 
Reuters photos
The parents of 27-year-old Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes (pictured right), whom British cops shot multiple times in the head and torso in London on Friday after they had mistaken him for a terrorist and already had pinned him to the ground, grieve for their son in Brazil in a Reuters photo taken today. De Menezes was an electrician who had lived in London for the past three years, according to Brazilian media. Apparently, he was guilty of running from police while looking possibly Muslim and thus had to be gunned down like a dog in the street.
George W. Bush kills again
or, when a 'president' lies, people die (duh!)
Americans aren't good at identifying cause and effect.
Unless the effect of the cause is immediate and obvious -- I shoot you in the heart and you die, for instance -- Americans, with their collective attention deficit disorder and their collective utter ignorance of even recent history (Gore Vidal correctly calls us "the United States of Amnesia"), aren't good at connecting the dots.
So, when I assert that U.S. "President" George W. Bush is at least partly responsible for the bloody, violent death of the reportedly terrified, innocent 27-year-old Brazilian man whom apparently trigger-happy British cops, in a frenzy over potential extremist Islamist terrorists, ran and gunned down in London on Friday, most Americans, predictably* would assert that I am full of shit. (*Americans are pretty fucking predictable in their "arguments" that are meant to make the United States look good, no matter what the fuck the United States has done.)
If you aren't familiar with the story of one of the latest innocent people to die because of "President" George W. Bush's lies, here is an Associated Press news story:
LONDON -- Police identified the man who was chased down in a subway and shot to death by plainclothes officers as a Brazilian and said [yesterday] they no longer believed he was tied to the recent terror bombings.
Friday's shooting before horrified commuters prompted criticism of police for overreacting and expressions of fear that Asians and Muslims would be targeted by a "trigger-happy culture" after two well-coordinated attacks in two weeks.
Police expressed regret for the death of the man at the Stockwell subway station, identified [yesterday] as Jean Charles de Menezes, 27. Witnesses said he was wearing a heavy, padded coat when plainclothes police chased him into a subway car, pinned him to the ground and shot him about five times in the head and torso.
Hours after the shooting, Police Commissioner Ian Blair said the victim was "directly linked" to the investigations into attacks Thursday and July 7. In the latter, suicide bombings on trains and a bus killed 56 people, including four attackers.
Police initially said the victim attracted police attention because he left a house that was under surveillance after Thursday's bungled bombings, in which devices planted on three subway trains and a double-decker bus failed to detonate properly. Stockwell is near Oval station, one of those targeted.
"He was then followed by surveillance officers to the station. His clothing and his behavior at the station added to their suspicions," police said Friday.
But [yesterday], a police official said on condition of anonymity that Menezes was "not believed to be connected in any way to any of the London bombings."
"For somebody to lose their life in such circumstances is a tragedy and one that the Metropolitan Police Service regrets," a spokesman said on condition of anonymity, which is police policy. However, police did not explain what went wrong or say whether Menezes had done anything illegal.
In Brazil, the Foreign Ministry said it was "shocked and perplexed" by the death of Menezes, whom it did not name but described as "apparently the victim of a lamentable mistake."
The ministry said it expected British authorities to explain the circumstances of the shooting, and Foreign Minister Celso Amorim would try to arrange a meeting with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw during a visit to London.
Brazilian media reported that Menezes was an electrician who had been legally living and working in England for the past three years. He originally came from the small city of Gonzaga, some 500 miles northeast of Sao Paulo in the state of Minas Gerais.
"He spoke English very well, and had permission to study and work there," Menezes' cousin Maria Alves told the O Globo Online Web site from her home in Sao Paulo.
Menezes' family was Roman Catholic. When asked if he had become Muslim in Britain, Agostino Ferreira Rosa, a policeman in Gonzaga said: "According to his family, he had nothing to do with Muslims or Islamism. He was Catholic."
"There was no reason to think he was a terrorist," Menezes' grandmother, Zilda Ambrosia de Figueiredo, told the Globo TV late [yesterday]. "He was very easygoing and very communicative with everybody. It's terrible what they have done to him."
Mayor Ken Livingstone said the killing was a "human tragedy" that was a consequence of the attacks.
"The police acted to do what they believed necessary to protect the lives of the public," he said. "This tragedy has added another victim to the toll of deaths for which the terrorists bear responsibility." [Once again, I wholeheartedly disagree with Livingstone, who, for some fucking reason, is said to be a leftist. Tony Blair bears at least as much responsibility for de Menezes' death as do "the terrorists," but it's most politically expedient for Livingstone, as it is for Bush, to blame everything on "the terrorists."]
Livingstone drew a hard line before the mistake became clear, declaring that anyone believed to be a suicide bomber faced a "shoot-to-kill policy."
The shooting was an indication of the nervousness and anxiety around the city of about 8 million people. A police watchdog organization, the Independent Police Complaints Commission, said it would investigate the shooting but make sure not to hinder the bombings probe.
...The Islamic Human Rights Commission said "in the current climate of anti-Muslim hysteria, IHRC fears that innocent people may lose their lives due to the new shoot-to-kill policy."
Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said, "It's absolutely vital that the utmost care is taken to ensure that innocent people are not killed due to overzealousness."...
My interpretation of events is thus:
The United States and Great Britain have a long, long history of oppressing other peoples, especially peoples who are not Anglo.
The chickens have been coming home to roost, as Ward Churchill so infamously put it**, and the mostly Anglo nations of the United States of American and Great Britain are terrified that the terrorism that they have inflicted upon others with relative impunity for centuries is being inflicted or will be inflicted upon them.
I mean, karma really is a fucking bitch, ain't it?
