7-27-05, 10:20 am
JEAN Charles de Menezes lies dead today.
The 27-year-old electrician was pursued onto the Tube by gun-waving police and held down on the floor of the train while five bullets were pumped into his head.
Jean Charles de Menezes was not a terrorist and he was not a criminal.
He was given no hearing, no trial and no chance before he was brutally executed by employees of the British government, carrying out a shoot-to-kill policy approved by the government and implemented by the Metropolitan Police.
A strategy which, according to reports in the national press, they have developed under the tutelage of the well-known humanitarians of the Israeli security services.
This strategy has led to the needless and pointless death of a carefree young man who had all his life in front of him.
Nothing can excuse this exercise in brutality.
Statements by people who should know better, that the police 'did what they thought was necessary to protect the public' or that the police are in an 'impossible situation' miss the point that Mr de Menezes was a member of the public, no more and no less.
They confuse and exacerbate a dangerous situation.
What has placed the police in this 'impossible situation' is a shoot-to-kill policy which has no place in British society, a policy which gives an armed officer on the street the power of life and death over any person on whom they choose to exercise it, above and beyond the rule of law.
This is not British policing or British justice. It is gun law and hysteria combined and its first victim has been Mr de Menezes.
The parallel between the war in Iraq, in which the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents were caused by an invasion motivated by fear of unknown weapons - which, it turned out, did not exist - and Mr de Menezes, who was summarily executed for fear of unknown weapons - which, it turned out, did not exist - should not be missed.
Mistakes and, in this case, tragic and irreversible mistakes, are almost inevitable.
Police chief Sir Ian Blair has admitted there is a 'shoot-to-kill policy' for tackling suicide bombers and has had the temerity to insist that it will not change, even while admitting that the death of Mr de Menezes was a 'tragedy.'
He claimed that his officers had tried to get Mr de Menezes under control before shooting him.
'We will try and get them under control and that is what this man was being asked to do,' he said.
There is no doubt that Sir Ian is accurate in this, if what he means by getting Mr de Menezes under conrol was three officers piling onto him on the floor of a train and pumping five bullets into his head.
It cannot be restated often enough that a shoot-to-kill policy overrides the presumption of innocence which is central to British law.
Mr de Menezes has paid the ultimate price for a lawless and irresponsible policy which should never have been implemented and must be withdrawn immediately.
In saner times, both the police chief and the Home Secretary would have been called on to resign following the blatant murder of an innocent man in pursuit of an indefensible policy.
With this brazen, warmongering government, that is unlikely.
But this cannot be allowed to continue.
State terrorism is not a defence against terror bombings, it merely demeans those who advocate and carry it out and reduces the country that practises it to the level of the bombers themselves.
The death of Mr de Menezes must be the first and the last time that this disgraceful policy costs the life of an innocent man.
From Morning Star
