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Sunday 7 September 2008

A reckless and cynical move

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Yesterday’s Times published a cryptic but nevertheless alarming story:

Scotland Yard’s anti-terror unit has been stripped of its control over covert surveillance teams in an attempt to ward off further criticism over the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, The Times has learnt. Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, ordered the overhaul of undercover policing, despite stiff opposition from inside the force. Senior sources are concerned that the loss of dedicated counter-terrorism surveillance units, which can be deployed anywhere in the country, might undermine future security operations.

You bet it would. Hiving off control over surveillance on terrorist suspects from the unit gathering intelligence on those suspects is a sure-fire recipe for a total breakdown in communication and accountability – the very thing which led to the mistaken shooting of Jean-Charles de Menezes. That fiasco – which I have written about here, here and here came about because of an operational shambles which has never properly been accounted for but which ultimately surely has to be laid at the door of the Metropolitan Commissioner himself, Sir Ian Blair. Whatever else went wrong that day, one of the most important points that has emerged was that there was no operational commander on the ground who, having been properly briefed, had the authority to take operational decisions. Without such a designated on-the-spot commander, the resulting shambles was almost inevitable. That is a systemic, procedural failing in the structure of Met operations – and the buck for that stops squarely with the Commissioner.

Blair has insisted throughout that there were no 'systemic' errors which led to the killing of de Menezes – in other words, ‘not my fault’. As the Times story says, he is desperate to carve this apologia in stone before the inquest into de Menezes’s death opens in September. This latest move looks like Blair trying to pin the blame firmly onto the anti-terror unit by removing its surveillance control as a kind of punishment. The result is that the people of London will be made significantly less safe through a reckless and cynical move to save the Commissioner’s reputation. When Scotland Yard says:

We will be enhancing our surveillance response through the coordinated management and deployment of these teams

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