Conspiracy theorists of all shades: get it straight---nobody, with the exception of that yahoo earlier who made the remark about improving the gene pool, is celebrating the death of an innocent man.

It seems (CNN-AP) that he was a 27-year old Brazilian electrician, who spoke good Englsih and had been working legally in the UK for 23 years, and was Catholic, not Moslem. It is a true tragedy that he was killed.

But who ordered the police to behave as they did? My understanding is that Ken Livingstone ("Red Ken"?) had been told that since suicide bombers can detonate their explosives as long as they are conscious at all, they had to be made unconscious immediately---therefore he issued the shoot-to-kill instruction. Would a stun-gun be able to do this? I don't know--does anybody? Maybe if stun-guns work that way, that approach could be tried.

Maybe once they have the suspect on the ground, they could try shooting the arms, not the head--that should make it impossible to detonate a bomb. Would that work?


Ken Livingstone's main goal is to protect all the people of London. It seems to me that, given the events of the past weeks, his instructions to the police made sense at the time.

Obviously there needed to be an apology, and an investigation.

The victim may have feared he was being robbed--since the police were plain-clothesmen. But he was surrounded by other riders of the London Metro. It's of course impossible to know his mental state. But what exactly did the police say--didn't they yell at him to stop? What kind of robbers do that?

If they didn't yell at him to stop, for fear that yelling would cause him to detonate his feared bomb, that introduces yet another complicating factor.

Did he or didn't he come out of a house the police had under surveillance? Was he wearing a thick coat in the middle of summer? Were there wires under his coat or not?

It seems there were all sorts of clues, false in retrospect, but convincing at the time, that he was in fact a suicide bomber.

Maybe both the American and British police need an immediate seminar given by the Israeli police, who have been dealing with suicide bombers for quite a while.

I read on Friday an article which predicted the "Israelification" of the world. Is this the direction we are headed?

By the way, anybody who can't tell the difference between a real police state, like Hitler's Germany, and current Israel, needs to do some reading in history.