[lbo-talk] Yobs in uniform

Dwayne Monroe idoru345 at yahoo.com
Thu Aug 18 12:57:58 PDT 2005


I think it's important, as a cautionary tale, to remember how quick some of us were to credit the London police's action and expound on the general usefulness of the idea of shoot-to-kill as a counter terrorist technique.

Oh, who am I kidding with this vagueness? It wasn't "some of us"; it was pretty much just Wojtek "here's where I part company with the left" Sokolowski.

Now we know the entire bloody operation -- from start to finish -- was extraordinarily sloppy and ill planned. Mr. de Menezes was essentially executed for going about his normal day in the midst of trigger happy, scared, obviously un-equipped to tell real threats from phantoms, officers.

Which means, I think, that creating a neutralization policy centered almost entirely around the use of deadly force without also working tirelessly to make sure your 'intelligence' is diamond solid and operational sloppiness has been eliminated makes tragedy almost inevitable.

Now, since sloppiness and poor intelligence appear to be the standard operating procedure of many counter-terrorist efforts (at least, many of the ones we've seen thus far from the Bush admin and steady-on co-pilot Blair) it seems caution -- by which I mean being less eager to say, 'yes, by all means, whatever is necessary to stop these terrorists' -- is super warranted.

This is what I meant when I said, again and again, during one of the earlier threads on this topic, that those who co-signed -- if only in theory -- to this ac tion were ignoring the real-world implications of their tacit approval.

.d.

---------

http://monroelab.net/ <<<<<>>>>> "Get outta that spaceship and fight like a man!"



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list