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London escaped higher death toll than New York by a whisker.

Journalist | 16.04.2006 11:16

The key plotters behind the July 7th 2005 London bombings planned to trap and drown tens of thousands of innocent people. A team of terrorists with a fifth bomb – intended to explode in the tube network directly under the River Thames – was arrested the night before.

The arrests were made when uniformed officers in police patrol cars stopped the terror gang, apparently by fortunate accident. Within minutes of their notifying their superiors they were ‘swamped’ by plain-clothes police, Special Branch and/or MI5 officers and the whole affair was taken out of their hands. They were ordered to tell no-one about the incident and several who have since tried to find out what happened to the small group of Islamics they arrested have been unable to do so. The men have vanished without trace.

The uniformed officers who prevented the atrocity are so deeply shocked by the Government and top security services cover-up – which maintains that the 7/7 bombings were carried out by a small independent cell of home-grown radicals with no overseas links or big ambitions – that one of them has come forward to tell us what really happened.

Not surprisingly, this has been done on condition of strict anonymity, so we can say nothing more about the source of the story, except that we are convinced that it is totally genuine. It is for mainstream journalists with greater resources and contacts than us to take up the investigation and find out more.

We can, however, provide a few extra pointers: First, the fact that Al Qaeda had a detailed plan to flood the London Underground network was first revealed by the London Evening Standard on 9th August 2004. Sarah Getty wrote a report on the discovery by MI5, in an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, of plans and maps for a tube bombing intended to breach at least one tunnel below the Thames and to kill thousands in the resulting floods and mass panic in the pitch black tunnels.

Second, we draw attention to various news reports’ speculation – supposedly based on a cryptic Al Qaeda statement - that the London bus bomber had originally been supposed to strike on the northern line, quite possibly at Stockwell, so as to form a rough symbolic ‘cross’. This, of course, would have been far more obvious had a fifth bomb gone off in the middle of the ‘cross’ in London right under the Thames. This would also account for the otherwise inexplicable presence and ruthlessness of the police marksmen who ‘just happened’ to be at Stockwell two weeks later.

Third, it explains why the suicide bombers made the extraordinary and dangerous effort to travel all the way to London instead of blowing up their reportedly unstable bombs at targets in Yorkshire such as the White Rose shopping centre or a major sporting fixture. Further it clarifies why they felt it would be more productive to blow up tube trains which travel at an average speed of less than 30mph, rather than taking out the front carriage of a fast moving intercity train out of Leeds on which the resulting derailment alone would have killed hundreds.

Fourth, arrests the night before, and the discovery of the group at the very heart of the plot, would account for the otherwise incredibly coincidental top-level security measures which were actually in place on the morning of 7th July even before the first suicide bombs in British history were detonated.

Exercises

These have been played down by the mainstream media, and do not appear likely even to feature in the official white-wash which is due to appear shortly. But official silence on these points cannot alter the facts:

According to Peter Power, a former high-ranking member of Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Branch, interviewed on Radio 5 Live and ITV News, his company Visor Consulting was conducting ‘crisis exercises’ with scenarios ‘uncannily’ mirroring those of the actual attack, on the very morning of July 7th. In the event, Power explained, his team were forced to stop role-playing and to do their job for real. “Unusual though it may be to stop an exercise and go into real time,” he told listeners, “it worked very well – although there were a few seconds when the audience didn’t realise whether it was real or not.”

This ‘uncanny coincidence’ soon produced a major conspiracy theory all over the Internet. The exercise, so the fantasy ran, was really a ‘cover’ for British intelligence to carry out the atrocities themselves, with four unfortunate innocent young Muslims duped into carrying bombs in what they thought was a dummy exercise run by the police for the safety of their fellow Brits.

Conspiracy theory

Needless to say, those keenest on this tale were neo-Nazi cranks in the USA, who are fortunate enough to have no experience of living next door to people like the arrogant, hate-filled ‘religious’ thugs like Khan and his gang, and so have no idea of the things of which they are capable. Simultaneously, their paranoia about the (very real) neo-con drive to drag the USA and Britain further into war in the Middle East leads them to believe that Tony Blair and his fellow pygmies would actually dare to order mass murder in their own capital city, and that no-one among the large number of operatives needed to carry out such a plan would refuse to obey such orders. While the BNP yields to no-one in terms of our criticism of Blair & Co, we have no hesitation in regarding such fantasy accusations as being barking mad.

