This is a post that I’ve been want­ing to make for a while now, but haven’t, because the facts still weren’t clear and there’s a part of me that aspires to jour­nal­ism beyond pure blogging.

July 23, 2005. “Bomb sus­pect shot dead on Tube”.

July 24, 2005. “Police gunned down inno­cent man”.

Notably, police did not gun down “Bomb sus­pect”. Shoot first, ask ques­tions later. Okay, what­ever. They screwed up, they’re only human. So why am I jump­ing up and down about it (value of human life aside — because we know thou­sands of peo­ple in non-Western coun­tries are being killed every­day and no-one blinks)?

If noth­ing else, their rea­son­ing. The appar­ent lack of recourse.

“For some­body to lose their life in such cir­cum­stances is a tragedy and one that the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Police Ser­vice regrets,” police said, acknowl­edg­ing they had shot the wrong man.

They are now try­ing to get the body of mur­dered Brazil­ian, Jean Charles de Menezes, back to his home land in accor­dance with the wishes of his family.

“The gov­ern­ment expects the British author­i­ties to explain the cir­cum­stances that led to this tragedy,” a For­eign Min­istry state­ment said.
The Brazil­ian was “appar­ently the vic­tim of a lam­en­ta­ble mis­take”, the state­ment said.

Brazil­ian For­eign Min­is­ter Celso Amorim issued a state­ment in which he states his expec­ta­tion the British author­ites explain the events that unfolded. This is impor­tant: there has been no men­tion from the British of any fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion or inquest into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes.

The actual nature of the killing itself, how­ever, is also in need of expla­na­tion. Police, appar­ently, assessed the risk and deter­mined the actions that would result in the mur­der (I use that word unflinch­ingly, for that is what this is) of an inno­cent man. Let us pause to col­lect what we know of the sit­u­a­tion, from the state­ments of eyewitnesses.

The police were in plain clothes. Other pas­sen­gers on the train had absolutely no way of know­ing with any degree of cer­tainty that the men weild­ing guns were, in fact, mem­bers of the Lon­don Met­ro­pol­i­tan Police Ser­vice. With­out indulging in con­spir­acy the­ory, to this day the only way the pub­lic can “know” this is by the [later, rather delayed] state­ments of the police force itself: the actual killers could quite eas­ily have been a covert British force that unseen agree­ments nec­ces­si­tated the blame being placed upon the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Police.

The “Met­ro­pol­i­tan Police Ser­vice”, wear­ing plain clothes, weild­ing sev­eral “heavy”-looking hand­guns (accord­ing to eye­wit­ness Mark Whitby), start chas­ing after this man.

If we cut through the ide­o­log­i­cal obfus­ca­tion about how “ter­ror­ism has no effects on the pop­u­la­tion” what­so­ever and “insert name of attacked city here will be strong!” rhetoric, just for a sec­ond, it’s pretty self-evident that ter­ror­ism does have very real effects, man­i­fest in (amongst other things) a pre­vail­ing sense of para­noia. Ter­ror, con­cep­tu­ally, is based upon the irra­tional. You are not sta­tis­ti­cally likely to be killed in a pub­lic place in Lon­don, but the fear is there. Sim­i­larly, a man wear­ing a New York tee-shirt and a coat that “looked out of place in the hot humid weather” (also Mark Whitby) would not, with­out the con­text of pre­vi­ous days, be con­sid­ered a sus­pect, chased into a train car­riage in a pub­lic place, and shot in the head at close range five times.

Ter­ror­ism, clearly, does have effects. Ignore the pop­u­la­tion: it has effects upon ratio­nal gov­ern­ment. It makes our lead­ers pass inef­fec­tive laws that ham­per the pop­u­la­tion but do lit­tle to pre­vent ter­ror­ism. In Syd­ney, about a week ago, the media started issu­ing demands that “rad­i­cal” books in Islamic book­shops be — and I quote — “burnt”.

I’m sorry, did I miss some­thing? Why is an increas­ingly “lib­eral” West­ern pop­u­la­tion revert­ing to burn­ing books? Whilst we’re at it, can we burn all the works of Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Marx, a host of other com­mu­nist lead­ers, and, if we were to con­tinue, the works of var­i­ous French rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies that would unequiv­o­ca­bly be con­sid­ered anti-establishment? Who cares what the estab­lish­ment is — polit­i­cal vio­lence is polit­i­cal vio­lence, is it not?

Oh, no, appar­ently not. But every­one avert their heads from Viet­nam and other instances of US-sanctioned polit­i­cal vio­lence, just in case. That wasn’t about democ­racy, it was about stop­ping com­mu­nism that had turned North Viet­nam into an indus­tri­alised state with the fastest-growing econ­omy in the region to which aid from Rus­sia and China decreased whilst sim­i­lar aid to South Viet­nam increased and they became pro­gres­sively more depen­dent upon the US.

But that was, of course, a huge digres­sion that just threw me into a big pit full of Left­ist writ­ers. Ah, quick, let me out.

