Stop the press. Please. posted by China

Posted by China

The rhetorical devices being used by officials in the de Menezes case are so breathtaking you'd expect their purveyors to blush so hard they burst into flames. But with trusting cow-eyes certain sections of the press just nod, or worse.

'Menezes death "cover-up" doubted'. Ah, the trusty passive voice. The existence of a cover-up is not doubted by anyone in particular, you understand, it's just ontologically a doubtable concept. It's dubious, if you will.

Turns out it's the Brazilian officials who, forced by popular pressure to come to London, are quietly giving Blair and Blair a hand. To be fair, their bolstering of the Met is done with with considerably more virtuosity than the 'crass and insensitive' local bobbies themselves can achieve.

Marvel, for example, as the Brazilian minister of justice, Marcio Pereira Pinto Garcia, manages to smuggle praise for the Met into his backing for those charged with keeping watch on it, stressing that one reason he trusts the IPCC 'completely' is that, as the deputy assistant commissioner of the Met John Yates told him, 'one hour after the incident [the police] sent a note to the IPCC - they were informed since the beginning'. See how honourable and helpful the Met is, how little time it wasted? (Those who cavil that the IPCC has seemed, in fact, rather pissed off with the police's obstruction doubtless have sinister agendas.)

Rest assured that Mr Garcia's elegant rescue is not so subtle that it escapes the BBC's attention. Though this section of the story also, perhaps as a sop to whingers, mentions the fact that the initial police statements and briefings were, y'know, total fucking bullshit, the BBC helpfully stresses this more important exculpatory role of the paragraphs, subtitling them 'IPCC "informed"', just in case we're not clear on the main point.

The BBC doesn't even seem to notice when the pabulum it dutifully regurgitates is contradictory. Thus it quotes Mr Garcia quoting Yates that the only reason the inquiry wasn't handed over for 72 hours was 'because of the mistaken suspicion Mr Menezes was connected with terrorism', but that '[f]rom then on, all the evidence is with the IPCC'. However, just up and to the right of this expression of childlike innocence is a link to the BBC's own fuckridden timeline, which points out that it was on the 23rd of July, one day after he was shot, that 'Scotland Yard says the man ... was not connected to the attempted terror attacks on the capital and expresses its regret'.

So even take Yates at his word, that's 24 hours delay accounted for. What about the 48 hours after that? One unnoticed click away, the BBC makes a nonsense of its own credulousness. Not all journalists can be Pilger or Foot, fair enough, but this is just taking the piss. Surely it would save money for the BBC to simply subcontract its website to the Met, so they can upload their own press releases direct?