Getting the Dirt on The Filth

Bear in mind that only a couple of weeks ago the Foreign Secretary was telling parliament - in response to The Guardian's revelations about the NSA's Prism programme and GCHQ's involvement in this mass surveillance project - that if you weren't doing anything wrong, you had nothing to fear from state surveillance, then consider the latest allegations that the Metropolitan Police spied on the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence in the hope of getting some 'dirt' to smear them with.  Is it any wonder that it took so many years to secure a conviction in the Lawrence case when the police seemed more concerned with defaming the victim's family (who had been critical of their handling of the case) rather than finding his killer?  Sadly, this isn't an isolated case.  Let's not forget the Met's campaign of disinformation in the aftermath of their shooting of that Brazilian guy on the tube, the one they mistook for a terrorist.  According to the stories their friends in the Murdoch press ran, the victim made himself a suspect by running away from police and leaping over the ticket barriers at the station.  Moreover, he was apparently an illegal immigrant and God knows what else. All untrue, as it turned out.  The facts, as presented at the inquest, were quite different: he entered the tube station normally and it was only his work permit which had expired.  However, by then it was too late: the lies had taken root in the public consciousness and the inquest was barely reported by those papers that had defamed the victim.

They were at it again in the wake of the London riots a couple of years ago, presenting multiple versions of what supposedly happened when they shot dead the guy in North London, whose death sparked the unrest.  Was he pointing a gun at the police when they opened fire on him?  Was he just holding a gun?  If so, why was it found several yards from the body, behind a wall?  Could it be that he had thrown it from the taxi window when he saw the police?  Who knows?  Certainly not the Met, who seem to be too interested in damage limitation to actually bother investigating anything any more.  Actually, that isn't entirely true.  Their undercover officers seem to have spent a lot of time over the past couple of decades infiltrating and investigating environmental groups, anti-capitalism protestors and the like.  Their investigative technique seemed to involve having relationships with female suspects, fathering their children and acting as agents provocateurs.  But as we found out through the Levenson enquiry, the Met also seem to be in cahoots with the right-wing press, thereby ensuring that the reporting of these kind of activities has, until now, been minimised, with the newspapers in question perpetually banging out the line that the police are beyond criticism.  Even the most hardened conspiracy theorists couldn't have come up with a web as tangled as the one the Metropolitan Police have woven over the years.  So, do you still think that you have nothing to fear just because you are innocent?