The Clash of Civilizations: London Lips Are Sealed.

Prison Planet

UK Channel 4 Whitewash London Underground Exercise Story

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

Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet | July 23 2005

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 Peter Power 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, the 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 active 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 if they discovered the real agenda.

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 Sky News might as well have reported that Intergalactic Imperial Reptoids claimed responsibility for the attack, because their existence is just as flimsy as Abu Hafs, 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.

SOURCE - http://www.infowars.com/articles/London_attack/channel_4_whitewash_underground_exercises.htm

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Channel 4 News
Special Reports

Coincidence of bomb exercises?

Published: 17 Jul 2005
By: Channel 4 News

Before the discovery of the London bombers' identities, bloggers had been speculating about a large-scale bomb-simulation that took place at the same time and locations as the explosions.

It began when Peter Power, one time high ranking employee of Scotland Yard and member of its Anti-Terrorist Branch, reported in two major UK media outlets that his company Visor Consulting had on the morning of 7th of July been conducting 'crisis exercises' whose scenarios uncannily mirrored those of the actual attack.

In interviews on Radio 5 Live and ITV News, Power appeared to claim the exercises involved 'a thousand people' as well as a dedicated crisis team whose number was not specified. The consultant described the simulation of 'simultaneous attacks on a underground and mainline station' and 'bombs going off precisely at the railway stations' at which the actual bombings occurred.

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.'

Three days after the London bombings, Power was in Toronto for the 15th World Conference on Disaster Management. There, he took part in a discussion panel for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's news discussion programme CBS: Sunday Night, in which he was quizzed again about what the host called the 'extraordinary' conjunction of his company's planned scenarios and the actual events. Power dismissed this as 'spooky coincidence'.

'Our scenario was very similar, but it wasn't totally identical,' he said. 'It was based on bombs going off - the time, the locations, all this sort of stuff. But it wasn't an accident, in the sense that London has a history of bombs.'

To many, this seemed a huge story wilfully ignored by the mainstream media. Online publishers stepped in to add fuel to the fires of indignation. Colman Jones, an Associate Producer on CBS:Sunday Night, claimed in his blog that, while escorting participants from 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.'

The rumours spread like wildfire: perhaps something lay behind the 'co-incidence' presented by Mr. Power. Prison Planet, the investigative journalism site which initially drew attention to the Radio 5 Live comments, set the tenor of online coverage in an article entitled 'London Underground Bombing "Exercises" Took Place at Same Time as Real Attack'. Here the authors argued that the simulated attacks were, whether Power knew it or not, intended to act as a cover for the real ones.

'Whether Mr. Power and Visor Consultants were "in on the bombing" [...] is not that important,' their report stated. 'The British government or one of their private company offshoots could have hired Visor to run the exercise for a number of purposes. This is precisely what happened on the morning of September 11th 2001 with the CIA conducting drills of flying hijacked planes into the WTC and Pentagon at 8:30 in the morning.'

News agency Al Jazeera agreed, baldly asserting that 'The London Underground exercises were used as the fallback cover to carry out the attack.'

The background to these startling claims has to be appreciated. The idea that simulations and scenarios were used as decoys for intelligence activity around 9/11 has gained some currency amongst those who decry the 'official version' of events. Occasional reports in the mainstream media have added weight to the speculation.

Associated Press, for example, reported a 'simulated accident', scheduled for September 11th, 'in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings.' The article reports a spokesperson for the intelligence agency running the simulation, the ultra-secretive National Reconnaissance Office, describing the conjunction as a 'incredible coincidence' - just as Power did.

In the frenzy of linking, cross linking and careless speculation, however, it appears most self-publishers - and Al Jazeera - failed to contact Visor to corroborate their claims. 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. As Fintan Dunne, editor of BreakForNews.com points out, 'these types of private-sector "risk management" drills never use field staff.

Neither do [such] low-level corporate drills have active involvement of police or other security forces.' The exercise, therefore, was 'in no way comparable to U.S. drills and wargames on 9/11 - which were being run by active-duty security forces in the U.S. military, federal agencies, the FAA and various emergency services.'

As Power explained, the London bombing scenario was in fact one of three explored: another looked at the disruption that might be caused by unruly anti-globalisation demonstrators. In no case was there any real mobilisation of physical or human resources, which makes the case for 'planned' intelligence alibi look awfully flimsy, if not downright silly.

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.

Indeed, in developing the London bombing scenario used in this exercise, Power's consultancy drew on the sort of scenario already explored in Osiris 2, a much-publicised major exercise initiated in the City of London to simulate a poison gas attack on the underground. Power further utilised his experience of taking part in Panorama's programme 'London Under Attack', another timely simulation.

And the date? That is indeed coincidence -- but an unbelievable one? 'Every week across the UK there are probably about hundred exercises, tests and simulations going on to get crisis teams familiar with their roles,' Power insists. 'We certainly do this regularly for many clients, the vast majority of them paper-based.'

Given this, the likelihood that one such simulation should fall on the day of an actual disaster is relatively high. Perhaps, who knows, that's the even case with oft-quoted simulations like the NRO's. 'When you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras,' goes the often-quoted popularisation of Occam's Razor.

In the absence of journalistic nous, bloggers would do well to stick by it.

SOURCE - http://www.channel4.com/news/special-reports/special-reports-storypage.jsp?id=372