Jean Charles de Menezes

photos:reuters, daily mail(UK) of Charles de Menezes, and his mother Maria.


July 2005,from Wikipedia's entry:

Initially, police falsely claimed that he was wearing bulky clothing, had vaulted the ticket barriers and run from police. The government also issued information that he was staying in the UK illegally. It soon become clear that de Menezes did not vault and run from the police, but police did not correct the misinformation until the correct information was leaked to the press. They later issued an apology, saying that they had mistaken him for a suspect in the previous day's failed bombings and acknowledging that Menezes in fact had no explosives and was unconnected with the attempted bombings.

August 21, 2005, from The Sunday Times,
Executed: "Anatomy of a police killing"

The real story of how an innocent man was shot by police is only now beginning to emerge. Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas investigates the accusations of incompetence and cover-up The day after Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by police at Stockwell Underground station, his grieving relatives and one of his closest friends filed into a mortuary to identify his body. They found him covered in a thin sheet and his face, unmarked, was ghostly white.

Gesio de Avila, a friend and fellow worker, looked carefully over the body, confused by de Menezes’s peaceful repose. Where were the wounds from the seven bullets to the head that killed him?

“Every bit of colour had left his face, but apart from that it was normal,” de Avila said last week. “There was a bandage on his head behind his ear and when I looked closer, I realised what had happened. He had been shot several times in the back of the head. It was like he had been killed by bandits.”

wikipedia, cont'd:

...Later, a security agency source said: “This take-out is the signature of a special forces operation. It is not the way the police usually do things. We know members of SO19 have been receiving training from the SAS, but even so, this has special forces written all over it.” [1]

[1] Cusick, James. "A COVER-UP? AND IF SO ... WHY?", Sunday Herald, 21 August 2005. (expired link)

December 2005 – Rigoberto Alpizar was fatally shot at Miami International Airport by two United States of America Federal Air Marshals in similar circumstances.

BBC:"Probe after Miami airport killing"

Investigations have begun after US air marshals on board an American Airlines flight on Wednesday shot and killed a man who started acting suspiciously.

May 11th, 2007, CNN: LONDON, England (AP) --

No disciplinary action will be taken against 11 officers involved in a surveillance operation that ended in the death of a Brazilian man who was mistaken for a terrorist and gunned down in the subway days after the 2005 London transit bombings, a police commission said Friday.

Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, was shot seven times in the head by Scotland Yard anti-terror officers as he sat on a London subway train July 22, 2005 -- two weeks after four suicide bombers killed themselves and 52 commuters on three subway trains and a bus, and a day after a failed set of attacks.

Crisis=Opportunity=Crisis*

CBS News had a special 1 hour edition tonight with Katie Couric live from Blacksburg, presumably so everybody can see for themselves how much she cares. Hey, screw the ratings boost the news gets when something interesting and terrible happens. Yes, what happened today is genuinely horrible, but how are the news networks different from more run of the mill ambulance-chasers?



As I think I've written before, I don't think George Bush,jr is stupid. He's strikes me as someone who, though narrow-minded and incurious about things that don't strike him as immediately interesting, is generally shrewd with regard to things that do matter to him. He/Cheney/Rove does(do?) strike me as someone(s) who will look at the horrible events at Virginia Tech this morning and see political opportunity, and I have a certain queasy feeling about it.

I could well see the white house calling for some ostensibly benign sounding legislation, like the "Safe Campus Initiative" or something. Legislation designed to reinforce the Patriot Act and give federal officials greater powers to inspect college facilities, including the personal effects of students, college computer systems, etc. I could even see the Bushies vaguely suggesting they'd even maybe, kind of, of sort of, maybe favor some sort of gun control.. They'd do this indirectly through a surrogate, say Elizabeth Dole or Arlen Specter. Then they'd quickly backtrack, and point out they only meant on college campuses, and maybe not even there, etc. But by then, you'd have a bunch of democratic senators who'd taken the bait, finding themselves hectored by the supposedly liberal media for not supporting the administration's initiative, now only a design to enable the feds to more easily snoop on students and faculties. Dick Morris used to call it "triangulation."

Less cynically,Helena Cobban on the events at Virginia Tech, here.



Above: more from CBS's 4.16 home page.


*I understand that the notion that the Chinese character for crisis means opportunity is not really accurate, but it still makes for a nice reference.