An independent witness to the incident, who does not want to be named, said in his statement: “I saw an armed officer…holding a black gun about 50 cm long and pointing this at the men on the bike.” He said he had heard a male voice shouting “shoot him, shoot him”. He said he also heard one of the brothers say “are you going to shoot me again?”

The police are watching thousands of terror suspects? Suspect who you want; my suspicions are of a new wave of state terror legislation.

The civil rights pressure group Liberty published a report this morning revealing that police powers to lock people up for a month without having to charge them already go well beyond those of comparable countries - including the U.S., and also including Turkey, a country that can much more legitimately complain of a terror problem but also with a well-deserved reputation for disrespect of human rights. The Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has previously complained that such a comparison would be so complicated as not to be worth bothering with - unsurprising, given her hope of getting the 28-day limit extended “before Christmas”.

A standard response to people worried about giving the police too much power is “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to be worried about”. While it’s clearly absurd to suggest that the law is an infallible judge and enforcer of right and wrong, this happy absurdity belies an ugly truth. For now at least, if you’re “white” you have nothing to be worried about. While the limited use of terror laws to stifle free speech have, by now, been well publicised, they have mainly served to harrass Muslims.

The Kahar brothers, apparently threatened with summary execution in the incident described above, have been victims of another arbitrary police attack before, the infamous Forest Gate raid where one of them did take a bullet, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. I don’t need to document the uniformed Muslim-bashing that goes on under the guise of fighting terror, surely, it’s so uncontroversial it’s even come to the attention of a parliamentary Joint Committee, and yet rather than standing up for our Islamic friends and neighbours we’ve allowed the ‘Muslim community’ to be scapegoated, isolated and, justifiably on the defensive.

At a Stop The War teach-in last month, I attended a talk by a young Muslim lawyer (sorry dude, I forgot your name) who’s working to help people understand the terror legislation, the inherent contradictions and the ways of coping with them. For him, this fear of harrassment explained the under-representation of Muslims in activist circles. There are things I say on this blog, and in real life, that a Muslim simply could not get away with without being labelled a terror suspect, without facing a very real risk of prosecution and persecution. That’s to a large extent the reality, and to an even larger extent the perception. Small wonder, then, that often the only Muslims daring to speak out on anything are those who seek not to condemn, but to justify the excesses and complexes of the ruling class.

(Graffiti from Jewish settlers in Hebron, via Chest Doc In Palestine)

Of course, the last thing one can demand of the racist is consistency, and I don’t want to pander to ‘Clash of Civilisations’ lunacy by making this all about the Muslims. In truth, the identity of the feared and despised Other is as mutable as the alliances in Orwell’s 1984. We fear the Muslims now, and there’s a growing subsection of the media devoted to proving that we always did; take, for example, the disgusting new BBC series Clash of Worlds, rewriting British Imperial history - and even, shamelessly, the Naqba - in terms of a “collision” between the liberal Christian West and the fanatical hordes of Islam. The thinking man, meanwhile, is able to distinguish between different types of Muslim, and may reserve his inaccurate fear and loathing for the Wahhabi alone.

But once you start drawing up categories of people to fear and to loathe, it’s hard to stop. The Muslim makes for a particularly useful demonic other, and we shouldn’t pretend that The War Against Terror has been mere business as usual - it’s a definite escalation of racism, tied in with militarism in a way that no such complex has been for decades, and we should definitely all be thinking about the ‘F’-word about now - but we nor should we pretend he’s the only one.

For one thing, and it’s a theme I’ll be coming back to, the Islamophobia of the press and the intelligencia is often chillingly reminiscent of the anti-semitism of old. The Holocaust, it seems, was so shocking as to put us permanently on guard against the age-old European hatred of the Jew, but the mindsets that had incubated and legitimated Nazism had never gone away. All that fury that had once been directed at the Jews had to be turned somewhere, and ended up being aligned with that subset of Jews most amenable to fascism, the settlers of Israel, and against our new common enemy, the Muslim Arab.

But I digress. The point is, racism and xenophobia never left us.

Though it’s pretty much taboo to say so openly, the thinly-coded equation between Black people and criminals is common currency in the mainstream. What I think was Tony Blair’s last speech as Prime Minister that didn’t concern the topic of Tony Blair as Prime Minister was one blaming Black on Black crime on Black gang culture. Don’t fail to notice the fact that he considers the negroes’ biggest problem to be the lack of strong father figures - the cult of patriarchal authority is what a certain type of White male is all about - but seriously, get a load of this:

We need to stop thinking of this as a society that has gone wrong - it has not - but of specific groups that for specific reasons have gone outside of the proper lines of respect and good conduct towards others and need by specific measures to be brought back into the fold.

