Menezes did not run: confirmed

Jean Charles de Menezes, Policing
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From the Sunday Times:

Gareth Peirce, one of Britain’s most prominent defence lawyers, is representing the family of de Menezes against the police. The Independent Police Complaints Commission is studying CCTV footage that caught de Menezes’s last moments. What is already clear is that the initial accounts of his death on July 22 were wrong.

When the shooting at Stockwell Underground station was first confirmed, a senior police source told reporters, off the record, that they had killed one of the would-be suicide bombers who was on the run after the failed July 21 bombings. Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, said that the shooting was “directly linked” to the terrorist operation.

The man, according to the police, was suspect because of his “clothing and behaviour”. He had been followed from a house that had been under surveillance. When he was challenged at Stockwell, he ignored instructions and ran. He had vaulted over the ticket barrier and was wearing a dark bulky jacket that could disguise a bomb.

One witness had de Menezes as an Asian with a beard and wires coming out of his torso. The truth is more mundane. De Menezes, an electrician, was travelling to north London to fix a fire alarm.

He was not wearing what witnesses called a “black bomber jacket”, but a denim jacket. It was about 17C and his clothing would not have been out of the ordinary.

He did not vault a ticket barrier, as claimed. He used a travelcard to pass through the station in the normal way. His family believes that he may have started to run simply because he heard the train pulling in — something Londoners do every day. Indeed, a train was at the platform when he got there.

Special chutzpah award to the unnamed police officer elsewhere in the article:

As one officer said yesterday: “They’ve done a good job for their country. But of course, they are very sad.”

Menezes did not run

Jean Charles de Menezes, Policing
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Nor did he wear a heavy coat, according to his relatives:

Jean Charles de Menezes before he was murdered

Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian shot dead in the head, was not wearing a heavy jacket that might have concealed a bomb, and did not jump the ticket barrier when challenged by armed plainclothes police, his cousin said yesterday.

Speaking at a press conference after a meeting with the Metropolitan police, Vivien Figueiredo, 22, said that the first reports of how her 27-year-old cousin had come to be killed in mistake for a suicide bomber on Friday at Stockwell tube station were wrong.

“He used a travel card,” she said. “He had no bulky jacket, he was wearing a jeans jacket. But even if he was wearing a bulky jacket that wouldn’t be an excuse to kill him.”

Ever since I first read this yesterday, I’ve been thinking about it. Imagine, you’re going to work, walking from your home to the bus, getting off at your local Underground station, use your travelcard to get into the station, you board the train that takes you to work –and all of a sudden you are grabbed from behind, thrown to the ground and before you even realise what the hell is going on, you are shot in the head. Seven times.

Not a nice way to day for poor Jean Charles de Menezes.

In the meantime, for all those who like to play blame the victim, the only thing left is that Menezes had overstayed his visa –if that’s an offense punisble by death, quite a lost of Ozzies in London must be feeling paranoid by now.

But what about his killer? He was sent on a well deserved holiday.

His superiors meanwhile are still in denial about the morality and necessity of this police, which so far hasn’t stopped any suicide bombers, is unlikely to stop any suicide bombers but did murder an innocent man for the crime of erm, not looking at all like a suicide bomber. In fact, police now say that they need not even give a verbal warning before they execute another “suicide bomber” like Menezes….

Marten Toonder died

Comix
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Yesterday, Marten Toonder died at the age of 93. For most of you, unless you’re a) Dutch or b) a fanatic comics reader this will mean nothing, but Toonder was one of the pioneers of the Dutch comic strip, who managed to get even the notoriously insular Dutch literary scene to appreciate him. Granted, it was often a patronising appreciation –in those circles his work was seen as illustrated literature rather than comic strip– but even so, they were the only strips found worthwhile enough to teach in literature lessons.

His most famous strip, which brought him this well deserved appreciation was the Tom Poes strip, usually called the Bommel strips. Tom Poes was a white, usually nude cat, clever, smart and utterly bland whose thunder in those comic adventure strips was stolen early by his friend, the brown teddy bear Oliver B. Bommel, “Heer van stand”, in his eternal checkered coat: dumb, vain, but goodnatured and well intentioned and much more interesting to write stories about. The Bommel strips evolved from fairly straight forward adventure stories to a sort of gentle satire, holding a mirror to Dutch society, in the process developing a huge, memorable cast of sidekicks, villains and foils for Toonder’s humour and satire. The Bommel strips appear in the classic two tier format, with the text below the illustrations, which helped in its acceptation as real literature. It also gave Toonder the room to play around with the Dutch language, which in his hands reached a peak of poetry. He created several new words and expressions: from minkukel (nitwit) to denkraam (thoughtframe), still in general use in Dutch today.

