THE Metropolitan Police chief, Blair, has already gone, his going made inevitable by the disgraceful attitude that he took to the police murder of Jean Charles de Menezes, for which no police officer has stood trial.
He said just hours after the murder that the police had no alternative but to do what they had done, and championed the shoot to kill order as the only way to deal with terrorist suspects, even conceding that more innocent men or women could be shot dead by police officers who were doing the right thing, convinced that if they did not shoot to kill, there would be a suicide bombing.
His line was that there was no other way to deal with the situation and that this line was supported by the Blair government.
It was no accident that he was Prime Minister Blair’s favourite policeman.
Both Blair’s have now gone, but police chief Blair’s lieutenants still remain, and are proudly flying the same flag, that the police did nothing wrong on the day and that they were right to shoot to kill Jean Charles de Menezes.
What is being championed here is the right of the capitalist state to shoot to kill all those that they consider to be a threat to the capitalist order of society.
Yesterday at the Oval Inquest, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick, who was promoted after the police killing to her present post, took the floor at the inquest.
She said: ‘If you are asking me did we do anything wrong or unreasonable, then I don’t think we did.’
Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, was shot 11 times, seven of them in the head, because the police suspected him of being a terrorist.
Ms Dick was named as the ‘decision maker’, and dutifully trotted out the same discredited line that the police have adopted as their own since the day of the murder.
When asked what went wrong, she replied by switching any blame to the ‘nation’, saying ‘One thing that clearly went wrong was that we didn’t manage as a nation to prevent those attacks.’
It was the nation’s fault!
She added: ‘Mr de Menezes was a victim of terrible and extraordinary circumstances that day and afterwards.
‘He was extremely unfortunate to live in the same block as Hussain Osman, desperately unfortunate to look very like Hussain Osman, and the things he did in all innocence, the way he behaved getting on and off the bus, contributed to our assessment – my assessment – of him as a bomber.’
What flows from this is that if you live in the same block of flats as a terrorist suspect, you are in deadly danger.
If you look ‘very like’ the suspect, which incidentally Jean Charles didn’t, since the suspect was black, you are also in deadly danger.
And then if you compound these crimes, if you ‘behave’ ‘getting on and off a bus,’ then you are as good as dead.
After this supreme analysis, Dick concluded: ‘But if you are asking me did we do anything wrong or unreasonable, then I don’t think we did.’
The message is: here stands the state, we are inviolable, we are above the law, and those who we kill in the interests of the state are guilty until proven innocent – we are innocent full stop.
This is why not one police killer has stood trial charged with murder.
Yesterday’s parade of arrogance does not even seek to reckon with the verdict in the ludicrous trial of Scotland Yard on the grounds that the killing breached the health and safety laws, which the state was forced to put on.
Even this comedy produced a verdict that London’s Metropolitan Police was guilty of endangering the public over the fatal shooting of a man officers mistook for a suicide bomber.
A jury found that the force broke health and safety laws when officers pursued Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes to a Tube station and shot him seven times. It was fined £175,000 with £385,000 costs over the 22 July 2005 shooting.
Even this sham verdict was ignored by the officers who have given evidence, so far, and who have said that they were not to blame and did nothing wrong.
Blair has gone and now all of the police death squads and their commanders must be sacked. No capitalist government will carry out this task, since capitalism cannot survive without death squads.
Only a workers government will disband the police death squads and punish those who organise and lead them.
