Changing the narrative

Metropolitan police commissioner Ian Blair is almost as good at steering the media as his namesake used to be. His epic quote that the police are "racing against time" to catch the attempted terrorists from last week has successfully captured the media’s attention.

Never mind that those particular clowns have conclusively proved that they couldn’t blow up a balloon, let alone the Underground… the important thing is that it gets his own and his officers’ appalling lack of judgement in the shoot-to-kill case off the front pages. Which is his job, after all.

(side note: anyone who uses the phrase ‘shoot to kill to protect‘ in this context should be shot to be killed to protect me from an outbreak of nausea. It’s almost as bad as ‘homicide bomber’, as well as being factually inaccurate in the de Menezes example…)

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8 thoughts on “Changing the narrative

  1. I’m sceptical that Tony Martin thought he was being attacked by suicide bombers, although it would be about as sensible a theory as most of the attempts to excuse his actions.

  2. Never mind that those particular clowns have conclusively proved that they couldn’t blow up a balloon,

    John, they’re using acetone peroxide, which shows, at least, that they don’t have access to any commercial or military explosives. But you shouldn’t be so blase about what they could and couldn’t do. The 7/7 bombers used similar stuff. Next time they could (a) kill hundreds of people (b) blow themselves up making the stuff or (c) repeat their latest failure. The fact is that the Stockwell shooting was a catastrophic fuck-up. But the bombers are, contra your suggestion, pretty fucking dangerous and they do need to be caught asap.

  3. … they’re using acetone peroxide, which shows, at least, that they don’t have access to any commercial or military explosives.

    Is this known for certain, by the way? It’s (as you say) a poor choice because of its instability, though against that it’s very simple to synthesise with easily-available materials. But the fact that they also appear to have been using separate detonators is then surprising — where are they getting them from, and why couldn’t they have just nicked explosives from the same place? (And why? It looks to me as if you could make an acetone peroxide bomb go off with a heated wire, which is backed up by this rather depressing discussion of suicide bombers in Palestine.)

  4. I no longer believe that it was TATP. The only evidence for this is that TATP was found in the bath in Leeds but a) people have the funniest hobbies, particularly suicide nuts and b) the British police have a long and undistinguished track record of finding traces of explosives. I think they had military TNT, as was said shortly after the bombings; it’s a better fit with the low power of the explosions and the need for detonators. I also don’t believe the suggestion that the second set of bombs were so weak because the explosive had "gone off" – if it was TATP then that doesn’t go off, except in the sense of bang.

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