YESTERDAY’S De Menezes family press conference gave its view of the Stockwell 2 document drawn up by the IPCC (Independent Police Complaints Commission).
The family welcomed the position of the IPCC that Jean Charles de Menezes was an entirely innocent man.
The IPCC document however states that Sir Ian Blair did not know that Jean Charles de Menezes was innocent a full 24 hours after he was murdered by a police death squad with eight shots to the head, after being falsely identified as being a terrorist suspect.
During that 24 hours he had been retailing a load of lies about Jean Charles that were being used to try and justify the killing.
One of the relatives of Jean Charles alleged that the police were ‘trying to get away with murder’ while the family solicitor said that it was ‘inconceivable’ that Sir Ian Blair did not know, a full 24 hours after the death squad killed Jean Charles, that he was ‘an entirely innocent man’.
If the solicitor is correct and Blair did know the truth, at a time when every Tom, Dick and Harry knew that Jean Charles was an innocent man, then he is a liar, which he denies, and should be sacked, with all those who are supporting this cover up.
It follows, that if this is so, the IPCC is covering up for Ian Blair, as are his fellow leading police officers, in order to preserve one of the leaders of the capitalist state in this country. It also follows that the whole lot should be sacked.
If she is mistaken, and Blair did not know the truth, then his role was to be an incompetent front man for a capitalist state machine whose business was to shoot to kill, while they kept their nominal boss in the dark about what was really happening.
In both cases the outcome must be the same, Blair should be sacked and the evil lying capitalist state organisation that he nominally headed be disbanded and broken up.
In fact what Blair, and his boss, Prime Minister Tony Blair were saying at the time was crystal clear.
This was that they were waging a war against terror.
Such was the severity of this war, the police had the right to shoot to kill terrorist suspects, and there were bound to be mistakes and people killed in error.
If entirely innocent people were murdered because they were mistaken for terrorist suspects, then their families and friends would have to accept that the police had the right to behave in this way and that their innocent relatives had died for a good cause. This is still the unspoken official line that has seen to it that no murder charges were made in the case of Jean Charles or also in the case of the police shooting to death of Harry Stanley.
In fact, since the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes the state and the government insist that ‘terrorism’ and the ‘terrorist threat’ are greater then ever.
This situation is a direct result of the murder of hundreds of thousands of ordinary innocent Iraqis and Afghans by the imperialist forces.
It is true that there are numbers of people who are seeking revenge for these crimes along the lines of ‘Biblical Justice’ – an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
In fact, the only way forward for humanity out of this situation, that has been created by imperialism, is to get rid of capitalism and its imperialist murder machines through socialist revolutions that expropriate the bosses and bankers, and smash up their murderous state apparatuses.
We urge the working people of the west to ally themselves with the peoples of the east to put an end to capitalism and imperialism and to advance to world socialism, replacing the capitalist law of the jungle by fraternal relations between the peoples of the world, on the basis of a worldwide socialist planned economy.