(no subject)

Snatching this month's coveted “What Do You Have To Do To Get Fired Around Here?” award from the alcoholism counsellor with several previous convictions for fraud, Cressida Dick, the woman who oversaw the unsuccessful test drive of Operation Kratos, has just been promoted.

Because a member of the army reconnaissance team assigned to watch a block of flats left his post for a crafty piss and so missed the moment when Jean-Charles Menezes left the building, no-one knew whether or not Menezes was a potential suicide bomber. The evidence against: He had just come out of a suspect block of flats thought to house one of the 21 July terrorettes. In his favour: The fact that our incontinent hero saw enough of him to identify him as white European, which is the one thing the terrorettes definitely weren’t.

As the surveillance team followed Menezes they became more and more certain that this was not their man. All the aspects of his behaviour later raised by a sceptical public—not acting suspiciously, not carrying or wearing anything suspicious and bulky, being Brazilian—were already fairly obvious to officers on the ground. By the time they got to Stockwell they were convinced, and said, that Menezes was no risk, which is why they were happy to let him board a tube train. They knew he might make a useful witness, living in the same block as Hussein Osman was believed to.

They didn’t know that at one point during the caper one Special Branch officer had positively identified Menezes as Hussein Osman. Based on what, no-one knows, but that was the entry in the log that was later amended by cunningly adding the word “not”. Despite the fact that all other officers at all other times said, with varying degrees of conviction, “This is not our man”, A Certain Someone in charge that day (I’m told it’s all right if I say it rhymes with “Cessida Drick”) appears to have made her decision on the basis of that one guy that one time, and unleashed the men with guns.

The IPCC’s report on the shooting is due soon. This is the report Sir Ian Blair fought so hard to block, presumably because the Met’s own report initially had Menezes just falling on some bullets that were lying around in the carriage, or begging officers to shoot him and end it all, or, get this, I’m on a roll now, he acted threateningly and vaulted the barrier to escape from pursuing policemen! All right, I’m kidding. Obviously no police officer would actually falsify a report like that.

Chances are we'll get a traditional British establishment I Ching-influenced judgment: Bad things happened. No blame. Impartial, impassive, impotent. Can’t be anything else when someone’s pension is on the line.

The police are doing an incredibly tough job in extraordinary circumstances, you say? I entirely agree, which is why it might be better to bestow greater operational responsibility on someone who hasn’t been at the helm of such a fuck-up. Apart from anything, it looks bad. Just as in Social Services, all the emphasis seems to be on protecting people’s jobs rather than actually addressing what’s gone wrong. Plus Menezes’s family are quite miffed, although obviously in matters like this grieving relatives rank somewhere below “coroner’s au pair”.


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In related news, the post-mortem has revealed that eleven shots were fired in total on the train: seven into Menezes’s head, one in his shoulder and three that missed. That’s two men, either SAS-trained or themselves special forces, pinning a man to his seat, firing at point blank range and missing him three times. I wouldn’t even begin to question the SAS’s hardness, but on this evidence, given a firearm and a human face, Dick Cheney has a better strike rate.