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also [latest WWIII news] - [WWIII news links]
A counterfeit world order - starting in
the cradle of civilisation, Iraq
Do
please take the time to look through the evidence compiled by the
9/11 truth movement.
Democratic institutions and rights, particularly
in the UK & US, are under sustained
covert attack.
'And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet' Matthew 24:6
Between the lines - what the mainstream
press isn't telling us
http://www.rense.com/general45/drk.htm
Most recent additions
Order from chaoshttp://www.waynemadsenreport.com/
Wayne Madsen
Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that "Al Qaeda" is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence.
"I first heard about Al-Qaida while I was attending the Command and Staff course in Jordan. I was a French officer at that time and the French Armed Forces had close contacts and cooperation with Jordan . . .
"Two of my Jordanian colleagues were experts in computers. They were air defense officers. Using computer science slang, they introduced a series of jokes about students' punishment.
"For example, when one of us was late at the bus stop to leave the Staff College, the two officers used to tell us: 'You'll be noted in 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat' which meant 'You'll be logged in the information database.' Meaning 'You will receive a warning . . .' If the case was more severe, they would used to talk about 'Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.' Meaning 'the decision database.' It meant 'you will be punished.' For the worst cases they used to speak of logging in 'Al Qaida.'
"In the early 1980s the Islamic Bank for Development, which is located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, like the Permanent Secretariat of the Islamic Conference Organization, bought a new computerized system to cope with its accounting and communication requirements. At the time the system was more sophisticated than necessary for their actual needs.
"It was decided to use a part of the system's memory to host the Islamic Conference's database. It was possible for the countries attending to access the database by telephone: an Intranet, in modern language. The governments of the member-countries as well as some of their embassies in the world were connected to that network.
"[According to a Pakistani major] the database was divided into two parts, the information file where the participants in the meetings could pick up and send information they needed, and the decision file where the decisions made during the previous sessions were recorded and stored. In Arabic, the files were called, 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat' and 'Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.' Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic 'Q eidat ilmu'ti'aat' which is the exact translation of the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for "base."
The military air base of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is called 'q eidat 'riyadh al 'askariya.' Q eida means "a base" and "Al Qaida" means "the base."
"In the mid-1980s, Al Qaida was a database located in computer and dedicated to the communications of the Islamic Conference's secretariat.
"In the early 1990s, I was a military intelligence officer in the Headquarters of the French Rapid Action Force.
Because of my skills in Arabic my job was also to translate a lot of faxes and letters seized or intercepted by our intelligence services . . . We often got intercepted material sent by Islamic networks operating from the UK or from Belgium.
"These documents contained directions sent to Islamic armed groups in Algeria or in France. The messages quoted the sources of statements to be exploited in the redaction of the tracts or leaflets, or to be introduced in video or tapes to be sent to the media. The most commonly quoted sources were the United Nations, the non-aligned countries, the UNHCR and . . . Al Qaida.
"Al Qaida remained the data base of the Islamic Conference. Not all member countries of the Islamic Conference are 'rogue states' and many Islamic groups could pick up information from the databases.
It was but natural for Osama Bin Laden to be connected to this network. He is a member of an important family in the banking and business world.
"Because of the presence of 'rogue states,' it became easy for terrorist groups to use the email of the database. Hence, the email of Al Qaida was used, with some interface system, providing secrecy, for the families of the mujaheddin to keep links with their children undergoing training in Afghanistan, or in Libya or in the Beqaa valley, Lebanon. Or in action anywhere in the battlefields where the extremists sponsored by all the 'rogue states' used to fight. And the 'rogue states' included Saudi Arabia. When Osama bin Laden was an American agent in Afghanistan, the Al Qaida Intranet was a good communication system through coded or covert messages.
"Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden's personal property . . . The terrorist actions in Turkey in 2003 were carried out by Turks and the motives were local and not international, unified, or joint. These crimes put the Turkish government in a difficult position vis-a-vis the British and the Israelis. But the attacks certainly intended to 'punish' Prime Minister Erdogan for being a 'toot tepid' Islamic politician.
" . . . In the Third World the general opinion is that the countries using weapons of mass destruction for economic purposes in the service of imperialism are in fact 'rogue states," specially the US and other NATO countries.
" Some Islamic economic lobbies are conducting a war against the 'liberal" economic lobbies. They use local terrorist groups claiming to act on behalf of Al Qaida. On the other hand, national armies invade independent countries under the aegis of the UN Security Council and carry out pre-emptive wars. And the real sponsors of these wars are not governments but the lobbies concealed behind them.
"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money."
