451.
I was very angry and extremely saddened this morning when I discovered that the man the police shot in the head yesterday - five times from point-blank range - was an innocent Brazilian electrician who was on his way to work. I was angry when I read eye-witness reports stating that the police had him pinned to the ground when they shot him in the head five times. Yesterday's reports gave the impression that he was shot whilst fleeing - we were led to assume that he was some distance away, and that he was a real threat - with bits of unexploded bomb clearly visible on his body. This is, apparently, not what happened at all. The attempted justifications for what can only be described as an extra-judiciary execution make me even angrier: 'Why didn't he stop when he was told to?', they ask; 'He was running, so he must have been guilty of something', they claim, in an attempt to salve their own conscience at the death of an innocent man. What you would do if you were suddenly confronted by a group of armed men in civilian clothes, all shouting at you in a language that is not your own? A British journalist who was waiting at the train station where this murder took place said he thought that the plain clothed policement were football hooligans chasing a supporter of another team. Put your hand on your heart and say that you wouldn't be tempted to run when confronted with what appears to be a crowd of armed hooligans. Imagine yourself in Rio or São Paulo and this happened to you - would you just accept that the men shouting at you are plain clothed policemen, or would you think that they were part of a criminal gang? Would you wait to be shot, or would you run for your life? The worst part of this whole sorry affair, however, is that the politicians and senior police officers seem to think that pinning someone down and putting bullets in their head is acceptable police practice. I know that in this day and age the police have an extremely difficult job to do, and I know that they are there to protect us from harm. I wouldn't like to imagine what the police officer who pulled the trigger is going through at this moment, knowing that he killed an innocent man. What angers me is that our leaders think that this is a price worth paying in the war against terrorism. How many more innocent people will have to die before we realise that we have let the terrorists win? How many nervous, trigger-happy plain-clothed policemen will there be on our streets before we rail against it and actually seek to address the problems that have made us a target in the first place? How many more freedoms do we have to lose in this unwinnable war? Heads must roll for this death. First to go should be the Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police - Sir Ian Blair - who has defended this indefensible policy. He ought to be followed by Home Secretary Charles Clark, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and by Defence Secretary John Reid. Above all, the man who took us into this war against the wishes of the majority of the British people he is supposed to represent, our Prime Minister - primus inter pares - Tory Bliar, ought to resign and seek forgiveness from the family of the murdered man, and from the famiies of all the innocents - whatever their race, creed or religion and wherever in the world they live - who have died as a result of his decision to take us into an illegal war that has only made the world a much more dangerous place, and which has made this once great country of ours increasingly intolerant, racist, suspicious, scared and illiberal. We are supposed to be fighting to preserve our way of life, but I don't recognise and don't like the Britain we now live in. I fear for the future. The Britain that was worth preserving was a country of unarmed policemen, where there existed a right to privacy and to anonymity; where, even at the height of the IRA campaigns, there was more likelihood of being killed in a train crash than by a suicide bomber. This Britain that we now have is one of trigger happy policemen who, with their superiors' blessing, shoot first then ask questions; a country in which it is okay to shoot people of 'Asian appearance' because they might be terrorists; one in which senior government and security officials, as well as the media, seem only too happy to exploit our fears in order to take more of our freedoms from us. I wonder if we would be so accepting of 'shoot-to-kill' if it was someone we knew who was at the wrong end of the gun - whether or not they were of 'Asian appearance'. Perhaps we should be told.

[27 July 2005] -- I'll own up now and let you all know that the inspiration for this image came all the way from Michigan's Upper Peninsula


Last year I was just wasting ink