Could these ’specific measures’ be anything like that which Martin Amis considers ‘the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’? We could go on and on (and, at some point, I probably will) about the paranoia with which any migrants are greeted, but let’s spare a thought too for the perenially-hated perenial migrants, the Gypsies.

Hitler’s race-science quackery was not enough to justify their extermination, and he only sold this one to the racially pure middle classes through bourgeois property concerns. How can the existence these wandering tramps and theives be reconciled with a world of wage slavery or private property? Or, as recently rehashed by Italian politician Gianfranco Fini:

Mr Fini said Gypsies considered “theft to be virtually legitimate and not immoral” and felt the same way about “not working because it has to be the women who do so, often by prostituting themselves”.

In an interview with the daily Corriere della Sera, he claimed Roma “had no scruples about kidnapping children or having children [of their own] for the purposes of begging”. Mr Fini, the leader of the ultra-conservative National Alliance and until last year his country’s deputy prime minister, added: “To talk of integration with people with a “culture” of that sort is pointless.”

Indeed. Fini’s lunacy passes for the norm in much of Eastern Europe, but he’s really not far off Michael Howard or the leader columns of the Sun either. In Britain too, Gypsy-bashing is if anything an even more legitimate form of racism than that directed at Muslims. Anyone seen the film Snatch, for example?

If the police are there to uphold the values (now there’s a word that should instantly put your guard up!) of society, then how can we expect them to be anything but racist? Even Ian Blair has complained, rightly, of institutional racism in the media, but he neglects to mention the similar problems within his own force. That falls to his sidekick, Cressida Dick, who admitted back in 2003:

I would say there is not an institution out there that could say, ‘We are not racist’. … It’s very difficult to imagine a situation where we will say we are no longer institutionally racist.

Later that year, that documentary vindicated Dick’s prevarication more than her half-hearted defence of the Met’s progress. Five officers resigned in the aftermath of The Secret Policeman, in which an undercover reporter showed vicious, prevelant racism among recruits in Greater Manchester and North Wales (one recruit, worryingly, said that Hitler had “the right ideas”). The then-Home Secretary David ‘machine-gun them all‘ Blunkett accused the Beeb of creating a story rather than revealing one, but a spokesman for the Black and Asian Police Association defended the documentary:

In a sense my members are relieved and grateful to the BBC because this has proved beyond doubt what we have been saying for a number of years. We need to sit round a table with the Police Federation, the Black Police Association and senior officers and discuss the revelations from a Manchester angle and what to do about it, but it’s not just a Manchester issue, such meetings should take place around the country.

There were similar investigations on Channel Four’s Dispatches not long afterwards, and not two years later they were pinning Jean-Charles de Menezes to the ground and shooting him seven times in the head.

So much has already been written on the subject of the unfortunate electrician. Much of it has focused on the incompetence that many would like to put down to the tense post-7/7 atmosphere, and it is that for incompetence that the Met were finally charged: not with murder, but with a breach of the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act. As Steven Poole writes:

Certainly Menezes’s own health and safety were rather permanently compromised. But that was not exactly the point of the trial.

In fact, the burden of what the court found the police did wrong was to let Menezes get on a bus, and then a Tube train, in the first place, while the Keystone Cops were miscommunicating and urinating at inappropriate moments. Their letting a person suspected of involvement in terrorism run around on public transport is what was found to have endangered the public safety.

Quite so. If the police had been more efficient and shot de Menezes dead immediately he left his flat that morning, there would have been no grounds for censure at all.

