It is finally becoming clear that the death of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes was a case of monumental incompetence by the police. It's not often the Guardian and the Mail are in agreement:
Now, as the first full details emerge of the incident, the disturbing scale of the bungling becomes clear. A surveillance officer who should have had his video camera trained on the suspect's flat was relieving himself and so unable to get a picture... despite being a suspected suicide bomber Mr de Menezes was allowed to get on a bus and into a tube station... he used a ticket to get through the barriers - not vault over them - and even picked up a free newspaper before boarding the train ... he was not wearing a heavy coat that may have concealed explosives, merely a light denim jacket.
And perhaps most damning of all he had actually sat down on the train and was being held by a police officer when he was shot seven times in the head. This was a high level failure of police intelligence. It does not augur well for the war on terror. And an innocent man has paid with his life. Daily Mail
But the revelation that will prove most uncomfortable for Scotland Yard was that the 27-year-old electrician had already been restrained by a surveillance officer before being shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder. The documents reveal that a member of the surveillance team, who sat nearby, grabbed Mr de Menezes before he was shot: "I heard shouting which included the word 'police' and turned to face the male in the denim jacket.
"He immediately stood up and advanced towards me and the CO19 [firearms squad] officers ... I grabbed the male in the denim jacket by wrapping both my arms around his torso, pinning his arms to his side. I then pushed him back on to the seat where he had been previously sitting ... I then heard a gun shot very close to my left ear and was dragged away on to the floor of the carriage."
The leaked documents and pictures showed the failures in the police operation from the time Mr de Menezes left home. A surveillance officer admitted in a witness statement that he was unable to positively identify Mr de Menezes as a suspect because the officer had been relieving himself when the Brazilian left the block of flats where he lived.The Guardian
Andrew Bartlett on police lies:
Human beings who are capable of being hateful and prejudiced, stupid and corrupt. Human beings who are also capable of being good, even great people. That said, we cannot dismiss out-of-hand the suggestion that the police service, and other institutions that grant their members great power, both attract a greater proportion of shits and shape those who are not yet into shits. This certainly was the case in the past, and is certainly the case abroad. Are we so special, by some virtue of Britishness, or some peculiarity of this point in history, that we are a people apart from the world as it exists and history as it happened? Plainly not, though some fools seem happy to suggest that we are.
And check out: A marriage of convenienceat Chicken Yoghurt
Wednesday, August 17, 2005