CHAPTER XXII
The London 7/7 Bomb Attacks *

 

* At the time of the London 7/7 attacks, this book was going to press. What we are presenting here are observations pertaining to the police investigation as well as a preliminary assessment of the broader political implications of 7/7 in the context of the “war on terrorism”.


On the 7th of July 2005 at 8.50 am, three bombs exploded simultaneously on underground trains in central London. The fourth explosion occurred approximately one hour later on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square, close to King’s Cross. Tragically, 56 people were killed and more than seven hundred people were injured. The alleged suicide bombers were reported to have died in the blast.


The explosions coincided with the opening sessions of the Group of Eight (G-8) meetings at Gleneagles, Scotland, hosted by Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Without supporting evidence, the attacks were presented as an assault on the “civilized world” by “Islamic terrorists”. Immediately following the explosions, Prime Minister Tony Blair, stated that:

Those engaged in terrorism [should] realize that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world.


Whatever they do, it is our determination that they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear in this country and in other civilized nations throughout the world.1

 


7/7 versus 9/11


There are marked similarities between 7/7 and 9/11. Prime Minister Blair’s words on 7/7 echo the statement of President Bush in the immediate wake of 9/11. At 11 o’clock on 9/11, Al Qaeda was held responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. (Chapter I.) Similarly, within hours of the 7/7 London bomb attacks, and prior to the conduct of a police investigation, the British authorities had already identified “Enemy Number One” as the mastermind behind the 7/7 attacks.


A mysterious Islamist website had posted a statement from an alleged “Al-Qaeda-linked group” claiming responsibility for the London attacks. On that same day, July 7, another website linked to “Al-Qaeda’s Iraq frontman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi” confirmed it had executed the Egyptian ambassador to Iraq, who had been abducted a few days earlier.2


Two weeks later, there was a second bomb attack in London, in which the detonators failed to go off. And two days later, on July 23, a triple attack in Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm al-Sheikh left 64 people killed.


Following the 21 July attacks a massive police hunt was launched.

 


The Post 7/7 Disinformation Campaign


The 7/7 bomb attacks occurred at a critical moment. Widely acknowledged, President Bush and his British ally Prime Minister Tony Blair were guilty of innumerable war crimes and atrocities. The political standing of Prime Minister Tony Blair in the country as well as within his Party was in jeopardy, following the release of the Secret Downing Street memorandum. The latter confirmed that the war on Iraq had been waged on a fabricated pretext: “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

The 7/7 attacks served to distract public attention from the broader issue of the war, which had resulted in more than 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq since the outset of the occupation.3


The London 7/7 attacks provided a new legitimacy to those who had ordered the illegal invasion of Iraq. They contributed to significantly weakening the antiwar and civil rights movements, while triggering an atmosphere of fear and racial hatred across Britain and the European Union.


Tony Blair stated authoritatively that extremism is “based on a perversion of the true faith of Islam but nonetheless is real within parts of our community here in this country”.4


Meanwhile, the British media had launched its own hate campaign directed against Muslims and Arabs. The nature of the Iraqi resistance movement was distorted. The London bombings were being linked to the activities of “terrorists” and “armed gangs” in Iraq and Palestine.


Several “progressive” voices added to the confusion, by describing the London 7/7 attacks as retribution for the US-UK invasion of Iraq: “If we hadn’t gone to Iraq, they might not have bombed us.”

 


Secret State Police


On both sides of the Atlantic, the London 7/7 attacks were used to usher in far-reaching police state measures.


The US House of Representatives renewed the USA PATRIOT Act “to make permanent the government’s unprecedented powers to investigate suspected terrorists”. Republicans claimed that the London attacks had “shown how urgent and important it was to renew the law”.5


Barely a week prior to the London attacks, Washington announced the formation of a “domestic spy service” under the auspices of the FBI. The new department—meaning essentially a Big Brother “Secret State Police”—was given a mandate to “spy on people in America suspected of terrorism or having critical intelligence information, even if they are not suspected of committing a crime”.6 Of significance, this new FBI service, would not be accountable to the Department of Justice.

