of the peculiarities of the morning of 7 July: the shut-down of the electrically powered Underground system, since bombs placed in carriages could not have wrecked lines to the requisite extent. Some conspiracists favour a tweak to the MI5-bomb-plot scenario, alleging that the security service subcontracted the attacks to an outside agency. This is generally identified as London-based Visor Consultants, a security risk and assessment company. According to the company’s website:
Visor Consultants have been able to support many domestic and global organizations to prevent chaos in a crisis and increase their overall resilience. Our clients include one of the top seven companies in the US and key Departments of the UK Government. Making any crisis an “brupt audit” rather than a presumed catastrophe has helped many organizations grow as a result.
Visor Consultants, by their own admission, were engaged in a city-wide operation on the morning of 7 July. The company’s managing director, Peter Power, told a BBC Radio 5 interviewer that evening: “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.” He dismissed the similarity between the Visor Consultants’ exercise and the actual bombings as coincidence.
Some conspiracists speculate that Visor Consultants were not MI5 proxy bombers but genuine casualty/crisis experts put on alert by “key Departments of the UK Government” to assist in the aftermath of the attacks, of which the government had prior knowledge. In this version, Visor were responsible for the medical supplies said by several witnesses to be on site at Edgware Road before the bombs detonated. The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad is frequently reported as having tipped off the British government about a planned al-Qaeda attack on London; as early as December 2004 FBI operatives in London,
The difficulty for all false-flag explanations for 7/7 is the video testament by bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan, aired by Arab TV network al-Jazeera on 1 September 2005, in which he said:
I and thousands like me are forsaking everything for what we believe. Our drive and motivation doesn’t come from tangible commodities that this world has to offer. Our religion is Islam, obedience to the one true God and following the footsteps of the final prophet messenger.
Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetrate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters.
Until we feel security you will be our targets and until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people we will not stop this fight. We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.
To most observers Sidique Khan’s taped message sounded like a suicide mission note, not the sign-off of an MI5 stooge. As for the witness evidence suggesting bomb blasts beneath the trains, this is unreliable: it consists of one or two traumatized people who are unlikely to have been able to recall events accurately. The power went down on the Underground network because a Code Amber Alert (emergency suspension of service) was declared at 09.19 a.m., and not because of collateral blast damage.
A number of pressure groups such as J7: The July 7th Truth Campaign have demanded that “the government RELEASE THE EVIDENCE which conclusively proves, beyond reasonable doubt, the official Home Office narrative”. A public inquiry has been several times denied on the grounds that it would both undermine the work of the security services and affect the legality of any forthcoming trial of suspected plot accessories. If the government is sitting on evidence it is likely to be of the most mundane sort: that MI5 and Scotland Yard bungled. Far from being the super-efficient machines of paranoid conspiracy, MI5 and Scotland Yard are large tankers which, having been ordered to change course from spying on Communists and the IRA, are taking years to get on to the new anti-Islamic terrorism bearing. It is clear from the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee Report into The London Terrorists on 7 July 2005 that Khan and Tanweer were identified by intelligence officers months before the attack and had even been interviewed by Scotland Yard.
Prior to the 7 July attacks, the Security Service had come across Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer on the peripheries of other surveillance and investigative operations. At that time their identities were unknown to the Security Service and there was no appreciation of their subsequent significance. As there were more pressing priorities at the time, including the need to disrupt known plans to attack the UK, it was decided not to investigate them further or seek to identify them. When resources became available, attempts were made to find out more about these two and other peripheral contacts, but these resources were soon diverted back to what were considered to be higher investigative priorities. The chances of identifying the planners and preventing the 7 July attacks might have been greater had different investigative decisions been taken by the Security Service in 2003– 05. However, someone, somewhere made the decision that Khan and Tanweer were fry not worth bothering with… and 7 July was the tragic result. A terrorist outrage committed by home-grown Islamic fanatics inspired by, but not in the control of, al-Qaeda.
Shag Harbour
Before 1967 only a handful of people in the world would have been able to find the small Nova Scotia fishing village of Shag Harbour on a map. All that changed on the late evening of 4 October 1967, with one of the best documented UFO sightings of all time.
At around 11.20 p.m. local teenager Laurie Wickens and four of his friends, driving through Shag Harbour on Highway 3, spotted a large object with flashing amber lights descend into the waters of the harbour, where it floated about 1,000 feet (300m) out from shore. Believing an aircraft had crashed, Wickens alerted the RCMP; other residents had seen the object descend, and they too contacted the police. Within quarter of an hour, three RCMP officers arrived at Shag Harbour, where they witnessed the object floating on the water; one of the Mounties, Ron Pound, later recalled the craft as being around 60 feet (18m) long. Concerned that the crashed craft might have survivors aboard, the RCMP contacted the Rescue Coordination Centre in Halifax, who dispatched Coast Guard boat 101 to the scene. Before this boat arrived the object sank, leaving only a wide trail of yellow foam behind it.
On checking with the NORAD radar station at Baccaro the RMCP discovered there were no reports of missing aircraft in the region. At 3.00 a.m. the next day the Coast Guard called off its hunt for survivors. However, Rescue Coordination Centre ordered a team of Navy divers from HMCS
For 30 years the Shag Harbour mystery went cold, until one of the original witnesses, Chris Styles, decided to reinvestigate the case. He interviewed two of the navy divers from HMCS
The verdict? Something clearly occurred in the Shag Harbour region in late October 1967, as archived Navy records show an unusually high amount of patrolling at the time. One diver claims that the Shag Harbour object was “not of this world”, although a number of terrestrial explanations have been put forward. Noting the mention
