AT A TIME when his office is on trial over the state execution of Jean Charles de Menezes, Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair has turned up at the House of Commons to demand the right for the police to hold suspects for up to 90 days without having to charge them.
You would think that the police chief – still living under the shadow of what happens when the state gives police officers life or death powers over suspects (Jean Charles de Menezes was just a suspect, who had already been found guilty by the police death squad commanders) – would think twice, or would be too embarrassed to demand more life or death powers, this time placing a person in the hands of the police for continuous interrogation for up to 90 days.
It is common knowledge that a large number of people, if they had to spend that amount of time in the hands of secret police interrogators, would be prepared to sign anything.
Blair obviously feels that he can act with impunity and that whatever the verdict in the ‘Health and Safety trial’ over De Menezes, he is one of the untouchables.
His message for the MP’s committee was that the number of terrorist plots in the UK is ‘mounting’ and the ‘magnitude’ of their ambitions growing. Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair gave these warnings to MPs, without having to provide any evidence for them.
At yesterday’s session Blair conceded that there have been no cases so far where detention beyond 28 days had been needed, but he said he was sure that this was only a matter of time.
Giving his order of the day to the House of Commons, the police chief said: ‘The prospect that we will need more than 28 days some time in the not too distant future, is so real a prospect that Parliament needs to consider it.’
Where this road leads to is many more deaths at the hands of the police, and the growth of a shoot-to-kill policy, and its development into a pre-emptive shoot to kill policy.
One branch of the UK police force, the RUC, is the living proof of this.
During the British state’s ‘war on terror’ in the north of Ireland against the Irish nationalists, both shoot to kill and pre-emptive murder became the rule, and a cover-up is being continued to this day by the state.
Yesterday demands were made by a senior coroner for the release of inquiry reports into the shoot-to-kill RUC death squads, reports that were made after investigations by serving British police officers.
Coroner John Leckey has formally requested that Sir Hugh Orde hand over the Stalker and Sampson reports into police killings, for the inquests to proceed.
Former Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police Sir John Stalker was brought in to investigate the shoot to kill policy, and was later replaced by Colin Sampson, Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police.
Leckey was speaking at a preliminary inquest into the deaths, which took place more than 25 years ago.
The inquests are into the November 1982 deaths of IRA men Sean Burns, Eugene Toman and Gervaise McKerr near Lurgan, County Armagh.
Police fired 109 bullets into a car they claimed had crashed through a checkpoint.
It later emerged the three occupants were suspected of involvement in the killings of three RUC officers in a bomb a fortnight earlier, and had been under observation. Leckey also plans inquests into the death of Catholic teenager Michael Tighe, a suspect who was shot dead by police at a hay shed near Craigavon, County Armagh, in November 1982, and suspected INLA men Roddy Carroll and Seamus Grew, shot dead near Armagh in December 1982.
As yet he has not been able to get hold of the reports. What happened in the north is a warning of where the present ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy is leading to.
The only solution to the emergence of capitalist state death squads is a socialist revolution to smash and break up that state to go forward to a workers state and socialism.