In yet another example of what happens to those who challenge the system, in December 2001, Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel was convicted by a secret French military court of passing classified documents that identified potential NATO bombing targets in Serbia to a Serbian agent during the Kosovo war in 1998. Bunel's case was transferred from a civilian court to keep the details of the case classified. Bunel's character witnesses and psychologists notwithstanding, the system "got him" for telling the truth about Al Qaeda and who has actually been behind the terrorist attacks commonly blamed on that group. It is noteworthy that that Yugoslav government, the government with whom Bunel was asserted by the French government to have shared information, claimed that Albanian and Bosnian guerrillas in the Balkans were being backed by elements of "Al Qaeda." We now know that these guerrillas were being backed by money provided by the Bosnian Defense Fund, an entity established as a special fund at Bush-influenced Riggs Bank and directed by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/
Published: 27 October 2005
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/ 2005/10/the_reality_of_1.html
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article322520.ece
The Government has been arguing before the House of Lords for the right to act on intelligence obtained by torture abroad. It wants to be able to use such material to detain people without trial in the UK, and as evidence in the courts. Key to its case is a statement to the Law Lords by the head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller. In effect she argues that torture works. It foiled the famous ricin plot.
She omits to mention that no more ricin was found than is the naturally occurring base level in your house or mine - or indeed that no poison of any kind was found. But let us leave that for now. She argues, in effect, that we need to get intelligence from foreign security services, to fight terrorism. And if they torture, so what? Her chief falsehood is our pretence that we don't know what happens in their dungeons. We do. And it is a dreadful story. Manningham-Buller is so fastidious she even avoids using the word "torture" in her evidence. Let alone the reality to which she turns such a carefully blind eye.
Manningham Buller also fails to mention that a large number of people have been tortured abroad to provide us with intelligence - because we sent them there to be tortured. The CIA's "extraordinary rendition" programme has become notorious. Under it, detainees have been sent around the world to key torture destinations. There is evidence of British complicity - not only do these CIA flights regularly operate from UK airbases, but detainees have spoken of British intelligence personnel working with their tormentors.
So the UK receives this intelligence material not occasionally, not fortuitously, but in connection with a regular programme of torture with which we are intimately associated. Uzbekistan is one of those security services from whose "friendly liaison" services we obtained information. And I will tell you what torture means.
It means the woman who was raped with a broken bottle in both vagina and anus, and who died after ten days of agony. It means the old man suspended by wrist shackles from the ceiling while his children were beaten to a pulp before his eyes. It means the man whose fingernails were pulled before his face was beaten and he was immersed to his armpits in boiling liquid.
It means the 18-year-old whose knees and elbows were smashed, his hand immersed in boiling liquid until the skin came away and the flesh started to peel from the bone, before the back of his skull was stove in.
These are all real cases from the Uzbek security services which we viewed as friendly liaison, and from which we obtained regular intelligence, in the Uzbek case via the CIA.
A month ago, that liaison relationship was stopped - not by us, but by the Uzbeks. But as Manningham-Buller sets out, we continue to maintain our position as customer to torturers in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Morocco and many other places. The key point is that none of the these Uzbek victims were terrorists at all.
The great majority of those who suffer torture at the hands of these regimes are not terrorists, but political opponents. And the scale of this torture is vast. In Uzbekistan alone thousands, not hundreds, of innocent men, women and children suffer torture every year.
Across Manningham-Buller's web of friendly intelligence agencies, the number may reach tens of thousands. Can our security really be based on such widespread inhumanity, or is that not part of the grievance that feeds terrorism?
These other governments know that our security services lap up information from their torture chambers. This practical condoning more than cancels out any weasel words on human rights which the Foreign Office may issue. In fact, the case for the efficacy of torture intelligence is not nearly as clear-cut as Manningham-Buller makes out. Much dross comes out of the torture chambers. History should tell us that under torture people would choke out an admission that they had joined their neighbours in flying on broomsticks with cats.
We do not receive torture intelligence from foreign liaison security services sometimes, or by chance. We receive it on a regular basis, through established channels. That plainly makes us complicit. It is worth considering, in this regard, Article 4 of the UN Convention Against Torture, which requires signatories to make complicity with torture a criminal offence.
When I protested about these practices within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, I was told bluntly that Jack Straw and John Scarlett, the head of MI6, had considered my objections, but had come to the conclusion that torture intelligence was important to the War on Terror, and the practice should continue. One day, the law must bring them to account.