 

It is controlled by the Directorate of National Intelligence headed by John Negroponte, who has the authority to order the arrest of “terror suspects”. According to Timothy Edgar, of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU):

The FBI is effectively being taken over by a spymaster who reports directly to the White House. ... It’s alarming that the same person who oversees foreign spying will now oversee domestic spying too.7

Meanwhile in the UK, the Home Office was calling for a system of ID cards as an “answer to terrorism”. Each and every British citizen and resident will be obliged to register personal information, which will go into a giant national database, along with their personal biometrics: “iris pattern of the eye, fingerprints and “digitally recognizable facial features”. Similar procedures were being carried out in the European Union. Sweeping controls on the movement of people, both within and across international borders were introduced.

 

Tony Blair called for “extended powers to deport or bar from the UK foreigners who encourage terrorism”.8 Particular categories of people will be targeted and prevented from travelling.

 


The Police Investigation


Within a few days of the 7/7 attacks, the police investigation had already identified the names and identities of the alleged “London bombers”. Reminiscent of 9/11, credit cards and drivers licenses were apparently found among the debris in the London underground.


Based on scanty evidence, the police concluded that the suicide attacks were carried out by four British-born men, three of whom were of Pakistani descent.
Three of the men were reported dead “after belongings were found at the scenes”. The alleged bombers are Shehzad Tanweer, 22, of Beeston, Leeds, Hasib Mir Hussain, 18, also of Leeds and Mohammed Sidique Khan, 30, of Beeston, The fourth bomber’s identity was later revealed to be Jamaican-born Lindsey Germaine.


A few days after the bombings, police announced that they were hunting for a fifth man who was said to have left the UK prior to the attacks.
 


“All Roads Lead to Pakistan”


Three of the four suicide bombers had allegedly visited Pakistan in the year prior to the attacks, where they had established contacts with several Islamic organizations, including the two main Kashmir rebel groups Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Toiba, both of which have ties to Al Qaeda.9


Pakistan immediately became the focus of the investigation. London police detectives were rushed off to Islamabad.


According to police statements, both Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, had established close ties to Jaish-e-Mohammed. Tanweer had apparently been trained at a Jaish camp for “young jihadists” situated north of Islamabad. There were also reports that he had visited a madrassa run by Jamaat-ud Dawa, a Kashmiri group previously associated with Lashkar-e-Toiba.10


In Pakistan, [British] police are painstakingly analyzing the mobile phone records of the two 7/7 suspects who visited the country. While officials stress that it is a tedious process, it has already yielded the name of at least one significant suspect: Masoud Azhar, leader of the Jaish -e-Mohammed (Army of Mohammed).11
 

 

The Role of Pakistan’s Military Intelligence (ISI)


The British investigation was being conducted in collaboration with Pakistan’s Military Intelligence (ISI), which is known to have supported both Lashkar-e-Taiba, (Army of the Pure) and Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Mohammed), which claimed responsibility for the attacks on the Indian parliament in December 2001. (See Chapter II.)


Instead of being the object of the police investigation, the ISI’s collaboration was sought by the British authorities. The ISI was providing “documentation” to the British on Islamic organizations, which they had supported and financed:

A list of telephone numbers believed to be shared by British intelligence officials with their Pakistani counterparts has been the focus of attention after suggestions that the two men may have phoned fellow militants during their visit [to their parents in 2004].12

This was not the first time that the ISI’s assistance had been sought in “going after the terrorists”. In the immediate wake of 9/11, a far-reaching agreement was signed at the US State Department with the head of Pakistan’s Military Intelligence, which defined the terms of Pakistan’s “cooperation” in the “war on terrorism”. (See Chapter III.)


Amply documented, Pakistan’s ISI has supported the terror network. It has acted in close liaison with its US counterpart, the CIA.

 


“Al Qaeda’s Webmaster”


British investigators had also uncovered that the “Yorkshire bombers” were in contact with a mysterious Pakistani engineer named Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, also known as Abu Talha, who was allegedly behind the August 2004 planned terror attack on Wall Street, the World Bank and the IMF. (See Chapter XX.)
In the July 2005 news coverage of the London attacks, Naeem Noor Khan was described as Al Qaeda’s webmaster:“he was sending messages for Osama bin Laden.”


