Pull the Wool Over Your Own Eyes

Blair is the patsy. He’s a nice big baw-faced dumpling of a man who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. They didnt even tell him they'd killed the wrong man for a day.

A whole day. They'd just shot a Brazilian sparky and they didn't tell him for A DAY.

How does that go?

I. Blair: "Anything happened today I should know about?"
Sarge: "Nah not really".

Next day.

Sarge: "Sir, you knoow how yesterday I said how nothing had really happened you needed to know about? Well there was this one thing..."

The de Menezes case rumbles on fuelled by the fact that it is the godawful ITN News that got the first leak from the IPPC (you know the sort of news that flashes up a huge picture of a goat if it’s a ‘goat story’ just to remind you what a goat is).

But amidst the calls for Blair’s resignation and the questioning of the shoot-to-kill policy (both of which seem so self-evident as to be scarcely worth discussing) two other points are being missed.

One is that what has really happened here is the merger of the police and the army the second of which is the diversionary debate about ‘non-lethal weapons’.

A few years ago people like Lobster magazine were writing about non-lethal weapons and were laughed at as ‘conspiratists’. Now liberals like Menzies Cambell are havering on about how we should be looking at this technology instead. All this does is feed scarey technology through stressed and often corrupt and racist police forces that need to be reigned-in not fired-up.

What happened in Scotland with the G8 as an excuse is now coming to Wales.

On non-lethal stuff see also here.

If this (Menzies) is really the best response to a complete breakdown of operations we are in big trouble.

The more important aspect of the case that everyone is missing is the fact that the Force Firearms Unit (better known by its Specialist Operations designation SO19) - the department of the London Metropolitan Police which provides firearms-related support to the generally unarmed force – was swept aside in this bungled operation.

It was swept aside by the military. When the military displace the civilian police force in a democratic society it's worth more than a vigil.

At the time of the kiling a security agency source said: “This take-out is the signature of a special forces operation. It is not the way the police usually do things. We know members of SO19 have been receiving training from the SAS, but even so, this has special forces written all over it.”

The question this raises is that it really shouldn’t be the toothless IPPC investigating the case it should be a useless inquiry run by some group like Royal Military Police instead.