A final thought. Manningham-Buller is arguing about the efficiency of torture in preventing a terrorist plot. If that argument is accepted, then in logic there is no reason to rely on foreign intermediaries. Why don't we do our own torturing at home? James VI and I abolished torture
- New Labour is making the first attempt in English courts to justify government use of torture information. Why stop there? Why can't the agencies work over terrorist suspects?
The Security Services want us to be able to use information from torture. That should come as no surprise. From Sir Thomas Walsingham on, the profession attracts people not squeamish about the smell of seared flesh from the branding iron. That is why we have a judiciary to protect us. I pray the Law Lords do.
The writer was British ambassador to Uzbekistan 2002-2004
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/ 2005/10/the_reality_of_1.html
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article322520.ece
London Independent / Marie Woolf, Raymond Whitaker and Severin Carrell
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10632.htm
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article320005.ece
http://prisonplanet.com/articles/october2005/161005terror_laws.htm
16 Oct 2005
A powerful coalition of judges, senior lawyers and politicians has warned that the Government is undermining freedoms citizens have taken for granted for centuries and that Britain risks drifting towards a police state. One of the country's most eminent judges has said that undermining the independence of the courts has frightening parallels with Nazi Germany.
Senior legal figures are worried that "inalienable rights" could swiftly disappear unless Tony Blair ceases attacking the judiciary and freedoms enshrined in the Human Rights Act.
Lord Ackner, a former law lord, said there was a contradiction between the Government's efforts to separate Parliament and the judiciary through the creation of a supreme court, and its instinct for directing judges how to behave. He cautioned against "meddling" by politicians in the way the courts operate.
"I think it is terribly important there should not be this apparent battle between the executive and the judiciary. The judiciary has been put there by Parliament in order to ensure that the executive acts lawfully. If we take that away from the judiciary we are really apeing what happened in Nazi Germany," he said.
Lord Ackner added that the Government's proposals to hold terrorist suspects for three months without charge were overblown. "The police have made a case for extending the two weeks but to extend it to three months is excessive."
Lord Lester QC, a leading human rights lawyer, expressed concern that the Government was flouting human rights law and meddling with the courts.
"If the Prime Minister and other members of the Government continue to threaten to undermine the Human Rights Act and interfere with judicial independence we shall have to secure our basic human rights and freedoms with a written constitution," he said.
Lord Carlile, a deputy High Court judge, warned against the whittling away of historic civil liberties. "We have to be acute about protecting what is taken for granted as inalienable rights. In the United States the Patriot Act included a system whereby a witness to a terrorist incident can be detained for up to a year. This is in the land of the free."
The senior barrister remarked that judges had now replaced MPs as the defenders of basic human rights."People use d to look to their MPs as the first port of call to deal with any perceived injustice by the executive. Now there is an increasing tendency for people to look to the judges to protect their liberties," he said.
Mark Oaten, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said Tony Blair was transforming Britain into an authoritarian state. "In eight years he has dismantled centuries of judicial protection. Britain's reputation as the world's most tolerant nation is now under threat," he said.
If Mr Blair's proposed terror legislation was unamended, said Anthony Scrivener QC, "Britain would be a significant step closer to a police state". The Prime Minister spoke of "summary justice", said the lawyer: "It would be better named street justice."
This week the Law Lords will consider whether evidence obtained under torture abroad should be admissible in British courts. Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said admitting such evidence would undermine one of Britain's basic freedoms."The Prime Minister is trying in his own words to try to tear up the rules of the game," she said. "The rules of liberal democracy are about no torture, free speech and fair trials. Every time he denigrates these he undermines the fabric of our society."
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10632.htm
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article320005.ece
http://prisonplanet.com/articles/october2005/161005terror_laws.htm
Marcel Berlins - Monday October 3, 2005 - The Guardian
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,11026,1583685,00.html
Legally speaking, Walter Wolfgang's experience at the Labour party conference was even more bizarre than it first seemed. After being forcibly ejected he wanted to get back in but was stopped from doing so by the police, under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000.
I don't believe the police had any legal right to do what they did. I've been reading section 44 and it's absolutely clear that its purpose is to give the police the power to stop and search. Not just to stop someone, full stop. The stopping is only there to lead to the searching.
But there is nothing I've seen in any of the reports to suggest that Mr Wolfgang was searched. If that's right, then the police were not entitled to use section 44. The whole act, as its title suggests, is specifically aimed at terrorism. Section 45 says that authorisation to carry out a section 44 stop and search "may be exercised only for the purpose of searching for articles of a kind which could be used in connection with terrorism".
So even had a search been authorised and carried out, it would probably have been illegal. Whoever decided to use the Terrorism Act to stop Mr Wolfgang from returning to the hall didn't know what he was doing - but achieved the objective.