The British and US media immediately concluded that the attacks on the London subway were part of a broader coordinated plan, which also included financial buildings in the United States:

All roads seem to lead to Pakistan and an apparent al Qaeda summit meetings in April of last year, where it appears both the London subways and US financial buildings were approved as targets.13

Naeem Noor Khan had, according to the news reports, played a central role in the preparations of the London 7/7 attacks:

The laptop computer of Naeem Noor Khan, a captured al Qaeda leader [arrested in July 2004], contained plans for a coordinated series of attacks on the London subway system, as well as on financial buildings in both New York and Washington.14

Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan had allegedly stored the maps of the London underground on his computer hard disk. He was said to be in close contact with two of the London suicide bombers, Shehzad Tanweer and Hasib Hussain, during their visits to Pakistan.

For Scotland Yard, Noor Khan’s laptop computer was central to their investigation:

There’s absolutely no doubt he [Noor Khan] was part of an al Qaeda operation aimed at not only the United States but Great Britain,” explained Alexis Debat, a former official in the French Defense Ministry who is now a senior terrorism consultant for ABC News.15


Faulty Intelligence


The assertions regarding Naem Noor Khan contradict the findings of American and Pakistani investigators, following his arrest in July of 2004 by Pakistan’s ISI.
According to (former) US Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge in an August 2004 statement, Noor Khan had “top secret information” on his laptop computer pointing to an imminent terror attack—involving multiple targets—on US-based financial institutions.


This information on Noor Khan`s computer was used as a pretext to trigger a Code Orange Alert at the height of the presidential election campaign.


The FBI, however, subsequently confirmed that the material on his computer included outdated pre-9/11 photos and diagrams, which were publicly available. This material did not point to an impending terror threat. Quite the opposite. Following the August 2004 investigation, the “top secret information” extracted from Noor Khan`s laptop was dismissed as being largely irrelevant. (See Chapter XX.)

 


Secret Maps of the London Subway


In none of these August 2004 reports, however, was there reference to the existence of maps of the London underground or “plans for a coordinated series of attacks on the London subway system” as suggested by ABC News in its July 2005 reports. While the latter referred to the participation of Noor Khan in an “Al Qaeda Summit”, where the London bombings were being planned, the same news source, namely ABC News, confirmed back in August 2004 that the information on Noor Khan’s computer was “out dated” and was not indicative of a terror threat.16


Following Noor Khan’s July 2004 arrest, there was indeed mention of the existence of outdated maps of Heathrow Airport, but there was no mention of the London underground:

Photographs and maps of the airport, along with underpasses running beneath key buildings in London, were found on the laptop computer of Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan when he was arrested in Pakistan last month [July 2004], although the computer file was four years old and created before 9/11.17

Moreover, according to a spokesman of Pakistan’s military-intelligence:

The computer and the other information obtained from Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan revealed that there were certain maps [of Heathrow airport] and some other plans. But let me clarify that none of these were new; they were the old maps and old plans.18

In other words, it was only a year later, in the wake of the July 2005 attacks, that the maps of the London underground allegedly on Noor Khan’s laptop surfaced in the British and American press.


They had never been reported on previously.

 


Terror Suspect Recruited by the ISI


Moreover, when Naem Noor Khan was arrested in July 2004, he was not charged or accused of masterminding a terror attack on Wall Street and the IMF as suggested in the July 2005 reports. In fact quite the opposite: he was immediately recruited by Pakistan’s military intelligence (ISI):

Khan had been arrested in Lahore on July 13 [2004], and subsequently “turned” by Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence Agency. When his name appeared in print [in early August 2004], he was working for a combined ISI/CIA task force sending encrypted emails to key al Qaeda figures in the hope of pinpointing their locations and intentions.19

At the time the “Yorkshire bombers” visited Pakistan (November 2004-February 2005) and allegedly had “secret meetings” with Noor Khan, with a view to planning the attacks on London’s underground, Noor Khan had already been hired by the ISI as an informer on a CIA sponsored program.


If there had been an “Al Qaeda Summit” or a plan masterminded in Pakistan, in which Naem Noor Khan had participitated, as suggested by the London police investigation, both the ISI and the CIA would have known about it.

 


Al-Muhajiroun


Meanwhile, another “prime terror suspect” had emerged. Barely three weeks after the 7/7 bombings, Scotland Yard reported that they had identified a British citizen named Haroon Rashid Aswat, who was living in Lusaka, Zambia.


