Boards
London Conspiracy Theory
London Conspiracy Theory.
This is a bit different from most conspiracy theories - and a bit different from many of the theories about London. Rather than starting with a conclusion and building evidence against it, it explores a strange discrepancy in the events of last Thursday and looks at the possible different implications. This isn’t all mine, I’ve put it together with friends, drawing on what they’ve told me – and only what they’ve told me they actually saw/experienced themselves. Much of this is backed up by accounts on other messageboards and on various blogs. I may quote or draw from these occasionally.
All the timelines relating to the bombings start with the explosion between Aldgate/Aldgate East and Liverpool St (another tiny point on which the story’s been very confused). But – I’m not sure how many people remember – there was something more than a little odd going on the tube quite some time earlier.
From about 0730, maybe even slightly before, the Northern Line was in total disarray. Par for the course on a weekday morning, you might think, but every single station south of the river was shut down. The explanation was given as a failed train at Balham – but, since when have failed trains led to a huge police presence, including vans. Two separate friends turned up at Balham tube station that morning to be turned away by large numbers of police officers. It’s fairly rare that a failed train would cause the whole line to be shut for so long anyway. One blog quotes a named person as asking the police what was going on, and whether this was a cover for something. They, apparently, couldn’t give an answer. Other (unconfirmed) reports include armed police at Kennington, as well as a vastly reduced service north of the river (extending as far as at least Highgate), with many down escalators closed. A friend was turned away from a station to the north at about 8.15 AM, although it didn’t seem officially closed or sealed off.
In short, something weird was happening on the Northern line.
Track forward to 8.30 AM, still 20 minutes before the bombings. The Piccadilly Line is suddenly suspended between Arnos Grove and Kings Cross (note, still seeking more confirmation of this.) Reason given was ‘fire’. A couple of fire engines were apparently spotted parked outside Cally Road tube around this time. This is confusing.
So, confusion on the Piccadilly line as well.
How about a bomb scare in Sheffield two days earlier? City center gridlocked for two hours? Great. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/south_yorkshire/4654289.stm. So, now we’re told the bombers are from Leeds, just up the road. I don’t know about anyone else, but I can’t help feeling someone knew something would happen somewhere at some stage that week.
If we want to push the boat out a little, we can find another odd coincidence. This one’s supported by video footage as well: http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/july2005/110705bombingexercises.htm
This footage shows the managing director of a Crisis Management/PR firm – Peter Power of Visor Consultants – confirming that his company was running an exercise, on behalf of a private company, which involved managing a crisis consisting of simultaneous bombings at the very stations where the bombings did in fact take place.
In his own words:
POWER: At half past nine this morning 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.
At first, I didn’t believe this, but I’ve seen the video. This is about as strange a coincidence as ever I’ve come across. Even leaving out the fact it was based on the same stations – reasonably likely targets for any attack – it still leaves me speechless. Note it was based on simultaneous bombings. It was a few days before it was announced this was what had happened.
So – what do we make of all this? It would be taking things far too far to claim that the whole tragedy took place under the auspices of government, the US or Israel, as some have been claiming. This is just scaremongering and assertion.
Instead, it seems that the authorities were probably aware of some kind of threat to the tube network on Thursday morning. Taken in combination, the odd occurrences above would suggest this was a nonspecific threat. Why, then, close/disrupt the Northern Line? I don’t buy the failed train explanation. There are two good reasons to disrupt the Northern line as a precaution.
1) The Northern Line passes under the river. The worst possible attack that could occur is for the tunnel to be breached either between London Bridge and Bank or between Waterloo and Embankment. The Bank branch’d be the worst – most of the deep-level tube system in London would flood very, very quickly, with enormous loss of life. The Jubilee line has some serious floodgates, ruling this out as a target, while the Waterloo & City, Bakerloo and Victoria have much thicker tunnels. The Northern line had floodgates at one stage, but these no longer work. This has taken some research, as you may guess.
2) Simply, it’s the second busiest tube on the network. Even disrupting it would lead to a bomber being unable to predict when/where they’d be (or the bomb’d be) by detonation time. I speculate this is what drove the fourth bomber onto the 30 Bus.