Another protesting octogenarian felt the brush of section 44 last week, though he was searched. John Catt was wearing a T-shirt proclaiming "Bush Blair Sharon to be tried for war crimes torture human rights abuse" and, lower down, "the leaders of rogue states".
The stop-and-search form filled out by the police officer stated, under grounds for intervention, "carrying plackard [sic] and T-shirt with anti-Blair info". The purpose of the stop and search was stated as "terrorism". So now we know. For the Sussex police, at any rate, an anti-Blair slogan is a ground for suspecting terrorism.
There is obviously a problem in the use of section 44. It was used prolifically against protesters around the Brighton conference centre. I am sure Sussex are not the only force using section 44 essentially as a tool of control. The police know very well that the vast majority of the people they're stopping have absolutely no hint of a suspicion of any link with terrorism. But the Terrorism Act is all they've got, they argue, to ensure that gatherings like party conferences and G8 meetings go off smoothly.
When Tony Blair and Charles Clarke tell the chief constable of Sussex that they want no trouble at their conference, and if that can only be achieved by wrongly using the anti-terrorism laws to stifle freedom of expression, freedom of movement and the right to protest - tough. That is not the way a democratic state should behave. But don't just blame the police for exceeding their powers. The government is conniving at every stage.
· This is an amazing legal coincidence. After many years - no, make that centuries - in which we have had none at all, we've now got, within a few days of each, two masturbating judges facing justice. One I've mentioned in the past, the Oklahoma judge using a penis pump in court - the giveaway was the loud whooshing sound it made. This week he's on trial for indecent exposure. But now he's got a judicial masturbatory rival, a French judge from Angoulême, Philippe Z, who also performed his solo during a court hearing. He has been suspended from duty and psychiatrists have agreed that he was not responsible for his actions. He has just appeared before the judges' disciplinary body claiming that his suspension was unfair. "I am curable and readaptable," he insisted. "But," he went on in an outburst of honesty, "as what, I don't know."
· In the US, calling someone scuzzy or a scuzzball is pejorative, offensive and denotes an unpleasant low-life kind of person, somewhat akin to an English scumbag. For Demetrius Fiorentino, on trial for murder in West Chester, Pennsylvania, this creates a problem. He's generally known as Scuz, and last week his lawyer tried to persuade the judge to ban the use of that nickname during the trial. He argued that if witnesses kept referring to the defendant as Scuz, it would suggest to the jury that Fiorentino had acquired that name for a reason, and it would prejudice jurors against him. Impossible, riposted the prosecution. The witnesses didn't know him by any other name. They would be unable to give evidence about him unless they could call him Scuz. The judge is thinking about it.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,11026,1583685,00.html
By Robert Parry
September 29, 2005
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/092905.html
Federal authorities “frog-marched” Private Lynndie England in handcuffs and shackles off to prison
to serve three years for her role in abusing and humiliating Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.
The 22-year-old single mother from West Virginia joins a group of nine reservists punished for mistreating Iraqis, some of whom were stripped naked and forced to pose in mock sexual positions. England appeared in photos, pointing at a prisoner’s penis and holding a naked Iraqi by a leash.
While England’s punishment fits with George W. Bush’s pledge to prosecute military personnel for wrongdoing in Iraq, a larger question is whether low-ranking soldiers are becoming scapegoats for the bloody fiasco that Bush created when he ordered the invasion in defiance of international law. Pumped-up by Bush’s false claims linking Iraq to the Sept. 11 terror attacks, U.S. soldiers charged into that Arab country with revenge on their minds.
In a healthy democracy, the debate might be less about imprisoning England and other “grunts” than whether Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other war architects should be “frog-marched” to the Hague for prosecution as war criminals.
The international community also has largely shied away from the issue of Bush’s criminality, apparently because of the unprecedented military might of the United States.
If the leaders of a less powerful nation had invaded a country under false pretenses – touching off a war that left tens of thousands of civilians dead – there surely would be demands for war crimes prosecutions before the International Criminal Court at the Hague. But not for Bush and his War Cabinet.
Ironically, Lynndie England’s sentencing at Fort Hood, Texas, on Sept. 27 came as new evidence surfaced that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners was not just the work of some deviant prison guards on the night shift at Abu Ghraib. Army Capt. Ian Fishback and two sergeants alleged that prisoners were subjected to similar treatment by the 82nd Airborne at a camp near Fallujah and that senior officers knew. [See Human Rights Watch report.]
Fishback blamed the pattern of abuse on the Bush administration’s vague orders about when and how Geneva Convention protections applied to detainees, a problem that has extended from the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a network of shadowy U.S. prisons around the world.