Nevertheless, the story soon gained momentum, even turning up on Al Jazeera news. The ‘Blair Done It’ conspiracy theory was then rubbished on Channel 4 on 17th July 2005 in a report which put it all down to sloppy blog journalism and the reporting of Chinese whispers. In truth, however, this attempt to discredit the story that the Visor Consultants operation was anything more than a coincidence was no more convincing than the wild claims that MI5 had murdered scores of innocent London commuters in order to provide a causus belli against Iran.
Security measures in place

Now, at last, we can see a good part of the real picture: Faced with the knowledge that – despite arresting the group with the professional bomb – a cell of home-grown terrorist auxiliaries with smaller bombs was still poised to strike, the authorities very properly put into place a massive intelligence/damage limitation exercise. At the same time, however, to avoid creating panic, economic dislocation and alerting the remaining would-be bombers to the fact that they were being hunted, it would have been an understandable operational decision to disguise the whole thing as a training exercise and to avoid putting an unusually high visible security presence on the tube network that morning.

This would also explain why, in the wake of the suicide blasts, firemen and other rescue service personnel were repeatedly ordered not to go down into the tunnels to search for and help survivors. The loss of a few critically injured commuters would have been regarded as a lesser evil than having large numbers of rescue workers drowned if by chance there were other bombs set to blast tunnels under the Thames.

Finally, in terms of explaining the otherwise unexplainable, this information tells us how it was that the Powers That Be were ready and able to shut down the entire mobile telephone network in London within moments of – or even before – the bomb blasts.

Mobile network

This operation is another part of the events of that terrible day which appears to have vanished from the official narrative. Yet, according to Wikipedia’s entry on the 7/7 bombings, BBC News on 1st March 2006 included the fact that “the Metropolitan Police have admitted that it was a mistake to shut down the mobile telephone networks in the immediate aftermath of the attacks”. The shutdown was described as wrong by Met boss Sir Ian Blair, although he failed to explain why a very sensible precaution against the use of mobile phone signals to detonate bombs (as was done in Madrid) was in any way a ‘mistake’.

Regardless of the strange opinions of the deeply useless Blair, however, the unanswered question of how it was that the security services were poised to cut the mobile networks on the morning of July 7th is now answered – they had had hours of warning that bomb blasts were a very real risk.

Pumping demands

They were certainly right to be desperately worried about the whole plot, for Al Qaeda’s plan was a fiendish one to strike at an incredibly vulnerable target, as a few statistics from websites about the tube network show:

Westminster station is 105 feet below sea level. Waterloo tube station is 21.3 metres below the water line. The East London line is 60 feet below sea level at Wapping. Bank station is 136 feet below the busy street above it.

There are 93 miles of deep level tunnel, a large proportion of them below sea level, and all interconnected. The average depth of the tube lines is eighty feet.

30 million litres of water have to be pumped out of the tunnel system even on a normal day. This is enough to fill a municipal swimming pool every 20 minutes and takes 1,030 pumps.

More than five hundred trains run in the tube system at each morning peak period. 34,000 commuters enter the network at Victoria station alone during the three hour morning peak. During the peak period, the Central Line alone carries 30 trains an hour. The Waterloo and City Line runs 19, and the Northern Line carries 30. The other lines are equally busy.

Many of these would have been caught on the outside edge of the area of low-lying central London cut off by the planned four suicide bomber blasts, but scores of trains would have been trapped in the killing zone.

Disaster

Had the fifth bomb (which was going to be planted in the most vulnerable place, rather than exploded in a moving train) succeeded in breaking the tunnel roof, the resulting torrent of water and shorting out of the electricity supply would have knocked out even the pumps that keep the normal leaks under control, thus making things even worse. Tens of thousands of people at least would have been caught like rats in a trap, or like the men in the engine rooms of torpedoed ships in wartime.

Of course, we simply have no idea as to whether the plot would actually have worked. Is a bomb which can be carried by one or two men capable of breaking the roof of such a tunnel? It is known that Al-Qaeda: a. has access to military grade explosives; b. that their key operatives (which this team could well have been) are trained in the use of shaped charges (which greatly magnify the piercing power of even small quantities of substances such as Semtex) and c. that Bin Laden himself used his civil engineering degree and family construction business knowledge to blast and dig out massive tunnel networks in the Afghan mountains during the war against the Soviets.

Putting all this facts together it seems to us that the answer could well be that the scheme would have worked all too well. Such a conclusion would also account in part for the Powers That Be’s determination to keep the whole plot secret so as to avoid a politically damaging increase in “Islamophobia”.

The death toll, and the TV footage of soaking, terrified survivors staggering out of stations all over the centre of Britain’s great capital city, could easily have outstripped the impact of the Twin Towers attacks. 7/7 could have dwarfed 9/11 as a triumph for Islamic fundamentalism, anti-white racism, and as a reproach to politicians like Bush and Blair whose vainglory and domination by vested interest warmongers has put the civilians of our nations into the front line.

Journalist

Additions

Hidden - repost from a fash site

16.04.2006 14:32

This article has been hidden because it is a repost from here: www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=8599

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