man is shot in the head. The SAS pride themselves on playing by “big boys’ rules”—you want to carry weapons and play soldiers, you accept the risks. De Menezes was doing neither, which perhaps the training should take into account.
Even before today I was worried that, for all the talk of London “standing united", the ultimate objective of splitting our society along its faultlines and pitting people of different faiths against each other might well be reached. Just in case foreign capitalists don’t depart en masse from the Middle East, Israel isn’t suddenly destroyed, Britain doesn’t convert to Islam and no-one reinstates the 1924 Turkish Caliphate, a permanent religious war would make an acceptable Plan B. British Muslims discovering that the state has given its footsoldiers the nod to gun down any of them looking like they might get a bit tasty could just nudge us all that bit closer.
The Brazilian foreign minister is flying to Britain to hear an explanation for de Menezes’ death direct from Jack Straw. On my list of “meetings I really wouldn’t like to have to attend”, that’s straight in at number fucking one.
You’ve got to admit, he looks a bit like an Arab
EDIT: De Menezes’ brother has apparently compared the killing of his brother to the killing of “25,000 innocent people in Iraq”. The silly sausage. US and allied troops have of course only killed around 9,500 people in Iraq, though fans will be pleased to note that this still roundly trounces the approximately 2,500 people killed by actual insurgents—almost four times as many. That’s good shootin’, soldier!
One thing I have to stand by, though, however hard it is to swallow, is the decision to fire. Jean Charles de Menezes was, at that moment, a suspected bomber, and the second he ran on to that train the officers’ range of options dwindled to a single point. It’s not the man who pulled the trigger who should bear the brunt of the shitstorm that’s about to fall—although he's almost certainly the one who'll be charged—but the people who provided the “intelligence” and “leadership” that led straight down to Stockwell’s northbound platform.
Incidentally, that’s how you get to my station from Stockwell. Oval is the next station north. That's the route New York Boy took on Thursday, when he tried to blow himself up next to a mother and child, at the station next door to where I live. This is a big part of the reason my initial reaction on hearing of the shooting was relief. Like many people—including, apparently, every single news editor—I assumed this had to be one of the suspects. Stockwell, for God’s sake, it had to be, too much of a coincidence. But then clearly the police were also operating on assumptions.
They say he emerged from a house they were surveilling in Tulse Hill. They followed him to the Tube, where they challenged him. He panicked and vaulted the barrier, and the rest, we know the rest. Was it a shared house? Had he, as he was an electrician, been working there? Were there any other conceivable reasons for his presence? If they thought he was that much of a potential threat, why didn't they intercept him before he got to a crowded Tube station? Why didn’t they surround him, then or before? How did it get so out of control so fast? I don't want to be too much of an armchair general, but these questions have to be asked. And some answers wouldn't go amiss.
If, as the Daily Mail salivated, these officers are “SAS-trained”, is that potentially more of a problem than a benefit? Possibly so, if, the first time the police’s unpublished guidelines on how to react to a suspected suicide bomber in a public place are put into action, an innocent man is shot in the head. The SAS pride themselves on playing by “big boys’ rules”—you want to carry weapons and play soldiers, you accept the risks. De Menezes was doing neither, which perhaps the training should take into account.
Even before today I was worried that, for all the talk of London “standing united", the ultimate objective of splitting our society along its faultlines and pitting people of different faiths against each other might well be reached. Just in case foreign capitalists don’t depart en masse from the Middle East, Israel isn’t suddenly destroyed, Britain doesn’t convert to Islam and no-one reinstates the 1924 Turkish Caliphate, a permanent religious war would make an acceptable Plan B. British Muslims discovering that the state has given its footsoldiers the nod to gun down any of them looking like they might get a bit tasty could just nudge us all that bit closer.
The Brazilian foreign minister is flying to Britain to hear an explanation for de Menezes’ death direct from Jack Straw. On my list of “meetings I really wouldn’t like to have to attend”, that’s straight in at number fucking one.
You’ve got to admit, he looks a bit like an Arab
EDIT: De Menezes’ brother has apparently compared the killing of his brother to the killing of “25,000 innocent people in Iraq”. The silly sausage. US and allied troops have of course only killed around 9,500 people in Iraq, though fans will be pleased to note that this still roundly trounces the approximately 2,500 people killed by actual insurgents—almost four times as many. That’s good shootin’, soldier!