“We did not set the conditions for our soldiers to succeed,” said Fishback, 26, who has served tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. “We failed to set clear standards, communicate those standards and enforce those standards.” [NYT, Sept. 28, 2005]
And in another case of apparent deterioration of discipline among U.S. troops in Iraq, a separate Army investigation examined whether some U.S. troops traded gruesome photos of dead bodies – with captions like “Cooked Iraqi” – for access to a pornographic Web site specializing in sexual images of wives and girlfriends. [NYT, Sept. 28, 2005]
For his part, Bush has condemned the misconduct of Lynndie England and her cohorts. After publication of the Abu Ghraib photos in 2004, Bush said he “shared a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated.” Bush added that “their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people.”
But the cavalier treatment toward Iraqi lives can be traced back to the very start of the war. Determined to invade Iraq, Bush brushed aside international objections, prevented the completion of a United Nations search for alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and unleashed his “shock and awe” bombing campaign on March 19, 2003.
Bush and his high command authorized the bombing of one Baghdad restaurant – where civilians were having dinner – because of shaky intelligence that Saddam Hussein might be eating there, too. The logic apparently was that the goal of killing Hussein justified the slaughter of the innocent restaurant clientele.
As it turned out, Hussein was not there, but the attack killed 14 civilians, including seven children. One mother collapsed when rescue workers pulled the severed head of her daughter out of the rubble.
In another U.S. bombing raid, Saad Abbas, 34, was wounded, but his family sought to shield him from the greater horror. The bombing had killed his three daughters – Marwa, 11; Tabarek, 8; and Safia, 5 – who had been the center of his life.
“It wasn’t just ordinary love,” his wife said. “He was crazy about them. It wasn’t like other fathers.” [NYT, April 14, 2003]
The horror of the war was captured, too, in the fate of 12-year-old Ali Ismaeel Abbas, who lost his two arms when a U.S. missile struck his Baghdad home. Ali’s father, Ali’s pregnant mother and his siblings were all killed.
As he was evacuated to a Kuwaiti hospital, becoming a symbol of U.S. compassion for injured Iraqi civilians, Ali said he would rather die than live without his hands.
The slaughter extended to the battlefield where the outmatched Iraqi army sometimes fought heroically though hopelessly against the technologically superior U.S. forces. Christian Science Monitor reporter Ann Scott Tyson interviewed U.S. troops with the 3rd Infantry Division who were deeply troubled by their task of mowing down Iraqi soldiers who kept fighting even in suicidal situations.
“For lack of a better word, I felt almost guilty about the massacre,” one soldier said privately. “We wasted a lot of people. It makes you wonder how many were innocent. It takes away some of the pride. We won, but at what cost?”
Commenting upon the annihilation of Iraqi forces in these one-sided battles, Lt. Col. Woody Radcliffe said, “We didn’t want to do this. Even a brain-dead moron can understand we are so vastly superior militarily that there is no hope. You would think they would see that and give up.”
In one battle around Najaf, U.S. commanders ordered air strikes to kill the Iraqis en masse rather than have U.S. soldiers continue to kill them one by one.
“There were waves and waves of people coming at (the U.S. troops) with AK-47s, out of this factory, and (the U.S. troops) were killing everyone,” Radcliffe said. “The commander called and said, ‘This is not right. This is insane. Let’s hit the factory with close air support and take them out all at once.’” [Christian Science Monitor, April 11, 2003]
Three weeks into the invasion, Hussein’s government collapsed, but Bush’s occupation plan left U.S. forces stretched thin as they tried to establish order.
Sometimes, jittery U.S. soldiers opened fire on demonstrations, inflicting civilian casualties and embittering the population. In Fallujah, some 17 Iraqis were gunned down in demonstrations after U.S. soldiers claimed they had been fired upon. Fallujah soon became a center of anti-American resistance.
As the Iraqi insurgency began to spread – and Americans began dying in larger numbers – military intelligence officers encouraged prison guards to soften up captured Iraqis by putting them in stress positions for long periods of time, denying sleep and subjecting them to extremes of hot and cold.
Some of the poorly trained prison personnel – like those on Lynndie England’s night shift at Abu Ghraib – added some of their own bizarre ideas for humiliating captured Iraqis. But even some of those strange techniques, such as adorning Iraqi men with women’s underwear, could be traced to practices used elsewhere.
The mistreatment of detainees further fueled the insurgency and spread anti-Americanism across the Middle East and around the globe.