So while I don't know the races of the British cops who gunned down the young Brazilian man on Friday, my guess would be that all of them or at least most of them were Anglo, and here was this possibly Muslim young man running away from them, so they had to plug him several times after they already had pinned him to the ground. Had to, I'm sure.
This incident makes me wonder if white cops in the United States are going to start shooting any young men who look possibly Muslim who run away from them. Gotta fight Gee Dubya's War on Terror, ya know. Gotta break some eggs to make an omelette, so if some innocent people are killed in Gee Dubya's War on Terror, well, that's just the price of freedom and democracy (a price that's much easier to accept if it's someone else who is paying it, of course). God bless America, you're either with us or against us, blah blah blah blah blah.
Curiously, over-privileged people like George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as I recently noted, never have to pay the so-called price of freedom and democracy. It's always us commoners who have to pay that price.
People like Bush and Blair cause unnecessary deaths and get away with it -- because we let them.
Let's connect the dots:
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George W. Bush and his cabal of fellow war criminals and war profiteers, over the course of several weeks, lied to the American people, to the United Nations and to the world that Iraq possesed weapons of mass destruction and thus posed an imminent threat to its neighbors, to U.S. allies and to U.S. interests, if not also to the United States itself. The Bush regime bypassed the United Nations Security Council because the council wasn't buying the regime's bullshit, and the regime launched its illegal, immoral, unprovoked and imperialist invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The Bush regime successfully coerced British Prime Minister Tony Blair to commit his nation to be the Bush regime's No. 1 ally in its illegal, immoral, unprovoked and imperialist invasion of Iraq.
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As a result of the Bush regime's March 2003 invasion of Iraq and its subsequent occupation of Iraq, thousands upon thousands of Iraqis have died, as well as almost 1,800 U.S. military personnel and many, many others, military and civilian. Dick Cheney's Halliburton and other war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp, however, are making billions of dollars off of Iraq. They are, you could say, making a killing over there.
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My guess is that because Blair's political ass is in a sling and he wants to save his own political neck, great pressure has been put upon Britain's cops to stop any further terrorist attacks. (Shit, as they say, rolls downhill.)
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My guess is that Britain's cops, under great pressure to prevent any further terrorist attacks, now are much more likely to shoot anything that moves and looks Muslim than they were before July 7. My guess is that this why they shot and killed Jean Charles de Menezes on Friday. His only apparent "crime" was that he looked possibly Muslim and ran from the cops.
If you assert that George W. Bush and his cabal did not start the obvious chain of events that obviously led to the grisly death of de Menezes on Friday, will you please do the gene pool a favor and kill yourself now? Please? For the species to be strong, only the genes of minimally intelligent people should be passed on. Please, kill yourself now, as a favor to your species. Thank you.
Those of you who should remove yourselves from the gene pool (but who probably won't) will want me to go back further in time in my sequence of events above.
OK, I will:
- On Sept. 11, 2001, a group of 19 men, all part of the extremist Islamist group al-Qaeda, hijacked and crashed four airliners in the United States. Two of the airliners hit the World Trade Center, one hit the Pentagon and one crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, the oily ruling family of with which the oily Bush family has been buddy-buddy for years. Not one of the 19 hijackers was from Iraq. The leader of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, who remains at large, is Saudi Fucking Arabian. (A big bone of contention for bin Laden, by the way, is that after the First George Bush War on Iraq, the United States left a military base in Saudi Arabia. In fundamentalist Islam, it is forbidden for non-Muslims ["infidels"] to occupy Muslim lands. Of course, since the United States now occupies the Muslim nation of Iraq, the extremist Islamists have even more reason now to hate and to attack the United States, U.S. interests and U.S. allies.)
- The members of the Bush regime, over the course of several weeks, lied continuously to the American people and to the world about a bogus connection between the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and al-Qaeda and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Iraq. (The 9/11 Commission, which released its report on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks a year ago this month, found no connection between 9/11 and Iraq.)
- Rather than focusing on catching bin Laden -- who, again, remains at large -- the Bush regime focused on invading Iraq, which it wanted to turn into a nation that was friendly to U.S. corporate interests. (Despite the Bush regime's Orwellian revisionist history, Saddam Hussein's largest crime, in the White House's eyes, was not gassing the Kurds in the 1980s, when, in fact, the United States and the Soviet Union were supporting Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, during which time Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and King George I were in power. No, the United States didn't give a shit about the Kurds, and Saddam only became a problem when he stopped taking orders from the White House.)
The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, in which just under 3,000 people died, were tragic. It is even more tragic, however, that the Bush regime, with the aid of the Blair regime, is responsible for the unnecessary deaths of thousands of more people, using 9/11 as an initial excuse to expand the American and British empires into the Middle East.
We Americans and Brits have a choice to make: Are we going to allow our "leaders" to wage a never-ending back-and-forth "war on terror" with extremist Islamists in which thousands and thousands of people (except, of course, for the well-protected elites of our nations, the Blairs and the Bushes and their ilk) continue to die? Are we going to continue to swallow our "leaders'" lies that only enable them and their fellow plutocrats to get even richer than they already are? Are we Americans and Brits going to have our own Israeli-Palestinian-like conflict on a global scale? Have we learned nothing from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
Although we call ourselves "Christians," why do we blatantly ignore Jesus' teaching to turn the other cheek, the point of which was to teach us that this tit-for-tat shit never fucking ends?
How many more people are going to die before we put a stop to this shit?
**I highly recommend Churchill's book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality. Churchill was taken out of context by the right and even the many timid members of the left have distanced themselves from Churchill (I heard Al Franken and his insufferable co-host distance themselves from Churchill recently on Franken's too-politically-correct show on Air America Radio). Churchill has balls for speaking the ugly truth and deserves better treatment from those who call themselves members of the left but who lack balls of their own.
10:39:23 AM 
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