Also, the apology represents a clear difference between terrorism, terrorists being indifferent to the loss of innocent life (in fact encouraging it), the state in this case attempting to target culpable parties (albeit prone to error, though that doesn’t modify the morality of the action which is to be found in the intention rather than the result).

I must be getting horribly cynical, because normally I would wholeheartedly agree with your point about the apology being refreshing. However I assumed that the apology was issued because the mistake was so stark.

My initial reaction was why go for the head and not just try and immobilise him, but apparently they do that because someone with a gammy leg can still detonate a bomb.

I think the London met were probably in a really difficult position. In the space of two weeks, they had eight people detonate bombs in the underground. Naturally this does nothing to mitigate the loss and certainly I don’t imply that the Brazilian chap brought it on himself, but if he was ordered to stop and then jumped the turnstile or whatever, he must have raised a reasonable level of suspicion in the eyes of the police.

I think that these sorts of decisions are very difficult and, like I said, there are many grey areas which unfortunately lead to a very stark, black and white conclusion one way or the other. They’re also made in the blinking of an eye. I think that to London met’s credit, Ian Blair came out and apologised unreservedly, as did the foreign secretary and the home secretary. Amongst the bravado and machoism that so often goes along with these things, I thought that was refreshing (by contrast, the US didn’t apologise for the “accidental” killing of an Italian secret agent in Baghdad in March when, arguably, an apology was all the more appropriate and necessary).

Within reason, I think what needs to happen is an explanation by the relevant authorities about what they mean by increased security. It’s arguable that if people had known there was a shoot to kill policy, the Brazilian guy might have acted differently and been in a position to avoid five bullets (important also from the point of view that police in Britain are normally entirely without firearms and so might not have been expected to be in the position they were in).

Shooting someone is excessive.

Further more the lack of conversational time committed to this amongst the stupefied population you speak of, will seriously pale in comparison to the passion and volume of conversation committed to the ‘victims’ of the London bombings. That in itself is an injustice and perhaps the terrorism of othering - us and them – or the haves and have-nots.

Have/Have not:
Armies, Arsenal, WMD, faith, civility, good, evil….

Conversational time committed to:
September 11? War against Terror? Collateral Damage (oh, yer know - I mean… civilian deaths… ) vandalism of mosques? War in Iraq? Bombing of the local market place in Baghdad…. Bali Bombing?, Madrid?, and London?

Put Iraq in a search engine and the first result you get back is the CIAs world factbook! Second is Iraq Body Count.

Really, I think once again google has told it like it is!

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/iz.html

http://www.iraqbodycount.net/

adrian? what do you reckon?