Back in Washington, the Bush administration claimed that the prisoner abuses were the work of a few “bad apples” who would be singled out for punishment. Looked at differently, however, Bush opened U.S. soldiers to a kind of double jeopardy when he ordered the invasion.
Not only did the soldiers risk their lives in combat, but they faced added legal risks in trying to execute a war in defiance of the UN Charter, which prohibits one country from attacking another without the approval of the UN Security Council.
The evidence is now clear, too, that Bush rushed the nation to war without UN sanction, in part, because his rationalizations about WMD and Iraq’s ties to al-Qaeda were falling apart, even as he was determined to make the war happen.
As British spy chief Richard Dearlove observed in the so-called Downing Street Memo in July 2002, “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
The memo added, “The case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”
Still, the Bush administration was confident that it could whip the U.S. news media and the American people into a war fever.
To stir up fears about nuclear bombs falling into the hands of terrorists, the administration leaked to the New York Times a story about Iraq buying aluminum tubes for making nuclear weapons. But U.S. nuclear experts soon concluded that the tubes actually were for conventional rockets.
Later in 2002, administration officials insisted that they knew where Iraq’s WMD stockpiles were. But UN inspectors, who were readmitted by Hussein as part of Iraq’s agreement to comply with international weapons restrictions, were finding nothing at the U.S.-identified sites.
In January 2003, Bush’s predicament got so desperate that his State of the Union speechwriters dug down to the bottom of the barrel to pull out an already discredited claim about Iraq seeking enriched uranium in Africa.
Then, in a Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the UN Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell played up assertions from a dubious source codenamed “Curveball” about Iraq’s supposed mobile WMD labs. Powell also read a doctored intercept between two Iraqi officials that made an innocent conversation sound sinister. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Powell’s Widening Credibility Gap.”]
Instead of giving the UN inspectors more time to complete their search for Iraqi WMD, Bush cut short the mission, forcing them to leave Iraq so the invasion could proceed.
Several months later, as Bush faced new questions about his war justifications, the president started a new lie, claiming that Hussein had never let the UN inspectors in.
On July 14, 2003, Bush said about Hussein, “we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.”
In the following months, Bush repeated this claim in slightly varied forms. On Jan. 27, 2004, Bush said, “We went to the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution – 1441 – unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world felt he had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he did not let us in.”
Though the U.S. national press corps had witnessed the UN inspections of Iraq and certainly knew that Bush’s historical revisionism was false, American reporters failed, repeatedly, to challenge Bush’s account.
Even ABC’s veteran newsman Ted Koppel fell for the administration’s spin, using it to explain why he – Koppel – thought the invasion was justified.
“It did not make logical sense that Saddam Hussein, whose armies had been defeated once before by the United States and the Coalition, would be prepared to lose control over his country if all he had to do was say, ‘All right, UN, come on in, check it out,” Koppel said in an interview with Amy Goodman, host of “Democracy Now.”
As Koppel obviously was aware, Hussein indeed had told the UN to “come on in, check it out,” but even prominent journalists were ready to put on blinders for Bush. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “President Bush, With the Candlestick …”]
In 2004, Fallujah was back in the news after Iraqi insurgents killed four American security contractors and a mob mutilated the bodies. Bush ordered Marines to “pacify” the city of 300,000 people.
The U.S. assault on Fallujah transformed one soccer field into a mass grave for hundreds of Iraqis – many of them civilians – killed when U.S. forces bombarded the rebellious city with 500-pound bombs and raked its streets with cannon and machine-gun fire. According to some accounts, more than 800 citizens of Fallujah died in the assault and 60,000 fled as refugees.
In attacking Fallujah and in other counterinsurgency operations, the Bush administration again has resorted to measures that some critics argue amount to war crimes. These tactics include administering collective punishment against the civilian population in Fallujah, rounding up thousands of young Iraqi men on the flimsiest of suspicions and holding prisoners incommunicado without charges and subjecting some detainees to physical mistreatment.
Even Bush’s boast that he closed Hussein’s torture chambers and “rape rooms” has lost its moral clarity.
A 53-page classified Army report, written by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, revealed that some of those abuses resumed as U.S. intelligence officers urged Abu Ghraib’s military police to break down Iraqis before interrogation.
The report said the abuses, occurring from October to December 2003, included use of a chemical light or broomstick to sexually assault one Iraqi. Witnesses also told Army investigators that prisoners were beaten and threatened with rape, electrocution and dog attacks. At least one Iraqi died during interrogation.
“Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees,” said Taguba’s report. [See The New Yorker's May 10, 2004, issue.]