Aswat had apparently been in touch with the “Yorkshire bombers” and had also traveled to Pakistan, where the planning of the attacks was said to have occurred. Aswat was a member of Al-Muhajiroun, a British based Islamist organization led by radical cleric Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed.


Al-Muhajiroun (“The Emigrants”) is described as “an arm of Al Qaeda”. It was involved in the recruitment of Mujahideen to fight “the holy war” in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Kosovo. It became active in the UK in the mid-1980s, recruiting British volunteers to join the ranks of the Mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan war. The foreign fighters in America’s proxy war against the Soviet Union were trained in Pakistan in CIA sponsored camps. (See Chapter II.)


In the late 1990s, terror suspect Haroon Rashid Aswat joined Al Muhajiroun where he was said to have participated in the recruitment of volunteers in Britain’s Muslim community, who were sent to fight in the ranks of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), largely supporting NATO’s war effort:

Back in the late 1990s, the leaders [of Al Muhajiroun] all worked for British intelligence in Kosovo. Believe it or not, British intelligence actually hired some Al-Qaeda guys to help defend the Muslim rights in Albania and in Kosovo. That’s when Al-Muhajiroun got started. … The CIA was funding the operation to defend the Muslims, British intelligence was doing the hiring and recruiting.20

In Kosovo, US, British and German intelligence (BND) were involved in training the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which was also being supported by Al Qaeda.
According to a report published in 1999, the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had approached The British Secret Service (MI6) to arrange a training program for the KLA. While British SAS Special Forces in bases in Northern Albania were training the KLA, military instructors from Turkey and Afghanistan, financed by the “Islamic jihad”, were familiarizing the KLA with guerrilla and diversion tactics (See Chapter III.)


Aswat was said to have recruited the “Yorkshire bombers”. He was also from West Yorkshire, where the alleged bombers were living. He is suspected of having visited the bombers in the weeks leading up to the attacks.21


He is said to have played a central role in planning the 7/7 attacks. Press reports initially referred to him as a possible “mastermind” of 7/7:

Cell phone records show around 20 calls between him and the 7/7 gang, leading right up to those attacks, which were exactly three weeks ago.”22

At the time of his arrest in Zambia, however, much to the embarrassment of the British authorities, Scotland Yard’s “prime suspect” was reported as being protected by the British Secret Service (MI6):

This is the guy [Aswat], and what’s really embarrassing is that the entire British police are out chasing him, and one wing of the British government, MI6 or the British Secret Service, has been hiding him. And this has been a real source of contention between the CIA, the Justice Department, and Britain.23

According to intelligence analyst John Loftus, Al-Muharijoun was an “intelligence asset” of MI6. Londoin Met’s terror suspect was being used either as an informer or a “double agent”:

JOHN LOFTUS: Yeah, all these guys should be going back to an organization called Al-Muhajiroun, which means The Emigrants. It was the recruiting arm of Al-Qaeda in London; they specialized in recruiting kids whose families had emigrated to Britain but who had British passports. And they would use them for terrorist work.


JERRICK: So a couple of them now have Somali connections?
LOFTUS: Yeah, it was not unusual. Somalia, Eritrea, the first group of course were primarily Pakistani. But what they had in common was they were all emigrant groups in Britain, recruited by this Al-Muhajiroun group. They were headed by the, Captain Hook, the imam in London the Finsbury Mosque, without the arm. He was the head of that organization. Now his assistant was a guy named Aswat, Haroon Rashid Aswat.
 

JERRICK: Aswat, who they picked up.
LOFTUS: Right, Aswat is believed to be the mastermind of all the bombings in London.
 

JERRICK: On 7/7 and 7/21, this is the guy we think.
LOFTUS: This is the guy, and what’s really embarrassing is that the entire British police are out chasing him, and one wing of the British government, MI6 or the British Secret Service, has been hiding him. And this has been a real source of contention between the CIA, the [US] Justice Department, and Britain.
 

JERRICK: MI6 has been hiding him. Are you saying that he has been working for them?
LOFTUS: Oh I’m not saying it. This is what the Muslim sheik said in an interview in a British newspaper back in 2001.


JERRICK: So he’s a double agent, or was?
LOFTUS: He’s a double agent.


