Secrets & Lies. posted by Richard Seymour

The more that comes out on the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes, the more questions that are raised.

Latest news says that he was shot eight times , seven to the head and one to the shoulder. Aside from the fact that this sounds like overkill to me, I would have thought that it was extremely dangerous to shoot someone you suspect of being strapped up with bombs in the body.

At yesterday's well-attended vigil outside Stockwell tube station (one of a number of such events to have taken place), an RMT official confirmed news reports that a tube driver had a gun pointed at his head by police. Did they imagine that RMT drivers were agents of Al Qaeda, or does this point to a total lack of control on the part of the coppers concerned?

Despite what was initially claimed by police, Mr Menezes was followed all the way from Tulse Hill after leaving a block of flats which was being monitored. He was followed, despite the fact that they didn't know precisely which flat they were monitoring. They allowed him to board a bus - no danger to the public there. They now say they challenged him when he tried to buy a tube ticket. Yet, at least one witness has said that when they chased him the police did not identify themselves as police. All they did was don caps reading 'Police' - well, I hope they had it printed backwards so the guy could read it in his mirrors.

I was in the station yesterday, so I got a fairly good idea of how the route was supposed to pan out (tried to take a pic of the vigil where it was visible from in front of the ticket gates at the usual entrance, but the staff didn't like it). He's alleged to have hopped over the ticket gates, ran across the concourse, dropped down into the escalator, scrambled down a whole flight of stairs with police in hot pursuit, turned the corner onto the platform, tripped into the train, been landed on by two blue boys and then been shot. Okay, so he's got right down into the bowels of the tube system and not detonated himself. They've got him on the ground, and piled onto his back, still no explosion. Perhaps that would have been the time to grab him by his hands and yank up his coat to check for explosives, no? I mean, in the interests of not murdering anyone without at least getting a peek at the evidence first? And having seen the evidence, it might be a good idea to spare the guy's life so you can have a chat with him, mano e mano.

It sounds like a vengeful Dirty Harry scenario to me. Who ever taught the Met Police that IDF advice on dealing with terrorism was good? Who ever thought it would be a good idea to recreate Gaza and the West Bank in South London?

A few other things are striking about this. All the speculation about exactly why Mr Menezes ran from the police, while understandable from one perspective, seems to miss the point. He did run, and he wasn't a terrorist. It seems to me that those who want to speculate about whether his visa had run out, thereby making him an 'illegal immigrant', are seeking a way to shift the blame onto him. Bruce Anderson in yesterday's Independent was quite forthright about it: Mr Menezes was "the author of his own misfortune" because his behaviour was allegedly 'unusual'. So, those big-jawed white guys in jeans and t-shirts who didn't identify themselves but did wave guns around were behaving fucking normally were they?

Those who think that shoot-to-kill is a good policy or even a necessary evil have some explaining to do as well. At what point does one pull the trigger? In this case, a guy was selected for monitoring and following quite arbitrarily it seems - he lived in the wrong block of flats and had slightly dark skin, so could well have been one of the Ethiopian or Somalian men the police were supposedly looking for. So, if a guy you have no good intelligence on even runs away from the police, even if they don't identify themselves, this is good enough grounds for revoking the presumption of innocence until proven guilty and publicly executing a man? The fact is, it is hard to conceive of a situation that is anything but contrived that will lead to a would-be suicide bomber being shot. This imaginary situation is rather like the 'ticking clock' scenario invoked to justify torture: inevitably, the justifying clause is never relevant to the ensuing practise.

In an excellent article for The Guardian yesterday, Gary Younge looked at some other examples of emergency legislation that allowed for vast abuses but did little to protect the innocent:

According to Home Office statistics, 97% of those arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act - a series of draconian measures supposed to thwart the IRA - between 1974 and 1988 were released without charge. Only 1% were convicted and imprisoned.

The strike rate since the declaration of the war on terror has not been particularly impressive either. More than 700 people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act since September 11, but half have been released without charge and only 17 convicted. Only three of the convictions relate to allegations of extremism related to militant Islamic groups.

And our allies in this bid to limit freedom at home so that we can ostensibly extend it abroad have not had much more success. According to a recent investigation by the Washington Post, fewer than 10% of the people prosecuted for terrorism were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security. Of those, few had any connection to al-Qaida while the remaining 90% were acquitted or convicted of lesser crimes like immigration violations or making false statements.

The only way to stop would-be suicide bombers would be to know who they are. Otherwise you're just blasting anyone with the wrong skin complexion who has a big coat or wires from an iPod hanging out. And if you know who they are, you are perfectly placed to intervene before it ever gets to the stage of public execution with no trial. And the only way you're going to do that, as Younge says, is to cease the demonological drivel and examine what motivates bombers, how they are likely to decide to blow themselves up etc. That way you can avoid a conflagration. New legislation isn't going to help either. It isn't as if there is a dearth of charges with which one could convict those who would blow themselves up in the tube. Murder, conspiracy to commit murder, carrying explosives etc.

For all the talk of how calm and stoical Londoners have been, those who support shoot-to-kill and emote on behalf of 'The Poor Officer and His Family' strike me as nothing so much as hysterical and irrational, if not bloody-minded and authoritarian.