One victim who faced torture at Abu Ghraib under both Saddam Hussein’s regime and the U.S. occupation said the physical abuse from Hussein's guards was preferable to the sexual humiliation employed by the Americans. Dhia al-Shweiri told the Associated Press that the Americans were trying “to break our pride.” [USA Today, May 3, 2004]
Yet, as the U.S. military death toll heads toward 2,000 and Iraqis die in far greater numbers, the U.S. news media continues to avert its gaze from what should be a central question: Should senior Bush administration officials most responsible for this bloody debacle join Lynndie England in the dock of accountability?
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/092905.html
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-09/19/content_3514065.htm
BAGHDAD, Sept. 19 (Xinhuanet) -- Iraqi police detained two British soldiers in civilian clothes in the southern city Basra for firing on a police station on Monday, police said.
"Two persons wearing Arab uniforms opened fire at a police station in Basra. A police patrol followed the attackers and captured them to discover they were two British soldiers," an Interior Ministry source told Xinhua.
The two soldiers were using a civilian car packed with explosives, the source said.
He added that the two were being interrogated in the police headquarters of Basra.
The British forces informed the Iraqi authorities that the two soldiers were performing an official duty, the source said. British military authorities said they could not confirm the incident but investigations were underway.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-09/19/content_3514065.htm
Ian Cobain, Stephen Grey and Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday September 12, 2005 - The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/humanrights/story/0,7369,1567896,00.html
It was only a matter of time before the CIA caught up with Saad Iqbal Madni.
A Pakistani Islamist and, allegedly, a close associate of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, he turned up in Indonesia in November 2001, just as the Taliban regime was crumbling and members of al-Qaida were fleeing Afghanistan. Renting a room in a Jakarta boarding house, he told locals he had arrived to hand over an inheritance to his late father's second wife.
On January 9 2002, Iqbal was seized by Indonesian intelligence agents. Two days later, according to Indonesian officials, he was bundled aboard a Gulfstream V executive jet which had flown into a military airfield in the city. Then, without any extradition hearing or judicial process, he was flown to Cairo.
Iqbal, 24, had become the latest terrorism suspect to fall into a system known in US intelligence circles as "extraordinary rendition" - the apprehension of a suspect who is not placed on trial, or flown to Guantánamo, but taken to a country where torture is common.
These suspects are denied legal representation, and their detention is concealed from the International Committee of the Red Cross. The most common destination is Egypt, but there is evidence of detainees also being flown to Jordan, Morocco, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Syria.
Precise numbers are impossible to determine. A report on renditions published by New York University school of law and the New York City Bar Association suggests that around 150 people have been "rendered" in the last four years, but that is only an estimate. A handful have emerged from what has been labelled a secret gulag, and have given deeply disturbing accounts of horrific mistreatment.
Previous media reports have uncovered sketchy details of a British link to CIA abduction operations, but the full extent of the UK's support can now be revealed. Drawing on publicly available information from the US Federal Aviation Administration, the Guardian has compiled a database of flight records which shows the extent of British logistical support.
Aircraft involved in the operations have flown into the UK at least 210 times since 9/11, an average of one flight a week. The 26-strong fleet run by the CIA have used 19 British airports and RAF bases, including Heathrow, Gatwick, Birmingham, Luton, Bournemouth and Belfast. The favourite destination is Prestwick, which CIA aircraft have flown into and out from more than 75 times. Glasgow has seen 74 flights, and RAF Northolt 33.
The Gulfstream V on to which Iqbal was bundled and flown to Egypt, for example, left Cairo on January 15 and headed for Scotland. After a brief stopover at Prestwick, probably to refuel, it departed again for Washington. Iqbal was held in Cairo for two years before appearing in Guantánamo, where he told other detainees who have since been released that he was tortured by having electrodes placed on his knees. It also appears that his bladder was damaged during interrogation.
Human rights campaigners insist that these operations violate international law. Washington insists they do not. Nevertheless, the United Nations is seeking to examine Britain's role in the policy, as part of a wider inquiry into ways in which counter-terrorism operations around the world may breach basic human rights.
Martin Scheinin, a UN commission on human rights special rapporteur, has submitted a number of queries to the British government. His view about complicity in renditions is clear: "When several states can, through cooperating, breach their obligations under international law simultaneously, if they are all involved in torture, they all bear their own responsibility. It is my intention to look at acts where more than one state is involved. It is too early to say what will happen with the UK."
Although the Foreign Office has denied any knowledge of the use of British airports during renditions, Prof Scheinin says: "It isn't unusual that governments deny involvement and try to keep it secret as long as possible." Some of the flights which the Guardian has examined were made during operations which clearly ended in the abduction of a terrorism suspect who was then tortured, such as Iqbal.