JERRICK: So he’s working for the Brits to try to give them information about Al-Qaeda, but in reality he’s still an Al-Qaeda operative.
LOFTUS: Yeah. The CIA and the Israelis all accused MI6 of letting all these terrorists live in London not because they’re getting Al Qaeda information, but for appeasement. It was one of those you leave us alone, we leave you alone kind of things.


JERRICK: Well we left him alone too long then.
LOFTUS: Absolutely. Now we knew about this guy Aswat. Back in 1999 he came to America. The Justice Department wanted to indict him in Seattle because him and his buddy were trying to set up a terrorist training school in Oregon.


JERRICK: So they indicted his buddy, right? But why didn’t they indict him?
LOFTUS: Well it comes out, we’ve just learned that the headquarters of the US Justice Department ordered the Seattle prosecutors not to touch Aswat.


JERRICK: Hello? Now hold on, why?
LOFTUS: Well, apparently Aswat was working for British intelligence. Now Aswat’s boss, the one-armed Captain Hook, he gets indicted two years later. So the guy above him and below him get indicted, but not Aswat. Now there’s a split of opinion within US intelligence. Some people say that the British intelligence fibbed to us. They told us that Aswat was dead, and that’s why the New York group dropped the case. That’s not what most of the Justice Department thinks. They think that it was just again covering up for this very publicly affiliated guy with Al-Muhajiroun. He was a British intelligence plant. So all of a sudden he disappears. He’s in South Africa. We think he’s dead; we don’t know he’s down there. Last month the South African Secret Service come across the guy. He’s alive.


JERRICK: Yeah, now the CIA says, oh he’s alive. Our CIA says OK let’s arrest him. But the Brits say no again?
LOTFUS: The Brits say no. Now at this point, two weeks ago, the Brits know that the CIA wants to get a hold of Haroon. So what happens? He takes off again, goes right to London. He isn’t arrested when he lands, he isn’t arrested when he leaves.


JERRICK: Even though he’s on a watch list.
LOFTUS: He’s on the watch list. The only reason he could get away with that was if he was working for British intelligence. He was a wanted man.
JERRICK: And then takes off the day before the bombings, I understand it—


LOFTUS: And goes to Pakistan.
JERRICK: And Pakistan, they jail him.


LOFTUS: The Pakistanis arrest him. They jail him. He’s released within 24 hours. Back to Southern Africa, goes to Zimbabwe and is arrested in Zambia. Now the US—


JERRICK: Trying to get across the—
LOFTUS: —we’re trying to get our hands on this guy.24

The interview conveys the impression that there were “disagreements” between American, British and Israeli intelligence officials on how to handle the matter. It also suggests that “the Brits” might have misled their US intelligence counterparts.


This interview, however, reveals something which news coverage on the London 7/7 attacks has carefully ignored, namely the longstanding relationship of Western intelligence agencies to a number of Islamic organizations including Al-Muhajiroun.


Haroon Rachid Aswat was reportedly in London for two weeks before the July 7 attacks, “fleeing just before the explosions”. If he had been working for MI6, his movements and whereabouts, including his contacts with the “Yorkshire bombers”, might have been known to British intelligence.


The broader role of Al-Muhajiroun since its creation in the 1990s, as well as its alleged links to MI-6 requires careful review.

 


Mock Terror Drill on the Morning of 7/7


A fictional “scenario” of multiple bomb attacks on London’s underground took place at exactly the same time as the bomb attack on July 7, 2005.


Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, a private firm on contract to the London Metropolitan Police, described in a BBC interview how he had organized and conducted the anti-terror drill, on behalf of an unnamed business client.


The fictional scenario was based on simultaneous bombs going off at exactly the same time at the underground stations where the real attacks were occurring:

POWER: At half past nine this morning [July 7, 2005] we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.
HOST: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?
POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don’t want to reveal their name but they’re listening and they’ll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they’d met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on.25

Following his interviews with the BBC, in response to the flood of incoming email messages, Peter Power—who is a former senior Scotland Yard official specializing in counterterrorism—answered in the form of the following “automatic reply”:

“Thank you for your message. Given the volume of emails about events on 7 July and a commonly expressed misguided belief that our exercise revealed prescient behavior, or was somehow a conspiracy (noting that several websites interpreted our work that day in an inaccurate/naive/ignorant/hostile manner) it has been decided to issue a single email response as follows:


It is confirmed that a short number of ‘walk through’ scenarios planned well in advance had commenced that morning for a private company in London (as part of a wider project that remains confidential) and that two scenarios related directly to terrorist bombs at the same time as the ones that actually detonated with such tragic results. One scenario in particular, was very similar to real time events.

