|
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.
Back to Contents
|