Gary Younge (Guardian Utd): No tails or tridents

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Monday July 25

No tails or tridents
The bombers look like everyone else, and it is improved intelligence rather than bullets that will weed them out
By Gary Younge

In the Addams Family movie, Wednesday Addams heads off to a fancy dress Halloween party in her regular clothes. "I'm a homicidal maniac," she explains when questioned by Morticia about her attire. "They look like everybody else." Just over two weeks ago Jean Charles de Menezes "looked like everybody else" in London. But on Friday morning in the eyes of the travelling public and the police, he was transformed into a potential "homicidal maniac".

In a clear indication of how terrorism not only destroys bodies but contaminates perceptions, fellow travellers say they saw an "Asian man" with "a bomb belt and wires coming out". What they actually saw was a young Brazilian in a Puffa jacket. The police saw a threat. To them De Menezes looked like another "clean skin" (a perpetrator with no history of previous terrorist involvement or affiliation) on the run and possibly about to act. Having cornered him and pinned him to the ground they pumped five bullets into his head at close range.

In a world where every brown skin is little more than a "clean-skin" waiting to happen, stop and search will inevitably become stop and shoot. The dominant mood that we are better safe than sorry is understandable. But after Friday's incident we are left with one man dead, nobody safe and everybody sorry. If there's one thing we've learned over the past two years, it's that a pre-emptive strike with no evidence causes more problems than it solves.

De Menezes's killing came the day after the police presented Tony Blair with a shopping list of new measures they say they need to tackle terrorism. As though the plea not to allow terrorists to change our way of life does not apply to the authorities, they want to increase the amount of time they can detain a suspect without charge from 14 days to three months. Given that they already have the option of shooting unarmed, innocent people dead in the underground, the police clearly have more power than they can responsibly handle. But De Menezes's death does not make the case against giving police extra anti-terrorist powers - it simply illustrates it.

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