 

However, anyone with knowledge about such ongoing threats to our capital city will be aware that (a) the emergency services have already practiced several of their own exercises based on bombs in the underground system (also reported by the main news channels) and (b) a few months ago the BBC broadcast a similar documentary on the same theme, although with much worse consequences. It is hardly surprising therefore, that we chose a feasible scenario - but the timing and script was nonetheless, a little disconcerting.


In short, our exercise (which involved just a few people as crisis managers actually responding to a simulated series of activities involving, on paper, 1000 staff) quickly became the real thing and the players that morning responded very well indeed to the sudden reality of events.


Beyond this no further comment will be made and based on the extraordinary number of messages from ill informed people, no replies will henceforth be given to anyone unable to demonstrate a bona fide reason for asking (e.g., accredited journalist / academic).
 

[signed]

Peter Power.26


Power’s email response suggests that mock drills are undertaken very frequently, as a matter of routine, and that there was nothing particularly out of the ordinary in the exercise conducted on July 7th, which just so happened to coincide with the real terror attacks.


There was nothing “routine” in the so-called “walk through” scenarios. Visor’s mock terror drills (held on the very same day as the real attack) was by no means an isolated “coincidence”.


There have been several mock drills and anti-terror exercises conducted by the US and British authorities since 9/11. A scenario of a mock terror attack of a plane slaming into a building organized by the CIA, took place on the morning of September 11, 2001, exactly at the same time as the real attacks on the World Trade Center. (See Chapter XVII.). Another high profile mock terror drill was held in late October 2000 (more than ten months prior to 9/11) which consisted in the scenario of a simulated passenger plane crashing into the Pentagon. (See Chapter XVII.)

 


“Atlantic Blue”


A mock terror drill on London’s transportation system entitled “Atlantic Blue” was held in April 2005, barely three months prior to the real attacks. (See Chapter XXI.) “Atlantic Blue” was part of a much larger US sponsored emergency preparedness exercise labelled TOPOFF 3, which included the participation of Britain and Canada. It had been ordered by the UK Secretary of State for the Home Department, Mr. Charles Clarke, in close coordination with his US counterpart Michael Chertoff. (See Chapter XXI.)


The assumptions of the Visor Consultants mock drill conducted on the morning of July 7th were similar to those conducted under “Atlantic Blue”. This should come as no surprise since Visor Consultants was involved, on contract to the British government, in the organization and conduct of “Atlantic Blue”, in coordination with the US Department of Homeland Security.


As in the case of the 9/11 simulation organized by the CIA, the July 7, 2005 Visor mock terror drill, was casually dismissed by the media, without further investigation, as a “bizarre coincidence” with no relationship to the real event.

 


Foreknowledge of the 7/7 Attack?


According to a report of the Associated Press correspondent in Jerusalem, the Israeli embassy had been advised in advance by Scotland Yard of an impending bomb attack:

Just before the blasts, Scotland Yard called the security officer at the Israeli Embassy to say they had received warnings of possible attacks, the official said. He did not say whether British police made any link to the economic conference.27

Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was warned by his embassy not to attend an economic conference organized by the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) in collaboration with the Israeli embassy and Deutsche Bank.


Netanyahu was staying at the Aldridge Hotel in Mayfair. The conference venue was a few miles away at the Great Eastern Hotel close to the Liverpool subway station, where one of the bomb blasts occurred.

 


Rudolph Giuliani’s London Visit


Rudolph Giuliani, who was mayor of New York City at the time of the 9/11 attacks, was staying at the Great Eastern hotel on the 7th of July, where TASE was hosting its economic conference, with Israel’s Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as keynote speaker.