But his influence didn’t stop with the Bommel strips. He was also the founder of a long running, flourishing animation and comic studio, Toonder Studios and created several other classic Dutch strips, though none had the same succes as the Bommel strips. Whole generations of comic artists and writers started in his studios.

The studio was as succesful in cartoons as it was in comics, creating a great many short cartoons promoting Philipsmproducts, as well as in 1983 Holland’s first (and so far only) full lenght feature animation film, based (of course!) on the Bommel strips. This became a classic Christmas staple, being shown on tv during the Holidays for years in a row, until the entire country was heartily sick of it.

Toonder had been more or less retired since 1986, when his last Bommel strip, Het Einde van Eindeloos, “the End of Forever” appeared in the Dutch newspapers. He died peacefully in his sleep.

example of Toonder Bommel work.
Most Bommel adventures ended with a “simple but nourishing meal”. It seems fitting to use this here as well.

Police kill innocent man: the system works

Jean Charles de Menezes, Policing
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Seems to be the conclusion reached by the idiot below, as linked to by Avedon Carol (I’m not giving this moron a link myself):

Many people will take this time to second-guess the London police and British special services. They will note the tragic consequences of a shoot-first policy that killed an apparently innocent man just trying to get to work, although one would expect that an innocent man would have stopped when commanded to do so instead of running for the nearest subway car. The police themselves will now second-guess themselves when it comes to making split-second decisions that could mean death in either direction.

Debate on tactics has its place and its benefits, but when such debate comes, it has to take place in the proper context — and that context is the war which Islamofascist terrorists have declared on the West.

In its way, this shows the folly of treating captured terrorists as if they were POWs. The Geneva Conventions exist to prevent civilian authorities to make these kinds of choices. It forces nations engaged in warfare to clothe their soldiers in recognizable uniforms so that civilians do not face these deadly consequences. The death of Menezes shows the wisdom of summary executions of infiltrators, spies, and saboteurs during wartime in order to discourage their use. The use of deadly force on people in civilian life in part because of a poor choice of outerwear during a hot summer season directly relates to the kinds of attacks that al-Qaeda has conducted on civilian populations.

A healthy dose of blame-the-victim there, with some nice pseudo-macho talk about sacrifices the blogger himself is very unlikely to make. It’s the quintessential rightwing reaction to any incident in which the wrong people –i.e. not themselves or their friends– are victims of the state. I’ve seen a lot of people elsewhere as well saying Menezes was to blame for his own death for wearing bulky clothes and running away when armed people ordered him to stop –and here I thought the death penalty had been abolished in the UK, but apparantly an exception has been made for wearing warm clothing on what is allegedly a summer day.

Police murder innocent man

Jean Charles de Menezes
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This was bad enough when we could still pretend the victim was a dangerous terrorist suspect:

“I saw an Asian guy. He ran on to the train, he was hotly pursued by three plain clothes officers, one of them was wielding a black handgun.

“He half tripped… they pushed him to the floor and basically unloaded five shots into him,” he told BBC News 24.

“As [the suspect] got onto the train I looked at his face, he looked sort of left and right, but he basically looked like a cornered rabbit, a cornered fox.

“He looked absolutely petrified and then he sort of tripped, but they were hotly pursuing him, [they] couldn’t have been any more than two or three feet behind him at this time and he half tripped and was half pushed to the floor and the policeman nearest to me had the black automatic pistol in his left hand.

“He held it down to the guy and unloaded five shots into him.

But then it turned out this was just an innocent Brazilian electrician:

A man shot dead by police hunting the bombers behind Thursday’s London attacks was a Brazilian electrician unconnected to the incidents.

The man, who died at Stockwell Tube on Friday, has been named by police as Jean Charles de Menezes, 27.

Cue many mealy mouthed apologies and talk about “tragedies”, as if this was some kind of unavoidable natural disaster, rather than the murder it was. The BBC on Radio 4 was particularly offensive, with its handwringing about the poor police men who had to take these hard decisions –murder is hard, as the Einsatzgruppen could tell you as well. Oh, and more innocent people might be killed, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, so says police commissioner Ian Blair.

All of which is eagerly lapped up by the media establishment and the pro-war “left”, who swallow everything held in front of them. But blaming the victim is so much easier than resisting the police state now created in Britain. All in the name of fighting terrorism –but what about state terrorism?