Metropol

Big up to ITN for not leaving this one alone.

Journalism is the discovery of facts and events, not parroting the government/police/corportate/business line on things. This was JOURNALISM from ITN, not its normal dross.

The one question that gets me about this whole thing is the "eyewitness" who appeared on all the broadcast media.

Is it reasonable to assume he was a very eloquent, non-camera-shy plant by the authorities? Why would he feel the need to LIE so blatantly? Enquiring minds want to know.

johnnyboy wrote:Big up to ITN for not leaving this one alone.

Journalism is the discovery of facts and events, not parroting the government/police/corportate/business line on things. This was JOURNALISM from ITN, not its normal dross.

The one question that gets me about this whole thing is the "eyewitness" who appeared on all the broadcast media.

Is it reasonable to assume he was a very eloquent, non-camera-shy plant by the authorities? Why would he feel the need to LIE so blatantly? Enquiring minds want to know.

i saw this on the late itv news last night, and i was frankly astonished.

this man was murdered by the police. i simply cannot understand why a man who appeared to be wearing jeans and tee-shirt was shot at 11 or 12 times with 8 bullets hitting him, 7 of which in his head.

this seems more like a frenzied attack than an attempt to disarm a potential terrorist - especially when you consider he was already restrained.

it will be interesting to find out how the officers who were directly responsible for his death are punished.

johnnyboy wrote:Big up to ITN for not leaving this one alone.

Journalism is the discovery of facts and events, not parroting the government/police/corportate/business line on things. This was JOURNALISM from ITN, not its normal dross.

The one question that gets me about this whole thing is the "eyewitness" who appeared on all the broadcast media.

Is it reasonable to assume he was a very eloquent, non-camera-shy plant by the authorities? Why would he feel the need to LIE so blatantly? Enquiring minds want to know.

Actually the documents were leaked to ITN by the Police. Rather proving my point that the truth always comes out in these cases.

Marcus wrote:Actually the documents were leaked to ITN by the Police. Rather proving my point that the truth always comes out in these cases.

Well, with respect, it doesn't really prove that, matie.

One question though, can you recall the name of the "eyewitness" who appeared on all the major news channels who described the initial "version" of events?

For the police to do a cover-up is not particularly new in a controversial case like this. I'd love to know who that guy was and who, if to anything, he was connected.

Eyewitness are never very useful, they will take 2 and 2 and come up with 17.

Plus the TV channels are very quick to stick a camera in someones face and certain people just see 'limelight' and talk balls.

johnnyboy wrote: One question though, can you recall the name of the "eyewitness" who appeared on all the major news channels who described the initial "version" of events?

The eyewitness was a 'Mark Whitby', plenty of articles with references to the eyewitness in it if you google the name.

From a sound establishmentarian true blue journal,

<http://www.telegraph.co.UK/news/main.jh ... shot23.xml>

Chris Wells, a 28-year-old company manager, said he was travelling on the Victoria line towards Vauxhall when he left the train at Stockwell.

He saw about 20 police officers, some of them armed, rushing into the station.

He said: "There were at least 20 of them [officers] and they were carrying big black guns.

"The next thing I saw was this guy jump over the barriers and the police officers were chasing after him and everyone was just shouting 'get out, get out'." Several other witnesses reported seeing the man jump over the ticket barriers and being chased by three men in plain clothes but carrying guns.

In retrospect it is obvious that the man seen jumping over the barriers was a plain clothes policeman, who was leading the execution squad in order to identify the suspect for them to "take out".

From the same article is the account by Mark Whitby.

The most eloquent testimony came from Mark Whitby, 47, a water installation engineer from Brixton, who was sitting on the Tube train reading a newspaper while it was stationary with its doors open.

He said: "I heard people shouting 'get down, get down'. An Asian guy ran on to the train and I looked at his face. He looked from left to right, but he basically looked like a cornered rabbit - he was absolutely petrified."

He added: "The man half tripped and was then pushed to the floor by three plain-clothes police officers who were pursuing him.

"One of the police officers was holding a black automatic pistol in his left hand.

"He held it down to him and unloaded five shots into him. I saw it all. He was dead, five shots. I was literally less than five yards away."

And from <http://www.cnn.COM/2005/WORLD/europe/07 ... yewitness/>

"He looked like a Pakistani but he had a baseball cap on, and quite a thickish coat. It was a coat like you would wear in winter, a sort of padded jacket. It looked out of place in the weather we've been having."

Whitby said he had been about five yards away from where the incident occurred and was "totally distraught" by what he had seen.

