Shoot to Kill Again. posted by Richard Seymour

So, the Association of Chief Police Officers has decided to publicly applaud their own policy of shooting to kill suspected 'suicide bombers'. All the usual provisions are appended: it's a very difficult decision, it's only an extreme circumstance, It Is Necessary To Destroy The Brain Instantly Utterly, it's shoot-to-kill-to-protect-where-necessary, etc etc. We keep hearing the same lies from the police, and there is nothing particularly sophisticated about it: repetition is key to the ongoing PR exercise. For example, I watched a Met officer explain to Channel 4 News that "we sometimes have to shoot, and we can't shoot in the torso because that's where the explosives are likely to be, and we have to ensure we terminate the operation": hence, fatal shots to the head. No news anchor has ever thought to ask about dead man's trigger, namely the possibility that by taking the shot one faces the risk not only of killing an innocent, but also of ensuring detonation. Some have asked under what circumstances it might be deemed necessary to take a shot:

I asked Chief Inspector Martin Rush who runs the Met's firearms training centre at Gravesend whether his officers actually have to see a suicide jacket, or what they think may be a suicide jacket, before they open fire.

"No", he replied.

This is not the case in Israel where suicide bombers have been a fact of life for many years.

I put the same question to Major General Mickey Levy, the police commander in Jerusalem between 2000 and 2004, who dealt with 42 suicide bombers.

He said his officers had to be sure they could see a suicide vest or explosives before they opened fire.

The present policy of the police is more extreme than that of the Israeli schmucks they were trained by. And the problem is obviously policy, not just error or deviation, partly for reasons I have mentioned above. The one instance of this policy being applied to date is obviously in the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Recall what happened there: Operation Kratos was put into motion when CO19 officers stationed outside a block of flats associated with one of the alleged bombers, Mr Osman Hussein, spotted a man with "mongolian eyes" leaving the block and decided that it was Osman, even though the man who was supposed to be watching was taking a slash and didn't catch him on camera. That identification made, Gold Command gave the okay to kill. The day's events had already been framed, however, by specific instructions in accord with Operation Kratos to intervene with a fatal shot if there was any noncompliance, and certainly if there was any attempt to run. From that point, anyone identified as Osman was likely to be dead very quickly. Despite totally inconspicuous behaviour, ordinary clothing and no sign of being in possession of any explosive, the authorisation had been given to kill. He was witnessed boarding a bus, then disembarking to enter Stockwell tube. Normal pace. Picked up a Metro, went through the gates using an Oyster Card, walked casually down the stairs. Ran a little at the bottom to catch his train. Then having sat down, he was faced with several plain clothes officers pointing guns at him and barking orders. One of them, codenamed 'Hotel 3', had been sitting next to him. He stood up and approached when beckoned, was wrestled with, and was then shot eleven times by two officers. He hadn't acted suspiciously, did not appear to be in possession of a bomb and did not pose an imminent threat. Neither did the tube drive who had a gun pointed at him. It was not "split second decision", but cold-blooded murder, and one prepared and provided for by Operation Kratos. The torrent of bullshit, obstruction and lies from the Metropolitan Police that ensued was an entirely predictable from an organisation that knew it had killed an innocent man entirely within the terms of its own settled policy.

Of course, the media apologetics have hardly been better. Their excuses are absurd: "what if he had been a suicide bomber, then the police would be condemned if they hadn't shot him". Okay, if you want to play at counterfactuals, I can play that game. What if he had been an especially cunning suicide bomber, using his crafty mongolian eyes to devise a dead man's switch just in case anyone did try to put a bullet through his skull? What if he'd been an eight foot tall desert warrior, impervious to bullet wounds? Wouldn't you just risk making him angrier? What if under his hair he was wearing a miniature explosive belt? Wouldn't you feel safer if we simply shaved everyone's head, printed a bar code and installed chip and pin technology? Yeah right - just you wait, you'll be begging for that legislation this time next year.

Update: from Leon Kuhn