So now we know...

Having seen and read about everything that has gone on in London in the last week or so, you might be forgiven for wondering why I haven't yet commented on the sad events of the Brazilian citizen shot by police in Stockwell tube station. The simple answer was because I didn't yet have access to all the facts. Just yesterday we learned that:

Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian shot dead in the head, was not wearing a heavy jacket that might have concealed a bomb, and did not jump the ticket barrier when challenged by armed plainclothes police, his cousin said yesterday.

Without seeming to stress the point, this contradicts everything we've heard since the shooting itself, right up to the eyewitness reports that told of "an Asian guy" who might have been wearing "a bomb belt with wires coming out of it". What we're facing here is more dangerous than any terrorist threat, because now it's the people responsible for keeping us safe and informed who are lying to us. The state, and the elite who control the state, control both the methods of coercion (the police) and the methods of persuasion (the media). For almost a week we've been unaware of the true facts, simply because it's not in the interests of the powerful to give them to us. The political "consensus", which has held sway ever since the deadly bombings of the 7th, should be broken, if not by the politicians than by the people. After all, it's our lives on the line here.