Saturday, August 06, 2005

Unwitting bombers?

July 16, 2005

INDEPENDENT intelligence sources believe that the four British Muslims named as the perpetrators of the July 7 bombings in London were unwitting victims of a plot which could have involved another group than Al Qaeda as blamed by the British government.
The theory of these sources is that the four were enlisted into what they believed was a national security exercise aimed at testing the abilities of the British authorities to handle an emergency situation.
A "security" exercise was being conducted at the time of the blasts, but this was not given wide media coverage. Peter Power, managing director of Visor Consultants, and a former Scotland Yard official who worked at one time with the Anti Terrorist Branch, was closely involved in that exercise. The drill was being conducted at the exact same stations the bombings actually occurred, he told the BBC in an interview, but few people have taken note of the report.
(It has to be noted here that on the morning of 9/11/2001 in the US, the Central Intelligence Agency was also conducting drills of flying hijacked planes into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon at 8:30am in the morning, and that was why the US air defence forces did not react to the hijackings. They thought it was a drill.
North American Air Defence (NORAD), which is in charge of intervening in the event of genuine hijackings, did not act at all even though some 22 planes were showing on NORAD radar screens as hijacked airliners at the same time. NORAD had been briefed that this was part of the exercise drill and therefore normal reactive procedure was forestalled and delayed).
Power told the BBC that at the exact same time that the London bombings were taking place, his company was running a 1,000-person strong exercise which drilled the London Underground being bombed at the exact same locations, at the exact same times, as happened in real life.
"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," Power told the BBC. "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."
Intelligence experts believe that the exercise fulfilled several different goals. It acts as a cover for everyone, including the bombers who did not know that they were carrying real explosives.
Several people have reported receiving an email message before the attacks that someone was trying to hire Muslims to play terrorists for a terror drill, to try to sneak onto the trains and buses with fake bombs to test out the security.
Under this theory, the four men responded to the email, and were told they were to be part of a security exercise and they were selected because they were Muslims and this could be a key test for the security forces involved in the exercise (to intercept Muslims carrying suspect backpacks). They were also told that the bags contained dummy explosives.
The four went in different directions from King's Cross station, and someone detonated the explosives carried by three of them from a distance. The fourth, somehow, got off the train at some point and got into a bus. Perhaps he was told to do so earlier, and the explosives were detonated while he was riding the bus. Or all the four backpacks were rigged to go off at the same time, but the fourth failed to go off simultaneously with the other three and exploded more than one hour later while he was on the bus.
The accused bombers don't fit the profile of men ready to die for any cause. Some of them were not particularly religious. Therefore, the possibility is that they thought they were carrying fake bombs as part of a terror drill. This also explains the nervousness of the man on the bus who had probably just heard of the real explosions and was starting to suspect that the fake bomb he was carrying might not be fake after all, but then it went off before he could do anying.
In the meantime, someone could have planted some explsoives of the same type in the house where in Leeds police found them during raids.
Many questions remain unanswered in the official police version of the bombings:
— Why the four had bought return tickets if they were to carry out suicide bombings?
— Why did they pay parking fees and put up the "pay and display" parking coupons in their vehicles?
— One of them had a child and a pregnant wife. Another had just launched a married life. Would someone like that undertake suicide attacks?
— How come the ID documents of one bomber were found at two bombing sites?