KILL THE WITNESS, SCRUB THE EVIDENCE?

So not only is phone-hacking whistleblower Sean Hoare dead -- although we're assured that the death is "not thought to be suspicious" -- but it looks as if the death scene might have been scrubbed by the police.

A phone call reporting trouble at his apartment went out at 11:40 A.M. yesterday, The Guardian reports, and then:

There was an unexplained delay in the arrival of forensics officers at the scene.

Neighbours said three police cars and two ambulances arrived at the property shortly before 11am. They left around four hours later, around 3pm, shortly after a man and a woman, believed to be grieving relatives, arrived at the premises. There was no police presence at the scene at all for several hours.

The curtains were drawn at the first-floor apartment in a new-build block of flats.

At about 9.15pm, three hours after the Guardian revealed Hoare had been found dead a police van marked "Scientific Services Unit" pulled up at the address, where a police car was already parked. Two officers emerged carrying evidence bags, clipboards, torches and laptop-style bags and entered the building. Three officers carrying cameras and wearing white forensic suits went into the flat at around 9.30pm.

Ten hours to get forensics in? And during four of those hours other police officers operated behind closed curtains?

*****

If this is as bad as it looks, what's jarring is that you don't expect modern business overlords to have to operate in ways that seem more suitable to a cheap thriller -- at least I don't. I don't expect it because it seems as if modern business overlords simply get what they want without ever having to ruffle their expensive suits -- a guy talks to a guy, and everything works out. Not only is it bloodless, but most of the time it's not even illegal.

But maybe that's true only as long as we non-elitists pose no real threat to the elite. It suggests to me that if, say, there were a popular movement attempting to put pressure on government to raise taxes on corporations and the rich, and to significantly increase regulation of financial institutions and other unaccountable players in the economy, and that movement began to have a real impact, with politicians making real efforts in a progressive direction, our corporate overlords would very quickly turn to "wet work" as a means of ridding themselves of class-warfare nuisances who don't know enough to mind their own business.