So remember when the gung-ho war on terror crowd jumped to defend the London Underground shooting of an alleged terror suspect who jumped a turnstile?

Turns out, there was nothing defensible about the shooting at all.

The Metropolitan police was today found guilty of a catastrophic series of errors during the operation that led to firearms officers shooting Jean Charles de Menezes dead on the London underground.

The force was fined £175,000 and ordered to pay £385,000 costs after an Old Bailey jury found it had breached health and safety rules and failed in its duty to protect members of the public in the killing of the innocent Brazilian electrician at Stockwell station, south London, on July 22 2005.

De Menezes was shot seven times in the head by police who mistook him for one of four men who had failed to detonate bombs on the capital’s transport system the previous day, the court heard during the four-week trial.

The prosecution alleged that the police operation to follow and stop the 27-year-old - who lived in the same south London block of flats as the terror suspect Hussein Osman - was carried out “so badly that the public were needlessly put at risk”.

British officials do at least seem to have accepted some responsibility for the incident. Perhaps U.S. officials could take a lesson from them.

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