The Metropolitan Police Authority, 'an independent authority that scrutinises the work of the London police force', has issued a bold indictment of the Met's conduct after the extrajudicial execution of Jean Charles de Menezes:
Authority member Jenny Jones said it should have been "an immediate priority" for police to clarify the information after the 22 July shooting.One suspects Authority member Jenny Sparks might have had something a bit more trenchant to say on the subject, followed by the summary electrocution of Sir Ian Blair and sundry other criminal elements.Meanwhile, the death-defying mendacity continues apace, Sir Ian (an anagram, btw, for 'raisin'; coincidence? I think not) taking the bit firmly in the teeth he so relishes lying through, after several days of bitchslapping by the media:
'The thing that I would want to say is that of all the allegations made in the last couple of days, the matter I would most want to reject is the concept of a cover-up.'Well yes, I don't doubt you would very much want to reject that allegation. I don't think anyone's asking if you want to reject it so much as whether or not you have a hope in hell of getting away with rejecting it. Which, sadly, it looks increasingly likely he will; as the Beeb noted yesterday, nobody important is calling for his resignation. Only, you know, the people whose son his boys butchered.I do love when they lie about the lying. It all takes on a kind of psychedelic hall-of-mirrors effect, like if they nest enough lies around each other, eventually the outermost lie will in fact be a truth, because it double-triple-quadruple-negates the lies inside it. That's just a theory though; I've never seen it pulled off in practice.Not content with building his personal Mighty Ziggurat of Lies, Sir Ian is shamelessly exploiting the July 7th bombing victims for a classic Look Over There gambit, exhorting people 'not to let the shooting overshadow the deaths of 52 victims of the London bombers.'
'Tragic as the death of Mr Menezes is, and we have apologised for it and we take responsibility for it, it is one death out of 57."The context here is the largest criminal inquiry in English history with 52 innocent victims dead, still double figures of people whose lives have been wrecked, four dead bombers and we can't let that one tragic death outweigh all others.'Leaving aside the fact that he appears to have taken the curious step of including the dead bombers in his sympathy-tally purely for the purpose of boosting his Deaths Which Outweigh Menezes's Death count, he fails to acknowledge the salient differentiating factor. To wit, while the other 56 deaths are all being vigorously pursued in 'the largest criminal inquiry in English history', Lucky 57's death, at the hands of those very inquirers, is the object of a criminal cover-up by same.It's a detail, but I think it's relevant.
You Tell 'Em, Jenny