When Terrorists carry a badge

It ain't that - pretty at all.

To say the latest details on the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes in the London Tube are disturbing would be a gross understatement. It turns out the cops lied and the video tapes from the Tube stations have mysteriously disappeared. The facts as they stand are, this 27 year old kid was not wearing a bulky coat, did not jump a turnstile and was not running away when he was pinned down by the police and shot in the head seven times.

But hell, maybe this shoot-to-kill policy will stop terrorism after all. The terrorists won't need to bother to build bombs and risk their own lives as long as law enforcement is willing to kill innocent civilians for them.

As Avedon so astutely says:

So let's recap: A Caucasian man is minding his own business, leaves his home for work, catches a bus, uses his Oyster card to get to a train platform, gets on a train, and gets killed. Let's see what excuses the shoot-to-kill right-wingers have for that.

Indeed. One can hardly wait to pop a Dramamine and ride the spin on this development.