But – Why not close the whole network? There are several possibilities. Maybe the threat wasn’t taken seriously enough to shut down the whole of London on a busy morning, costing millions in terms of economic disruption. Maybe (this is very tenuous, I know) it was decided that maybe if there was going to be a bombing, let there be one. It does benefit the government politically, both in a knee-jerk way as we saw during, say, the Falklands War, and also removes many barriers to pushing through various bits of legislation. Maybe a combination of both.
I theorize that the police/whoever did receive either a threat, or more likely some form of intelligence suggesting something of that nature would take place. Maybe somebody under surveillance disappeared suspiciously from Leeds (would this explain the rapid identification of the bombers that’s been reported today?) I believe they assumed if anything would happen, which was by no means likely, it would be one terrorist, one tube. I believe that, for this reason, the Northern line was disrupted to divert a threat, if on existed, to somewhere less crucially dangerous. I also believe Peter Power was contracted to run this exercise by an ex-colleague at Scotland Yard, possibly a former member of the anti-terror squad now running an independent consultancy. This was again as a precaution, and to me would suggest that the threat wasn’t being taken all that seriously by the authorities – obviously if they were aware it would happen this coincidence would be hugely powerful. I imagine it was suspected an attack would, if it occurred at all, occur at one of these stations – they are the logical locations.
In short, I think there was moderately vague intelligence, and it was partially acted upon in a half-assed way, which now looks bad after the fact. Working under pressure, could those involved have done anything more? Only they know, and my guess is they’re not talking.
So – more cock-up than conspiracy? It certainly looks that way at the moment, although the opposite is a possibility.
And all that remains for me to do – and all that I have in my power to do – is express my sympathy to relatives and friends of the dead, the injured, and the traumatized, and those who still wait to find out if their friends or family have been caught up in this evil attack. While questions remain to be asked, as I hope I have begun to do, it’s now down to the people of London to show the world that neither crippling fear nor blind fury is the good and wise human being’s reaction to such an outrage. We should seek not only to rebuild both physically and psychologically, but to enter into the mindset of these people, and to explore what we can do, short of becoming a microscopically-controlled police state, to remove the desire, the motivation, the potential consequences and the actual likelihood of such a barbaric and despicable act occurring on our shores again.
Alari. 12/07/2005.
This is a bit different from most conspiracy theories - and a bit different from many of the theories about London. Rather than starting with a conclusion and building evidence against it, it explores a strange discrepancy in the events of last Thursday and looks at the possible different implications. This isn’t all mine, I’ve put it together with friends, drawing on what they’ve told me – and only what they’ve told me they actually saw/experienced themselves. Much of this is backed up by accounts on other messageboards and on various blogs. I may quote or draw from these occasionally.
All the timelines relating to the bombings start with the explosion between Aldgate/Aldgate East and Liverpool St (another tiny point on which the story’s been very confused). But – I’m not sure how many people remember – there was something more than a little odd going on the tube quite some time earlier.
From about 0730, maybe even slightly before, the Northern Line was in total disarray. Par for the course on a weekday morning, you might think, but every single station south of the river was shut down. The explanation was given as a failed train at Balham – but, since when have failed trains led to a huge police presence, including vans. Two separate friends turned up at Balham tube station that morning to be turned away by large numbers of police officers. It’s fairly rare that a failed train would cause the whole line to be shut for so long anyway. One blog quotes a named person as asking the police what was going on, and whether this was a cover for something. They, apparently, couldn’t give an answer. Other (unconfirmed) reports include armed police at Kennington, as well as a vastly reduced service north of the river (extending as far as at least Highgate), with many down escalators closed. A friend was turned away from a station to the north at about 8.15 AM, although it didn’t seem officially closed or sealed off.
In short, something weird was happening on the Northern line.
Track forward to 8.30 AM, still 20 minutes before the bombings. The Piccadilly Line is suddenly suspended between Arnos Grove and Kings Cross (note, still seeking more confirmation of this.) Reason given was ‘fire’. A couple of fire engines were apparently spotted parked outside Cally Road tube around this time. This is confusing.
So, confusion on the Piccadilly line as well.
How about a bomb scare in Sheffield two days earlier? City center gridlocked for two hours? Great. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/south_yorkshire/4654289.stm. So, now we’re told the bombers are from Leeds, just up the road. I don’t know about anyone else, but I can’t help feeling someone knew something would happen somewhere at some stage that week.
