Above the law ?

Sir Ian Blair is having a hard time at the moment, having the organisation for which he is ultimately responsible found guilty of breaching health & safety.

Health & safety ? Loose wires in a plug guilty ? Or slippery floor guilty ?

No, shooting dead a completely innocent man guilty.

Health & safety ?

News of the incident immediately following the shooting revolved around sightings of a man acting suspiciously, getting off buses before immediately getting back on like some kind of cold-war spy novel, of a crazed terrorist running & vaulting the ticket barriers at Stockwell tube station to conclude his deadly journey.

Sure, there is a war against terror going on while we speak, and, if the police are to be believed, there are always ongoing covert operations keeping the nation safe.

And yes, while those sort of operations continue, and while highly trained individuals have to make snap life or death decisions, mistakes will inevitably happen.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has written to her Tory shadow, David Davis, criticising his call for Sir Ian's resignation.

Ms Smith told reporters that politicians like herself and Mr Davis should rally round the police.

She said she retained "full confidence" in Sir Ian and the Met.

Later in the Commons, she told MPs: "Opposition politicians in this house and the [London Assembly] who have called for the sacking of the commissioner will never have to face the split-second decisions in life and death policing operations that they do.

But looking at the time line (from the BBC), this wasn't a split-second decision, was it ? This was mistake after mis-identification on an ultimately fatal level. Not split second, but 26 minutes between first spotting the victim (note, Jean Charles de Menezes is the victim, not the Police officer who shot him) and later shooting him dead. 26 minutes is quite considerably more than a spilt-second. 1,560 seconds or 3,120 spilt-seconds to be precise. And the only identification had the victim as having "Mongolian" eyes. Are any of the terror suspects Mongolian ?

It isn't so much the seemingly flippant attitude of inevitable collateral damage in a war against terror, more the procedural mistakes, the inability to arrest someone within a 26 minute period despite having at least one officer on the bus with the victim and the mis-information (or, let's face it, downright lies) following the incident. Even now, there's still confusion about the exact journey taken by the armed Police. One word springs to mind; bollocks.

London mayor Ken Livingstone, who has given Sir Ian his backing, said that a "cynical campaign" was being waged against the commissioner.

He said: "Today's vote by the London Assembly on the Met Commissioner shows why the government was right to give the London Assembly no powers whatever in policing."

"Al-Qaeda must be laughing at us while we busy ourselves pillorying the police who keep us safe."

No, Al-Qaeda must be laughing at us because they don't have to worry about killing innocent members of the public when our Police force seem free to do it themselves with complete impunity.