ABSTRACT

In this chapter a shoot-to-kill counter-suicide terrorism strategy, codenamed Operation Kratos, developed and implemented by the police in the United Kingdom, is examined as an example of state violence. In this case, the use of state violence, ostensibly to protect the public and combat terrorism, was sustained by a state campaign of secrecy and cover-up. Such has been the secrecy surrounding the strategy that full details have never been placed on public record despite police acknowledgement of its existence after an operation in London in July 2005 ended with the fatal shooting of an innocent man, Jean Charles de Menezes. Neither this recourse to lethal state violence in the pursuit of counter-terrorism, nor the secrecy by which it is guarded, can be understood in isolation from their political contexts. Whether in the form of military action or police force, the question of what constitutes political state violence is always dependent on standpoint. It is a question of perception whether operations conducted to prevent crime, protect the public or combat terrorism amount to harassment of the dispossessed, suppression of a just cause or perhaps even state terrorism. As conceptualised by Jackson et al. (2009: 3), state terrorism involves ‘the intentional use or threat of violence by state agents or their proxies against individuals or groups who are victimized for the purpose of intimidating or frightening a broader audience’. The killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, and the carefully protected state strategy that led to it, may not demonstrably have had this purpose. Nevertheless, a close analysis of this state strategy and the de Menezes case is indispensable for understanding the form that counter-terrorism has taken in contemporary Britain.