 

Giuliani was having a business breakfast meeting in his room at the Great Eastern Hotel, close to Liverpool Street station when the bombs went off:

“I didn’t hear the Liverpool Street bomb go off,” he explains. “One of my security people came into the room and informed me that there had been an explosion. We went outside and they pointed in the direction of where they thought the incident had happened. There was no panic. I went back in to my breakfast. At that stage, the information coming in to us was very ambiguous.”28

Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Rudolph Giuliani knew each other. Giuliani had officially welcomed Netanyahu when he visited New York City as Prime Minister of Israel in 1996. There was no indication, however, from news reports that the two men met in London at the Great Eastern. On the day prior to the London attacks, July 6th, Giuliani was in North Yorkshire at a meeting.


After completing his term as mayor of New York City, Rudi Giuliani established a security outfit: Giuliani Security and Safety. The latter is a subsidary of Giuliani Partners LLC. headed by former New York head of the FBI, Pasquale D’Amuro.


After 9/11, D’Amuro was appointed Inspector in Charge of the FBI’s investigation of 9/11. He later served as Assistant Director of the Counterterrorism Division at FBI Headquarters and Executive Assistant Director for Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence. D’Amuro had close links to the Neocons in the Bush administration.


It is worth noting that Visor Consultants and Giuliani Security and Safety LLC specialize in similar “mock terror drills” and “emergency preparedness” procedures. Both Giuliani and Power were in London at the same time within a short distance of one of the bombing sites. While there is no evidence that Giuliani and Power met in London, the two companies have had prior business contacts in the area of emergency preparedness. 29

 


Concluding Remarks


The British police investigation although formally under the jurisdiction of a “civilian police force”, involves the participation of British intelligence and the Ministry of Defense. In fact, several key organizations of the military-intelligence apparatus including MI6, MI5, British Special Forces (SAS), Israel’s Mossad, the CIA and Pakistan’s Military Intelligence (ISI) are directly or indirectly involved in the investigation.


The evidence presented in this book suggests that these same Western intelligence agencies, which are collaborating with Scotland Yard, are known to have supported the “Islamic jihad”. This applies not only to Pakistan’s Military Intelligence, which supports the two of main Kashmir rebel groups, it also pertains to MI6, which has alleged links to Al-Mahajiroun, going back to the 1990s.

 


Notes

1. Statement by Prime Minister Tony Blair, 7 July 2005.
2. AFX News, Cairo, 7 July 2005.
3. Riyadh Lafta, Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi and Gilbert Burnham, “Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey”, Lancet, October 2004.
4. Statement of Tony Blair at a Press Conference together with visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai, following his meeting with 25 Muslim leaders, AFP, 9 July 2005.
5. Reuters, 21 July 2005.
6. NBC Tonight, 29 June 2005.
7. Quoted in Mike Whitney, “Genesis of an American Gestapo”, Dissident Voice, 16 July 2005.
8. BBC, 5 August 2005.
9. Washington Post, 5 August 2005.
10. The Guardian, 1 August 2005.
11. Christian Science Monitor, 1 August 2005
12. Financial Times, 2 August 2005.
13. ABC News, 18 July 2005.
14. Quoted by ABC News, 14 July 2005.
15. ABC News, 14 July 2005.
16. ABC Good Morning America, 3 August 2004.
17. Sunday Herald, 8 August 2004.
18. Statement by Pakistan’s Inter-Service Public Relations (ISPR) Director-General Maj-Gen Shaukat Sultan, PTV World, Islamabad, 16 August 2004.
19. The Herald, 9 August 2005.
20. Statement of intelligence expert John Loftus in an interview on Fox News, 29 July 2005.
21. New Republic, 8 August 2005.
22. Fox News, 28 July 2005.
23. John Loftus, op. cit., emphasis added.
24. Ibid., emphasis added.
25.BBC Radio Interview, 7 July 2005.
26.Quoted in London Underground Exercises: Peter Power Responds, Jon Rappoport, July 13,2005. http://www.infowars.com/articles/London_attack/power_responds_terror_drills.htm
27. AP, 7 July 2005.
28. Quoted in the Evening Standard, 11 July 2005.
29. Peter Power served on the Advisory Board to the Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness (CCEP), together with Richard Sheirer, Senior Vice President of Giuliani and partners. (http://wcdm.org/wcdm_advs.html) Sheirer was previously Commissioner at the NYC Office of Emergency Management, and Director of New York City Homeland Security, responsible for emergency preparedness. Peter Power of Visor, who coordinated Atlantic Blue, held in April 2005, had a close relationship with the US Department of Homeland Security.

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