Belt Up

Apparently, in June 1,800 drivers were stopped in four counties for not wearing seatbelts. The seatbelt law has been in place for more than a decade now, and yet still people don’t wear them – quite honestly, I’m surprised that the figure is as low as it was.

Now it’d be nice if the same could be done for the immense number of fuckwits I see every day still using their mobile phones while driving…

60 Years On

Sixty years ago, the US used atomic weapons against Japan. The BBC has a set of photos of Hiroshima now and then, some of which are really quite affecting.

Oddly enough I was watching an episode of West Wing from Season Five a couple of nights ago that talked about nuclear weapons. (It was “The Warfare of Genghis Khan, should anyone care) Within it, they said that the US was still the only country to have actually used a nuclear bomb in anger – which is true, of course, but I’d never actually thought of it like that.

Effnic

I’ve been thinking a lot (ok, a bit) about the latest news regarding stopping and searching people based on their ethnic background, which was in all the news and papers yesterday. Personally, I don’t understand the entire aspect of “we’ll do it more based on whether we think you’re Muslim or not”, which seems to be the main thrust of the argument.

If you’re publicly targetting one sector of society more than others, then any potential threat will do itself up to not fit in with that stereotype. In fact,the police are probably less likely to catch anyone using this method than they are by just saying “We’re increasing the likelihood that anyone could be stopped and searched at random”.

Of course, the Metropolitan police have always had a bit of a preference for singling out certain ethnicities for their stop and search programmes and so on. So I suppose it shouldn’t really be a surprise that they’d seize (pardon the pun) on this set of events as an excuse to target the same sections of the community that protested last time the stop and search became overly politicised.

</cynic>

Suicide?

As I said in the previous post, the New York Times has a piece debating whether the bombers actually meant to commit suicide (just type access for both username and password, if it asks) – which gives a lot of the resultant hysteria an interesting perspective.

Investigators raising doubts about the suicide assumption have cited evidence to support this theory. Each of the four men who died in the July 7 attacks purchased round-trip railway tickets from Luton to London. Germaine Lindsay’s rented car left in Luton had a seven-day parking sticker on the dashboard.

A large quantity of explosives were stored in the trunk of that car, perhaps for another attack. Another bomber had just spent a large sum to repair his car. The men carried driver’s licenses and other ID cards with them to their deaths, unusual for suicide bombers.

In addition, none left behind a note, videotape or Internet trail as suicide bombers have done in the past. And the bombers’ families were baffled by what seemed to be their decisions to kill themselves.

While some of these clues could be seen as the work of men intent on covering their trail, some investigators increasingly believe that the men may have been conned into carrying the bombs onto the trains and leaving them, thinking they were going to explode minutes later.
…
The suicide question has major implications not only for the investigation, but also for the assessment of the terrorist threat that London faces. If the attacks were a suicide mission, they would be the first suicide bombings on European soil, and signal a dangerous new threat. Suicide could indicate a higher level of commitment and point to the existence within Britain of extremists willing to die for a cause. If the men were not suicide bombers, some of the most basic assumptions of the investigation would change. On one level, the idea makes the plot less ominous. It is much easier to recruit “mules” who will carry and deposit explosives than people who are prepared to die

I must admit, I find a lot of the views given to be quite convincing.

We Come In Peace

Apparently, armed police don’t need to give a warning to someone they suspect of being a suicide bomber – if nothing else it means that I suspect the death of Jean Charles de Menezes won’t be the last such occurrence of this sort. (<cynic>particularly if the police marksman wants a free holiday</cynic>) In addition, the New York Times is speculating about whether the bombers were actually suicide bombers at all, which I’ll write about later.

Yes, sure, a suicide bomber is likely to try and detonate their device if they know that they are being followed by police, as the Guardian article says. But equally if a suspect isn’t actually a suicide bomber then they’re far more likely to stop when being told they’re in the sights of armed police right now than they are to keep moving.

Thing is, to my mind the warning isn’t just for the sake of the suspect – it’s for the sake of the armed officer, too. If the warning’s been given, and the suspect continues to act in the same way, or to make moves to detonate their device, then it’s a justified act to stop them. If they’re not, or it turns out that (as in the case last week) they’re innocent but still ran, then the officer can at least have the reassurance that yes, they were warned, and if they ignored that warning then that’s their choice. But at least they were warned– they had the choice to stop, to halt the chain of events. Without that warning, the shooting of an innocent suspect is – to me – plain murder.

The story of Menezes’ shooting/murder will come out in the end, I’m sure – but already it’s looking smellier and smellier, the more the police backtrack and attempt to justify their actions.