I probably won’t be the only one to make this point, the British blogscape being peppered with complacent, glib bastards and their over-developed sense of fair play, sorry, moral equivalence. But I think this is a cheap shot worth making.

The leak of the Independent Police Complaints Commission’s report investigating the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes alleges that the surveillance team who wrongly identified him as a suicide bomber doctored the records in an attempt to cover up their involvement in the debacle.

Still, no harm done. Just identify the culprit, slap him on the wrist and allow him to retire early due to ill health on full pension. The very model of police justice.

Just one snag.

The Daily Mail: Those on duty that day all deny involvement, which means the Independent Police Complaints Commission finds it difficult, if not impossible, to establish the truth.

When something happens in our house (spilt milk, felt tip pen marks on the sofa, the guinea pig shot eight times, that kind of thing) and nobody will admit they’re responsible, we say “the fairies must have done it”. In between getting my five year-old into trouble, those fairies are clearly busy stitching up special branch coppers.

I’ve said this before but when my brother and I were young and one of us had been up to no good but wouldn’t confess, my dad would crack us both “to make sure he got the right one”. It never did me any harm. Apart from engendering a white hot, near-pathological hatred of injustice, of course.

So, why not apply this methodology to the de Menezes surveillance team? Some may be guilty and some may be innocent but the actions of at least some of them it seems led directly to an atrocity being committed on the streets of London. They must all, of course and regardless of the evidence, be held without trial. As Charles Clarke once said: “There remains a public emergency threatening the life of the nation”. These men are, clearly and maybe, a possible and potential danger to the public. Belmarsh would seem suitable for such men and they can all be assigned a letter to protect their identities. I think we’re up to Q already.

Maybe, to get to the bottom of all this we could try a little “harsh treatment“. Nothing too drastic, maybe just the odd mock execution or a long stand? (Who, after all, as a callow youth, wasn’t sent out for a “long stand” by joshing workmates and suffered nothing more than mocking laughter ringing in their ears?)

And naturally, it needn’t be us getting our hands dirty. We could bundle the team onto one of those CIA planes, that Tony Blair knows nothing about, stopping here on its way to Syria or Uzbekistan or wherever. It’ll also save on expenses and could double up as an exchange programme - our boys gaining first hand knowledge of how the Syrian secret police do things on their manor.

After all, we do not agree with the use of torture. Is that an absolute rule? Absolute in this sense, that you say ‘Look, it is simply the civil liberties of the suspect, or simply the liberties of freedom from being shot in the head on the tube’. You have to balance those two things.

I also say it is wrong to frame this debate simply in terms of the civil liberties of suspects. Of course their liberties are important, but so are the liberties of the people who may be victims of a police shooting, what about their most basic civil liberty - the right to life?