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The shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell Station, South London, on 22 July 2005, was described as a 'tragic mistake' by Metropolitan Politce Commissioner Sir Ian Blair. This framing of the killing as a mistake, a one-off lamentable tragedy, has come to dominate responses to '22/7' in the mainstream British media. However, this paper argues that such a framing stymies critical questioning about what happened and colludes in the reproduction of a particular framework of understanding within which sovereign power has retrospectively valorised his death. By contrast I read the shooting as one of multiple responses of the British state to the bombings of the London transport network on 7 July 2005 and seek to locate Menezes' death within the broader context of the global 'War on Terror'. Rather than a 'mistake' I argue that the shooting is symptomatic of systemic features of Western politics and in particular innovations in the ways sovereign power attempts to secure the spatial and temporal borders of sovereign political community. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current wave of fundamentalist terror and the anti-terror response it has generated raise a lot of important questions; questions that have been all too readily glossed over in the hasty turn to rhetoric by powerful people who should at least be think ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]