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Article Excerpt
The shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell Station, South London, on 22 July 2005, was described as a "tragic mistake" by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair. This framing of the killing has come to dominate responses to it in the mainstream media. However, such a framing stymies critical questioning about what happened and colludes in the reproduction of a particular framework of understanding within which sovereign power has retrospectively valorized his death. By contrast this article reads the shooting as one of multiple responses of the British state to the bombings of the London transport network on 7 July 2005 and locates Menezes's death within the broader context of the global "War on Terror." Rather than a "mistake," the author argues that the shooting is symptomatic of systemic features of Western politics and in particular innovations in the ways sovereign power attempts to secure the spatial and temporal borders of sovereign political community. KEYWORDS: Menezes, London bombings, War on Terror, sovereign power, borders
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Well, [Jean Charles] is a kind of fallen soldier. He died because of the war on terror, didn't he? --Dagmar Almeida It's still happening out there, there are still officers having to make those calls as we speak [...] Somebody else could be shot. --Sir Ian Blair (1)
At 10:05 A.M. on 22 July 2005 UK antiterrorist officers killed Jean Charles de Menezes aboard a stationary underground train at Stockwell Station in South London by firing eleven rounds at close range (seven bullets entered his head, one bullet entered his shoulder, and three bullets missed). (2) Five and a half hours after the shooting Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair issued a statement in which he claimed that the operation had been "directly linked" to ongoing investigations into the attempted bombings in central London the previous day. (3) At that time, Ian Blair announced that the person shot dead at Stockwell had been acting suspiciously and was challenged by police but refused to obey instructions. (4) However, in a statement the following day the commissioner announced that a "mistake" had been made and that there was no evidence to connect Menezes with the attempted bombings or any other "terrorist activity." (5) Six months later, following the completion of the first part of the inquiry into the shooting by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), Ian Blair commented: "In a terrible way, the Met was transfixed on other things. It was transfixed on: where are these bombers? And therefore, in a dreadful way, we didn't see the significance of that. That was our mistake. It was. It was a bad mistake." (6)
Any attempt to reflect on what happened on 22 July 2005 cannot get very far from what we might call the brute fact of Menezes's death without invoking some sort of angle or frame. (7) We rely upon such frames in the quest to comprehend events: They offer grounds upon which phenomena may be rendered intelligible through devices such as analogy, metaphor, and narrative. (8) However, any given frame is not neutral or natural but a politically loaded assessment of actuality with potentially important implications: There is always a politics of framing. (9) Discussion of the killing in the mainstream British media has been typically framed by Sir Ian Blair's explanation that it was simply a mistake--an error, an aberration, or a lamentable one-off tragedy. (10) According to one commentator this framing is entirely appropriate: "by recognising that de Menezes' death was a freak mistake, we can deal with the reality of politics today--rather than worrying about whether we could be next, or wondering what the Met is hiding from us." (11)
On the one hand, the discourse of the mistake of the shooting of Menezes, especially when read alongside familiar accounts of the feverish manhunt for suspected bombers after the attempted attacks, perhaps offers a convenient way of making sense of the killing. On the other hand, an uncritical acceptance of the discourse of the mistake reifies rather than questions the very framework within which the killing of Menezes has been valorized. In other words, by merely accepting the discourse of the mistake as a starting point in reflecting on Menezes's death we run the risk of colluding with rather than offering a critique of the activities of sovereign power. This raises the problem of how it might be possible to analyze what happened on 22 July 2005 without risking the same form of collusion. One possible response is to examine how the dominant discourse of the mistake has legitimized and/or obscured particular political practices in the aftermath of the shooting. Such an approach allows for analysis of the way in which the above discourse has distracted attention from broader issues connecting the killing to the global War on Terror. In this context I seek to develop the argument that the shooting reflects innovations in the ways sovereign power attempts to secure the spatial and temporal borders of political community in the West.
"22/7"
Despite the emergence and subsequent entrenchment of a particular narrative about what happened to Jean Charles de Menezes on 22 July 2005 (22/7), there are many ambiguities and unanswered questions about the circumstances leading to and surrounding his death. To some extent, the long-awaited outcome of the findings of the IPCC investigation might cast new light on these circumstances, although there are still calls by the Menezes family and their "justice4jean" campaign for a full public inquiry. (12) However, irrespective of these findings, it is instructive to analyze how particular framings in the immediate aftermath of the shooting have led to the privileging of some questions over others and what the political implications of this agenda-setting have been. From here it might then be possible to consider alternative framings and open up new avenues of inquiry.
From Scotia Road to Stockwell Station
There are multiple blind spots in the detail of the killing of Menezes, which, in the quest to produce a coherent narrative, sometimes go unnoticed in accounts of 22/7. One blind spot relates to the elementary issue of precisely who was involved in the planning, management and carrying out of the killing. According to Nafeez Ahmed, the initial report given by the police had not mentioned anything about the surveillance operation mounted outside a block of flats located on Scotia Road in the Tulse Hill area of London on the morning of 22 July. (13) We now know that the aim of that stakeout was to find suspects linked to the attempted bombings on the London transport network the day before--in particular Hussein Osman, whose details, including a gym membership card leading to the Tulse Hill address, had been found at the site of the attempted blast in the Shepherd's Bush area. (14) However, information about the surveillance team remains sketchy, and there have been unconfirmed suggestions about the involvement of military personnel and/or members of the Special Forces. (15) Nevertheless, many reports obscure questions surrounding this involvement by focusing on the antiterrorist officer who was distracted from Menezes's emergence from the flats at 9:33 because he was "relieving himself" in nearby bushes. (16)
In one of the few extant academic treatments of the shooting, Joseph Pugliese has argued that Menezes's departure from the flats instigated a "regime of visuality," which led from practices of racial profiling to a situation whereby he was racially suspect and produced...
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