If we want to push the boat out a little, we can find another odd coincidence. This one’s supported by video footage as well: http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/july2005/110705bombingexercises.htm
This footage shows the managing director of a Crisis Management/PR firm – Peter Power of Visor Consultants – confirming that his company was running an exercise, on behalf of a private company, which involved managing a crisis consisting of simultaneous bombings at the very stations where the bombings did in fact take place.
In his own words:
POWER: At half past nine this morning 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.
At first, I didn’t believe this, but I’ve seen the video. This is about as strange a coincidence as ever I’ve come across. Even leaving out the fact it was based on the same stations – reasonably likely targets for any attack – it still leaves me speechless. Note it was based on simultaneous bombings. It was a few days before it was announced this was what had happened.
So – what do we make of all this? It would be taking things far too far to claim that the whole tragedy took place under the auspices of government, the US or Israel, as some have been claiming. This is just scaremongering and assertion.
Instead, it seems that the authorities were probably aware of some kind of threat to the tube network on Thursday morning. Taken in combination, the odd occurrences above would suggest this was a nonspecific threat. Why, then, close/disrupt the Northern Line? I don’t buy the failed train explanation. There are two good reasons to disrupt the Northern line as a precaution.
1) The Northern Line passes under the river. The worst possible attack that could occur is for the tunnel to be breached either between London Bridge and Bank or between Waterloo and Embankment. The Bank branch’d be the worst – most of the deep-level tube system in London would flood very, very quickly, with enormous loss of life. The Jubilee line has some serious floodgates, ruling this out as a target, while the Waterloo & City, Bakerloo and Victoria have much thicker tunnels. The Northern line had floodgates at one stage, but these no longer work. This has taken some research, as you may guess.
2) Simply, it’s the second busiest tube on the network. Even disrupting it would lead to a bomber being unable to predict when/where they’d be (or the bomb’d be) by detonation time. I speculate this is what drove the fourth bomber onto the 30 Bus.
But – Why not close the whole network? There are several possibilities. Maybe the threat wasn’t taken seriously enough to shut down the whole of London on a busy morning, costing millions in terms of economic disruption. Maybe (this is very tenuous, I know) it was decided that maybe if there was going to be a bombing, let there be one. It does benefit the government politically, both in a knee-jerk way as we saw during, say, the Falklands War, and also removes many barriers to pushing through various bits of legislation. Maybe a combination of both.
I theorize that the police/whoever did receive either a threat, or more likely some form of intelligence suggesting something of that nature would take place. Maybe somebody under surveillance disappeared suspiciously from Leeds (would this explain the rapid identification of the bombers that’s been reported today?) I believe they assumed if anything would happen, which was by no means likely, it would be one terrorist, one tube. I believe that, for this reason, the Northern line was disrupted to divert a threat, if on existed, to somewhere less crucially dangerous. I also believe Peter Power was contracted to run this exercise by an ex-colleague at Scotland Yard, possibly a former member of the anti-terror squad now running an independent consultancy. This was again as a precaution, and to me would suggest that the threat wasn’t being taken all that seriously by the authorities – obviously if they were aware it would happen this coincidence would be hugely powerful. I imagine it was suspected an attack would, if it occurred at all, occur at one of these stations – they are the logical locations.
In short, I think there was moderately vague intelligence, and it was partially acted upon in a half-assed way, which now looks bad after the fact. Working under pressure, could those involved have done anything more? Only they know, and my guess is they’re not talking.
So – more cock-up than conspiracy? It certainly looks that way at the moment, although the opposite is a possibility.
And all that remains for me to do – and all that I have in my power to do – is express my sympathy to relatives and friends of the dead, the injured, and the traumatized, and those who still wait to find out if their friends or family have been caught up in this evil attack. While questions remain to be asked, as I hope I have begun to do, it’s now down to the people of London to show the world that neither crippling fear nor blind fury is the good and wise human being’s reaction to such an outrage. We should seek not only to rebuild both physically and psychologically, but to enter into the mindset of these people, and to explore what we can do, short of becoming a microscopically-controlled police state, to remove the desire, the motivation, the potential consequences and the actual likelihood of such a barbaric and despicable act occurring on our shores again.
Alari. 12/07/2005.