On July 22 this year a young Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, was killed by police guarding the Stockwell underground station in London. At first the killing was justified by the police who said De Menezes had been wearing a bulky anorak, had refused to stop when challenged for questioning, had leapt over a barrier and run down into the underground station. The police said they had no option but to pursue him, right on to a train and then, as he sat in his seat, shoot him in the head seven times.
As it has turned out, the police officers’ claims, for the most part, are believed to be grossly exaggerated. However, the police policy that led to the killing has been defended with great vigour and a measure of lofty arrogance by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, yet another odious Blair on the English scene — this one Sir Ian. He has tried to delay probes into the death, to have these done “internally”. Wiser heads have intervened and the police officers who did the chasing and shooting could well be punished. This won’t bring back De Menezes, but it will look good and responsible.
Any reasonable police authority, faced with the appalling evidence of the De Menezes incident, would realise how dangerous it is to give excessive powers to its officers. Not so for Blair or, for that matter, the Metropolitan Police Authority and the Crown Prosecution Service. The British Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, has gone even further, by issuing an edict to armed police officers right across England and Wales. If these officers have good reason to believe someone is about to detonate a bomb, they are entitled to shoot-to-kill.
I’ve been sent an article written by Alasdair Palmer, public policy editor for the English Sunday Telegraph. It’s headed “Is Torture Always Wrong?” In it Palmer says that utilitarian logic is being used to justify the British government’s shoot-to-kill policy. Hundreds of lives could be saved by shooting a suspected suicide bomber. Therefore shooting-to-kill is regarded as rational, ethical and legal. I would add that it’s also supremely stupid. Suicide bombers will easily devise some means of making sure their ordinance detonates whatever happens to themselves — including being shot. They’re out there to die, anyway. It’s the bomb that must flourish.
Palmer points out that the same utilitarian logic may also be used to justify the use of non-lethal torture to extract information — something like the location of a radioactive bomb — which also could save hundreds of lives. There is inconsistency in ruling that it’s quite okay to kill someone merely on suspicion but not at all okay to submit someone to the techniques of non-lethal torture — also on suspicion.
This is because torture of any kind whatsoever is completely out of the question. No judges, no Metropolitan Police Authorities or Home Secretaries will risk deep staining of their ethical purity by having anything to do with torture. Torture is a very bad call. It’s what barbarians do, not knights of the realm. No amount of logic, utilitarian or otherwise, modifies this stance. As a philosopher friend pointed out to me, the act of torturing is of itself so repugnant, so offensively immoral it defiles the very humanity of the torturer. It is very tempting to argue that in a world as distorted as that of the terrorist, moral arguments are something of a luxury.
Palmer visits all the arguments. In 1995, torture by the Phillippines’ intelligence services yielded information that, when handed on to the Americans, helped foil an al-Qaeda plot involving the hijacking and crashing of 11 planes, the taking of many lives. British intelligence services have used non-lethal torture — disorientation, sleep deprivation, stress positions, loud music, “white” noise — when interrogating IRA suspects, and claim that the results were reliable.
The arguments against any form of torture involve our old friend, the slippery slope. Assign police the right to deprive someone of his sleep and a few weeks down the line special anti-terrorist investigators of the Paddington Green Get-the-Muslim-Squad will be dipping him in boiling oil or connecting a Yamaha generator to his balls. Sir Ian will have nothing to do with such time-wasting.
With the shoot-to-kill policy the death sentence has now, in effect, been reinstated in England. In this case the Old Testament injunction about eyes and teeth, so often used to make the death sentence appear God-ordained, has been spun-up to read: a life for an unquantifiable number of other lives. Better still, the powers of prosecution, trial, judge, jury, sentencing and execution are now invested in a single police officer who, in a matter of seconds and by simply pulling a trigger, can circumvent the whole tiresome matter of due process. Best of all, suspected criminals may now be shot before they commit a crime. How’s that for a slippery slope?
Those who, like Jean Charles de Menezes, are yet to be executed by this new, one-size-fits-all, shoot-to-kill method, will be in exactly the same New Labour bracket of care afforded a slavering dog that looks like it’s about to bite another dog.