There’s also the incompetence that led to shooting down the wrong man, which has, rightly, been the subject of a great deal more attention. It’s hard to get much consolation from the commentators on Have Your Say deploring the death of someone who “didn’t even look remotely Middle Eastern“, but we’re not all that guy, and either way the Met were afraid that heads might end up rolling for it. So they tried to soften the blow, sowing confusion around the events of that day, and engaging in a smear campaign (something with which the Kahar brothers, who aren’t paedophiles after all, can probably sympathise with) to try and make us glad Jean-Charles was gone. From The Nether-World:

• The Met dishonestly manipulated a photo of Jean Charles de Menezes in an attempt to make him look more like Hussain Osman, one of the men who tried to bomb London’s transport network on July 21 2005.
• We were told by the Met that Jean Charles de Menezes was killed because he acted in an “aggressive and threatening manner” when challenged and was “up for it“
• The facts that Jean Charles de Menezes had apparently taken cocaine and had a fake stamp in his passport* was used as a smear to somehow justify the execution.
• After the shooting, we were told that Jean Charles de Menezes was an illegal alien. He wasn’t
• We were told that he was wearing bulky coat, refused to stop when challenged and then vaulted the ticket barriers. Not true
• We were told that there was no CCTV footage at the Stockwell tube station. There was (at least in the ticket area, no footage was recorded on the train or on the platform as far as we know).

More disinformation is documented at Ten Percent, with Ian Blair personally accused of obstructing the IPCC’s investigations. Frolix, meanwhile, reveals the campaign of harrassment targeted at those who did challenge the official narrative and leak out bits of truth. I concur with his assessment that:

… it is the aftermath of this terrible event which gives us an insight into how the state functions, a story of an unaccountable, out of control police force which is not only getting away with murder but misleading the public then using its powers to arrest citizens who worked to expose it. While the fragmented aspects of this case are in the public domain, it is only when all the elements are drawn together that the true picture of the Met’s iniquity becomes clear.

Apologists for the police point to the tension and difficult circumstances of July 2005, but the fact is that there was nothing whatsoever about Mr Menezes which could give anyone reasonable grounds for concluding he was a danger to the public. The magnitude of recklessness here is staggering and those involved are indisputably a danger to the public themselves and unfit to be wielding firearms on the streets of London.

There is also the fact that somebody in the police force, somewhere in the chain leading from the shooter, through the officers directly involved in the operation, to the operational commanders and up to the Met leadership, fabricated a story which would have mitigated the police’s responsibility for the killing.

Just as worrying as the incident itself are the policies that led to it; when armed police consider that having one’s hands at one’s side is the stance of a suicide bomber, that headshots are the only way to be sure, tragedy seems inevitable. It’s what comes of getting training from Israel, of all places; perhaps the Met are starting to see a subset of the British public in the same way as the IDF see Palestinians. But if it’s hard to get a clear idea of what was really going over police radios on that day, what with the lies and all, allow me to put forward a hypothesis.

The police waited outside the house of a Muslim they had marked as a terrorissssuspect. One way or another, with the pissing and the tense atmosphere, they got him mixed up with his neighbour, and started following him around. They waited for him to get into the most spectacularly public place possible, and they chased him down and executed him. They pinned him down, and pumped him full of bullets. They did so believing him to be Hussain Osman, and knowing him to pose no immediate danger. They did it to prove a point.

The liberal press would have editorialised about how preferable this was to the risk of another attack, how deplorable it was that the Muslim Community’s inability to police itself made this kind of thing necessary, and slowly we’d sleepwalk into a place where it’s ok to shoot designated Muslims dead. It only failed because they got the wrong guy; if I’m right, Jean-Charles gave his life slowing the rise of fascism by a few crucial years. If I’m right, he’s an unwitting hero.

Is this far-fetched? As an officially sanctioned conspiracy it seems far-fetched, but as the actions of a few well-armed thugs, spooked by the events of the previous day, conditioned by one editorial too many about defiance and resolve in the face of the Islamist Other, trained by forces that safeguard an order worse than apartheid, it sounds mighty plausible. Whether it’s what actually happened or not is unfathomable, but we’ve created an atmosphere in which that kind of thing could so very easily happen.

This whole sordid tragedy has bought us time, but we’re not changing that environment. Unless we start doing something now, well, it’s only a matter of time before de Menezes’ name fades from the headlines, before another set of attacks or near misses, another set of speeches about clamping down on extremism and “Who do you think you are kidding Mr. Osama?” leader columns and then bam! here we are again.

In the short term, start dusting off any “Blair Must Go!” banners you may have accumulated after the flattening of Lebanon; I’m with the Tories, for once, he’s got to go. And in the long term? Challenge the logic by which any suspect is a terrorist, by which any brown person is a suspect. Start paying at least as much attention to the violence of the powerful as to the violence of the powerless. Reject racism, reject racist assumptions of security. Be on guard for establishment figures sneaking this in through the back door.

This is serious.