So let’s ignore the pol­i­tics behind it for a sec­ond, and look at raw emo­tion. A man was shot in the head five times at close range on pub­lic trans­port. SOMEBODY, BLINK! I’m sure I’m miss­ing some­thing that makes all this per­fectly fine — and don’t say prior acts of ter­ror­ism, because that’s been proven to be uncon­nected, remem­ber? Ter­ror­ism has no effect on the pop­u­la­tion! Oh, what was that? I’m assum­ing imposed ide­olo­gies? Yeah, maybe.

Whilst I’m on this whole rant, I thought I’d men­tion tomor­row I’m going to blow up the Syd­ney Har­bour Bridge…

…and the only rea­son I’m capa­ble of doing this, is that I don’t yet have a national iden­tity card to act as a restrain­ing force upon me. I’m imag­in­ing they’d come out now, and the force it would have on me as I walked towards the cen­ter of the bridge wear­ing a large back­pack… Oooh!!! It’s pulling me back!!! I can’t pos­si­bly det­o­nate this bomb, because that would mean I’d destroy this beau­ti­ful work of holo­graphic, bio­met­ric, foren­sic per­fec­tion! Oh, yeah, and they’d be able to iden­tify me as the per­son who did it if it sur­vived the blast. Because, see­ing as I’m a sui­cide bomber, I do actu­ally care a great deal about that.

To the Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment: who­ever decides this is a good idea should be taken out on an excur­sion to Sydney’s pub­lic trans­port net­work. They should be pur­sued by peo­ple in plain clothes call­ing out to them to stop, weild­ing hand­guns. The pub­lic should oblig­ingly step out of the way and accept this as nor­mal. The mem­ber of the pub­lic ser­vice who is being pur­sued will trip, and fall to the floor in the door­way of a train car­riage. They will cower, whilst three armed men come to the door­way of the train, and raise their guns in the air, point­ing to the head of the per­son who is now pow­er­less beneath them.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

The floor of the car­riage is red. “Every­body, please leave the car­riage. This per­son was a suspect.”

Twenty other — now uni­formed — peo­ple come running.

Two days later, a state­ment is issued. But we already know the end­ing. It has been realised in the actions that recur­sively lead to the the death of this pulpy com­bi­na­tion of blood and flesh. A death of pub­lic free­doms has been realised, and the peo­ple have calmly left their car­riage of lib­er­ties with­out fur­ther ques­tion:– after­all, the guns are held by some­one else.

The ter­ror­ists have won.

If I were to write that in my HSC exam, as a short story or a work of fic­tion, chances are the paper would be con­sid­ered a non-serious attempt, as has hap­pened pre­vi­ously in at least one widely-publicised case with ‘exces­sive’ vio­lence (If mem­ory serves me cor­rectly, this instance detailed a school shoot­ing, I think). This vio­lence is not only on our streets, and in our tele­vi­sions: it is so per­va­sive in soci­ety that the insti­tu­tions once assigned the role of pre­vent­ing such now facil­i­tate it gra­tu­itously and with­out need for expla­na­tion. Remem­ber, in all this, that the British gov­ern­ment and bod­ies that con­sti­tute their pub­lic ser­vice (includ­ing the police force) have not iden­ti­fied the need for any fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion into the pro­ce­dures that have allowed this bru­tal mur­der to take place, and nei­ther has any fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion into why this man in par­tic­u­lar was shot. As of the time of writ­ing, the most recent press release avail­able on the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Police web­site is from the pre­vi­ous day:

“I can say as part of oper­a­tions linked to yesterday’s inci­dents, Met police offi­cers have shot a man inside Stock­well Under­ground Sta­tion at approx­i­mately 10am this morn­ing. Lon­don Ambu­lance Ser­vice and the air ambu­lance both attended and the man was pro­nounced dead at the scene. I under­stand Stock­well tube sta­tion remains closed.

The infor­ma­tion I have avail­able if [sic] that this shoot­ing is directly linked to the ongo­ing and expand­ing anti-terrorist oper­a­tion. [Empha­sis mine] Any death is deeply regret­table. I under­stand the man was chal­lenged and refused to obey. I can’t go any fur­ther than that at this stage…”

– Sir Ian Blair

This infor­ma­tion has since been proven incor­rect, yet there is a pre­vail­ing silence from the author­i­ties. Democ­racy requires a degree of open­ness that has not been allowed, here. Irre­spec­tive as to any “ongo­ing and expand­ing anti-terrorist oper­a­tion”, announc­ing that an inves­ti­ga­tion is pro­ceed­ing into this spe­cific event is not only of no detri­ment to “anti-terrorist” oper­a­tions, but a req­ui­site aspect of democracy.

BBC arti­cle
SMH arti­cle
Some­one who knew Jean

Tags: anti-terrorist, Australian Government, BBC, Brazil, British government, Celso Amorim, china, Emphasis mine, Foreign Minister, Foreign Ministry, head, Hitler, Ian Blair, Jean Charles de Menezes, London, London Ambulance Service, Mark Whitby, Met police, Metropolitan Police, Metropolitan Police Service, New York, paranoia, public transport network, Russia, Stalin, Stockwell Underground Station, sydney, Sydney Harbour Bridge, United States, Vietnam