Monday 25 July 2005

UK Channel 4 Whitewash London Underground Exercise Story

'Coincidence theorists' say nothing to worry about, go back to sleep

by Paul Joseph Watson


A firestorm erupted amongst alternative media after this website first highlighted the inconceivable coincidence of Visor Consultants holding an exercise which centered around bombs exploding in the exact areas and at the same time as happened during the real 7/7 London Underground attack.

However, no mainstream media has reported on this massive story, instead focusing on drills that had taken place months and years before the actual event.

Until now.

British Channel 4 News has produced a special report which whitewashes the entire affair as one big coincidence and attacks this website for even questioning the unusual nature of the concurrent exercises and attacks on 7/7.

Before we offer a rebuttal to the perspective of the report, it's interesting to relate the reaction of Visor managing director when he was questioned as to the lack of mainstream media coverage on this issue.

Colman Jones, an Associate Producer on CBS:Sunday Night, met Power at a conference on disaster management in Toronto. As they were leaving the building he enquired of Power 'why there had not been more media coverage of this.' 'They were trying to keep it quiet,' Power purportedly responded, with what Jones called 'a knowing smile.'

Who is trying to keep it quiet? If this is all just hot air as Channel 4 later go on to claim, then why is it being kept secret? Why hasn't Power even revealed the name of the company he was running the drill for?

Quoting from the Channel 4 report,

Visor's crisis team, Power explained, were planning to practice the switch from what he called 'slow time' thinking to the 'quick time' thinking required by a crisis situation. In the event, they were forced to do so for real. 'Unusual though it may be to stop an exercise and go into real time,' he comments, 'it worked very well - although there were a few seconds when the audience didn't realise whether it was real or not.'

After quoting our report and Al Jazeera (who the Channel 4 writer JJ King failed to notice had just copied our article wholesale and claimed it as their own), Channel 4 claim that this website engaged in 'careless speculation' in that we failed to contact Visor.

All we were doing is drawing attention to the comments that Power had made on both BBC Radio 5 and ITN News. Furthermore, Power refused to respond to anyone who wasn't what he called 'accredited media' - and just sent the same template stock e mail out to anyone who enquired about the drill.

Channel 4 and JJ King then state,

In fact, the 'exercises' he spoke of on Five Live were carried out purely 'on paper', or at least PowerPoint, by a small group of seven or eight executives (Power remains tight-lipped about the client) seeking to examine the impact on corporate decision-making of a potential crisis situation.

OK, let's take a step back here.

Channel 4 quoted Power earlier as saying that when the real attack began, th exercise switched from 'slow time' to 'quick time' thinking and that Visor stopped the exercise and went into 'real time'. This, coupled with comments previously made by Power, suggests that Visor had some kind of actie role in the command structure in dealing with the management of the crisis, the real attack. How can the exercise have just been paper based when Visor started managing the real attack, not the scripted one, after it happened.

Even putting this aside for a moment, the drill need not have any link whatsoever to the attack as it unfolded, but still could have been cited by the government as a fallback excuse had any of their operatives been caught in the act of facilitating the bombings. This was the point of our original article and we made it clear that Visor and Peter Power could have been completely unwitting dupes in this process. In fact that would have been the favourable because it reduces the chance of good people stepping forward and blowing the whistle.

In the light of a brief interview with Power, the 'unbelievable' coincidence of events suddenly seems entirely comprehensible: the train stations targeted, after all, were all in central London -- any planner would pick these amongst a list of possible targets.

Take a look at a map of the tube stations. Factor in the amount of different stations with the fact that the exercises targeted the exact same stations at the exact same time as the real event happened.

Then consider the fact that the exercises planned simultaneous bombs going off in different stations. The fact that the 7/7 attacks were simultaneous bombs only emerged two days after the event, making the coincidence theory even less plausible.

One individual calculated the likelihood of this being just a coincidence. The odds were one in 3,715,592,613,265,750,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This is obviously a figure open to conjecture but it gives you an idea of the ballpark improbability we are talking about.

Channel 4 cite poison gas attack drills on the Underground and a BBC documentary which dramatised an attack on the Underground as proof that the Visor drill was very much part of a trend and nothing more than a coincidence. This misses the point entirely.

Again we have to repeat, the key elements of the Visor drill are that the exact same locations were targeted at the exact same time as the real attack. This is beyond coincidence. We are aware that there were other drills and the mainstream media has covered them over and over again. Why haven't they covered this one?

Channel 4 conclude their whitewash piece by questioning this website's 'journalistic nous'.

This is pretty rich coming from a mainstream media that for example takes Al-Qaeda responsibility claims as gospel even if there's no evidence the group exists.

Yesterday Sky News carried the headline 'Group Claims Bombings' - in relation to the failed attacks on Thursday.

The group in question was Abu Hafs al Masri Brigade. Previous investigations by the Boston Globe and others concur that this group doesn't exist and is likely to be one man sat at a computer.

So how can Sky News might as well have reported that Intergalactic Imperial Reptoids claimed responsibility for the attack, and yet it is the alternative media that consistently gets lambasted for bad journalism?

The tide is turning, newspaper sales are down, TV news viewers are falling. The mainstream media has lost all credibility and people are turning to those who actively seek the truth rather than actively seek to suppress it.

Even in the face of this barrage from both sloppily researched 'special reports' and government hackers trying to shut our websites down, we will continue to cover the events in London with a skeptical eye. In fact the more we are attacked, the more we will re-double our efforts to reach more people.

The truth will always triumph over the scoffing sardonic whims of establishment media news whores.

Full story...