Met Police intimidated whistleblower. posted by Richard Seymour

Just saw ITN's interview with Lana Vandenberghe, the whistleblower who leaked information about the Metropolitan Police's shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Like one of the ITN journalists who reported her leak, Vandenberghe was arrested for no particular good reason, and eventually released without charge. There had been some possibility that a prosecution would ensue - but that has been dropped.

Lana Vandenberghe said that ten police officers bust into her house, breaking down a door, and charged in. She said that they were bullying and aggressive and treated her as "the worst kind of criminal", and that she was kept in a filthy cell. There was a toilet, and also a camera positioned to see everything one might do - but no toilet paper. They boys at the station must have had some japes over that conundrum. She then lost her house and her job, and had to be treated for depression.

Vandenberghe had seen the tapes - the ones that were supposed to have disappeared:

"He wasn't a terrorist at all, he was just a normal guy, wearing normal jeans and a jacket, going to work.

"And when I saw the videos, then I saw the state after he was shot, my heart ... I just thought, 'oh my God, this could be my daughter'."

"I knew from what I read and from what I learnt that it was a lie, and it appalled me that the police or the Met were not coming to light and saying we were wrong, this was a mistake."

Oh, by the way - remember immediately following the shooting that a number of folks were trying to incriminate Menezes, suggesting with a knowing wink and an indulgent nod that he must have done something? There was all that palaver about his passport with the allegedly forged stamp, and a former bigwig at the Met said on ITN - even as the police officially admitted he was totally innocent - that he must have been doing something. If nothing else, his behaviour was weird and therefore, according to Independent columnist Bruce Anderson, he was "the author of his own misfortune" (penalty for weird behaviour, even if fabricated: death by a Met firing squad). Then, in January, a story came out suggesting that Menezes had been behind a rape, and then that turned out to be bullshit? Well, also note that this claim was leaked to the press by the police, as was practically every other false allegation made in the course of this. The cops are perfectly happy to leak false information, provided it enables them to wipe some of the blood off their fingers and onto the victim.

Put it like this: if Vandenberghe had not released this information, the press would still, with doe-eyed credulity and a doleful sense of duty, be retailing the police's lies about what happened. People go on and on about this being an 'unfortunate tragedy', a sad instance of 'collateral damage' and so on. One must understand, we are told, the terrible pressure the police were under. As detail after detail has emerged, these excuses have become more and more greasy. And after everything the police have done to cover up the truth, to intimidate those who reveal it, to slander the victim as he lies in his grave, to heap calumny and deceit upon the six feet of earth that cover him - after all of this, it seems to me that it's a tiny bit less acceptable to blubber about the onerous burden of the police "marksman", and to prate of the necessity to "get behind" the police.