The accuracy of this account has surely been thoroughly discredited by other more reliable sources, and one can only conjecture concerning the motives in relating such a tale.

And let us not forget the hollow words of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner.

Hours after Menezes was killed, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair said he was "directly linked" to the bombing investigations.
The Brazilian "was challenged and refused to obey police instructions," Blair said.

Can it be said that Blair was misinformed about events? If Blair did not know the true facts, is there a serious problem of communications within the Metropolitan Police? And if there is such a serious problem of communications, for which Blair is ultimately responsible, should his employment be continued?

Baby Ben wrote:Eyewitness are never very useful, they will take 2 and 2 and come up with 17.

Just like eyewitness Teri Godly?

From <http://www.cnn.COM/2005/WORLD/europe/07 ... yewitness/>

But commuter Teri Godly told Sky News television the man had been carrying a rucksack.

"A tall Asian guy, shaved head, slight beard, with a rucksack got in front of me. Shortly after that, as I was about to get onto the train, eight or nine undercover police with walkie talkies and handguns started screaming at everyone to 'Get out, get out'," she said.

But note, there could very well have been an Asian man with a rucksack on the Underground train, but who was in fact totally unrelated to the events.

By using such statements as these, the media plant images in people's minds of people being involved when they had nothing to do with the issue, the standard media tactic of suggestion and guilt by association.

From the official BBC propaganda site, <http://news.bbc.co.UK/1/hi/uk/4175432.stm>

it is now revealed that

"He said that on Sunday, July 24, Mr de Menezes' family in the UK, his cousins, were briefed by police that Mr de Menezes did not run into the Tube station, that he used a ticket to get through the Tube station barrier - specifically that he did not vault the barrier - and that he was not wearing a padded jacket or carrying a bag."

So why did it take so long for this information discrediting the false report of "wearing a padded jacket and leaping the barriers" to become public knowledge only weeks later?

Furthermore, a most unlikely source, the Daily Mail, is now posing the awkward question of whether there has been a conspiracy, in view of the claim by the Metropolitan Police that no recordings from the CCTV spy cameras at Stockwell LUL station were made because they had not been refitted with tape, when LUL employees claim that the recordings were available.

From <http://www.dailymail.co.UK/pages/live/a ... =&ito=1490>

London Underground sources insisted that at least three of the four cameras trained on the Stockwell Tube platform were in full working order.

This appears to contradict police assertions that 'technical problems' meant no footage exists of the innocent Brazilian's final moments before he was killed by marksmen after being wrongly identified as a potential suicide bomber.

The sources also rejected suggestions that the cameras had not been fitted with new tapes after police took away footage from the previous day, July 21, when suspects in the failed bombings caught trains there.

Why do both the BBC and the Daily Mail continually use the mechanical and cliched phrase, "appears to contradict", in many of their reports in this entirely sordid affair?

Surely either something contradicts something else, or it does not, and only self-censorship prevents a publisher from stating the plain and unvarnished facts.

Of course we all know in light of the Kelly-Gilligan affair in which the Hutton inquiry revealed the BBC to be guilty of lying (why else did Gilligan, Davies, and Dyke resign if they had done nothing wrong), the BBC must practice self-censorship in this period of charter review, so as to not further bite the hand that sustains it.

Corin wrote:

London Underground sources insisted that at least three of the four cameras trained on the Stockwell Tube platform were in full working order.

This appears to contradict police assertions that 'technical problems' meant no footage exists of the innocent Brazilian's final moments before he was killed by marksmen after being wrongly identified as a potential suicide bomber.

Why do both the BBC and the Daily Mail continually use the mechanical and cliched phrase, "appears to contradict", in many of their reports in this entirely sordid affair?

Because, in the Mail case, it doesn't actually contradict what the police asserted. The cameras on the train were indeed in full working order - there was just no hard drive recording the pictures, as it had been removed for investigation of an 'earlier incident'. Or at least that's what one newspaper was reporting (can't remember which).

The Guardian follow's the Evening Standard in claiming that the CCTV tapes - note that we're back to tape here, rather than HD - had been found to be blank, raising speculation that the police might have wiped them.

Tilly O'shea wrote:The cameras on the train were indeed in full working order

Please correct me if I am in error,which I most probably am, but I thought on a previous occasion you claimed that there were no surveillance cameras in the interiors of the actual trains themselves.

Furthermore, is it not probable that the surveillance on the trains are simple cameras + recorder, and so have their output sent to cassette tape, whereas the cameras at the stations are networked and so have their output sent to hard disk?