Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos

We're not entirely blameless in the London terror, y'know.

As you all know, July 7th was a rough day for Britain. We know something was afoot by 9am with rumours of electrical surges and explosions on the Underground in London; by 3pm Tony Blair had come forward to admit that London had been attacked by terrorists, and suicide bombers no less. This was suspected as an Al-Qa'aeda attack and what do you know, a month later Al-Qa'aeda themselves owned up to it. 52 people died. Admittedly small fry compared to the 4,000 killed on September 11th 2001, this was nonetheless the first suicide bomber attack in the UK ever and as such left people terrified and spooked.

Two weeks later, as London was coming to terms with all this, another attack happened. Except this time, it was completely lame, with a whopping ONE person injured. OK, so good suicide bombers are hard to find (their line of work doesn't exactly lend itself to repeat performances) but I mean, really. Osman Hussein, the suspect caught in Rome, claimed on capture that the attacks were an imitation and an attempt to scare London: plausible enough given the unsuccessful detonation.

However, it wasn't the names of suspects responsible for the second bomb scare that headlined the news of July 22nd. You see, the police had a suspect in mind, indeed had tracked him to an address and kept watch over him. So certain that he was responsible, they hired four men to pursue him. This doesn't sound so bad so far: police are worried about terrorism and want to catch a potential suspect.

But the plot thickens. These weren't just standard policemen. These were armed marksmen. What with the post-Dunblane ban on guns, this isn't very common in Britain: police aren't known to carry guns. Hell, even the impoverished Menenez family- in BRAZIL- knew that. And why would they? Because their son was the suspect. Yes, despite being BRAZILIAN and having no link to any of the suspects apart from living in the same building as one of them (and this was a block of flats), electrician Jean Charles de Menezes was a marked man. And on July 22nd, the marksmen shot him eight times in the face on a crowded Tube station.

Now, I'm surprised that this wasn't the final straw for the Muslims of this country and we didn't end up with the equivalent of the Rodney King-based LA riots of the early 90s, because here we had a man persecuted not for being a Muslim but for LOOKING like one (oh, that South American/Arabic confusion! I'm so sick of it!- this was the same police that admitted they were institutionally racist post-Stephen Lawrence? NEVER!), and race/hate crimes against Muslims increased significantly since 7/7.

Thankfully, we got none of that (yet), but what the police fail to recognise is that moronic behaviour like this is not "the only way these terrorists will learn!"- it will in fact encourage more of these copycat bombings and further jihadery. Politically, while I can't speak for the families of the victims of London, I would tend to think that they'd want terrorists brought to justice rather than being gunned down in the middle of a train station- after all, the family of Robert McCartney were actually offered the "disposal" of McCartney's killer (by the IRA), and they said no, so you've got to assume that the London terrorist victims would feel the same. On the subject of the IRA, it's a bit rich saying you don't negotiate with terrorists in the same month that you start negotiating the disarment of Sinn Fein, no?

No. I can't solve all the problems surrounding terrorism in a day, nor the problems in Iraq, which is enjoying terrible problems in its conversion to democracy. However, the shoot-to-kill policy is ridiculous and totally unnecessary, and despite its disastrous debut killing entirely the wrong person in front of a large audience, the police are going to maintain it. We're not going to solve anything using this technique, and things are going to get a whole lot worse with no real results if it continues. We don't need a police state, we need good police.

I'll be back with something similarly vitriolic next time... whenever it is...

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Dark Tower is written by Joe "Shiori Coybito" Wilson.

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