The police offers who executed Jean Charles de Menezes are back on active duty. It doesn’t surprise me.
The officers from SO19 in question saw the threat of a man who might in the wrong kind of lighting have passed for a paki with heavy clothing and a rucksack with wires hanging out. They decided to put several bullets into his head and now they are free to do that again.
Their behaviour is not as difficult to explain as we might think. People ordered to do things by an authority will frequently violate all the norms of “decent” human behaviour. If you don’t know about the Milgram Experiment, you should certainly look it up. It partly explains the behaviour of the Nazis who were “only following orders”. Its conclusions are certainly not palatable. It also teaches us a very important lesson – be very careful with civil liberties. If we allow our governments to erode them, then the execution of Jean Charles de Menezes will not be the exception; worse still, in the future, it will again be possible for such killing to be justifiable by the powers-that-be.
There are a million things that went wrong. Nobody is going to answer for them. That’s democracy today.
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Thanks for pointing this out. There’s always a tendency to forgot such incidents because most cannot be bothered to care..
Something unrelated I also wanted to bring to your attention, check the link:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3261125,00.html#n
Interesting
That there is a cover up is undeniable. That inadequate little men in positions of power, fearing for their well-paid jobs, are misleading and lying to the public — is also undeniable. That Blair abrogates responsibility when he should be calling for the truth and censure where deserved is well documented. In sum, this event will go unpunished and the worse aspects of our society will gain courage from this fact.
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