Rarely has an operational policy been put to such a critical test as in the shooting dead of a man in London after last Thursday's suspected bombings.
An innocent Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, who may have been an illegal resident in the city, his student visa having expired, was shot eight times in the head by a special police officer acting under the shoot-to-kill-to-protect policy for suicide bombers. He was shot, after he failed to stop when ordered. The shooting has triggered an enormous public debate and an agonising appraisal of policy. It is, as prime minister Tony Blair said yesterday, a tragedy which illustrates the grave choices facing a democratic society encountering such threats. And it is not limited to Britain, since it is becoming a worldwide issue.
The justification for police responding in this way to suspected suicide bombers is easily put and understood. By definition suicide bombers are willing to kill themselves to ensure their weapon explodes. Their purpose is not to die but to inflict the widest possible damage on their chosen target. Usually this is to kill the greatest number of civilians in order to force the target society's government to change policy. Since these weapons can be activated in various ways while the bomber remains conscious, and since disabling shots could also trigger them, the rational course is to shoot to kill.
Put as baldly and starkly as that one could agree with the policy. The question is whether the threat to public safety and the policing and intelligence record on which the policy is built merit such a lethal licence for the security forces? There are many major questions to answer before an unconditionally positive answer should be given to this question. It ill behoves outsiders to doubt the threat to public safety after 56 people died in the co-ordinated assault on London's mass transport system on July 7th. Last Thursday's failed attempts appear to have been equally serious.
There is a frightening realisation now that home-grown terrorism, however motivated, has arrived in Britain. The security services are ill-equipped to chart and monitor it in terms of human intelligence.
The political debate on what motivates such hatred is prone to simplistic explanations in terms of Islamic fundamentalism or the failure of Britain's loose multiculturalism to create civic loyalty, rather than the dangerous ripple effects from the invasion of Iraq and the growing resistance to it.
The great temptation for governments is to rely on flawed explanations to justify the suspension of normal liberties. The lesson from these stark events is that mistakes can all too easily be made. It is one thing to base a shoot-to-kill policy on such extreme cases, quite another to trust the intelligence and policing authorities to implement it effectively. Confronted with such threats, civilised societies should be reluctant to allow extreme cases determine their response. A shoot-to-kill policy has many resonances here. Jean Charles de Menezes should not have died.