Other data points to the strong possibility that the CIA was using British airports during an abduction operation. On March 26 2002, the Gulfstream used in the abduction of Iqbal flew from North Carolina to Washington and on to Prestwick, where it remained overnight before flying to Dubai. Two days later, FBI officials and Pakistani police stormed a house in Faisalabad, where they arrested a number of al-Qaida suspects, including Abu Zubaydah, one of Osama bin Laden's senior aides.
Flight records do not show where the aircraft flew after Dubai, and where Zubaydah was taken remains a mystery. There have been rumours that he is being held in the far east, however, and the Gulfstream next appeared in Alaska before returning to Washington.
On other occasions the same aircraft has stopped off at Prestwick before and after flying people from Pakistan to Tashkent in Uzbekistan. Craig Murray, the former British ambassador in Tashkent, says he is aware of detainees being flown into the country on an executive jet, and believes they were probably tortured.
It is not clear whether any detainees are on board the aircraft when they land in the UK, or whether the CIA is using British airports purely for refuelling and other logistical support. There is no suggestion that any of the UK airport authorities have colluded in any wrongdoing. The CIA's renditions programme, and its use of UK airports, has angered some human rights lawyers. Concern is also being expressed in a number of other European countries, where authorities have barred the agency from making unauthorised flights or have launched investigations into abductions.
Last month Denmark announced that unauthorised CIA flights would not be allowed into the country's airspace, while in Austria, in January 2003, two fighters were scrambled to intercept a Hercules transport plane thought to be involved in the renditions operation which had not declared itself to be on a government mission. In Sweden, a parliamentary investigator into the abduction of two Egyptian men flown from Stockholm to Cairo in December 2001 concluded that CIA agents had broken the country's laws by subjecting the pair to "inhuman treatment". In Italy, a judge has issued warrants for the arrest of 19 CIA agents said to have been behind the kidnapping of Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr, an Islamist cleric dragged into a van near his home in Milan in February 2003. He was flown to Egypt for interrogation, and later told relatives that he had been tortured with electric shocks.
The aircraft and their crews are the successors to Air America, the CIA-owned airline that flew covert missions during the Vietnam war. Many of the aircraft are operated by a company called Aero Contractors, which was founded by a former chief pilot of Air America, and is based in a remote corner of an airfield at Smithfield, North Carolina.
Most of the CIA's fleet, which includes executive jets, a Boeing 737 and a Hercules transport plane, is owned, at least on paper, by a network of seven other companies. Examination of records in the US shows these seven firms to be a series of shell companies with no premises, and the directors of the companies appear to be fictitious. Aero's company president, Norman Richardson, would not talk to the Guardian, although he has told one American journalist: "Most of the work we do is for the government. It's on the basis that we can't say anything about it." A former Aero Contractors pilot has confirmed to the New York Times that he had been recruited by the CIA, and that the agency ran the airline. He said the crews did not use the term extraordinary rendition: "We used to call them snatches."
British assistance for covert CIA kidnapping operations may violate international law, according to some lawyers, while the CIA agents involved may also be breaking British domestic law. "In international law, states are required to prevent acts of torture, and not turn a blind eye to it," said Paul Green, a member of the Law Society's international human rights committee.
It remains illegal under US law for any American citizen to torture a foreigner. Critics of the rendition campaign argue that the CIA gets around this by practising "torture by proxy", taking detainees to countries where they know they will be tortured.
President George Bush has defended the renditions programme, saying: "We operate within the law and we send people to countries where they say they're not going to torture the people." Critics doubt whether such pledges are credible. The US State Department describes torture as being systemic in most of the countries. Even the CIA has described the "curtailment of human rights" in Uzbekistan as a concern.
The CIA declined to comment.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/humanrights/story/0,7369,1567896,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1564933,00.html
Ever since the 1995 bombing of the Paris metro by the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) made France the first western European country to suffer so-called radical Islamist terrorism, its politicians and "terror experts" have consistently warned Britain to the dangers of welcoming Islamist political dissidents and radical preachers to her shores.
In the aftermath of the July London attacks, commentators were quick to argue that France's "zero tolerance" policy and campaign of "integration" in the name of republican values - embodied in the 2004 ban on the display of all religious symbols in schools - has spared the country from terror attacks, while Britain's failure to follow Spain and Germany in adopting the French model has proved a spectacular own-goal. However, as Tony Blair made clear in unveiling his government's proposed legislation on August 5, "the rules of the game have changed". Suddenly, the French recipe for dealing with Islamist terror has become feted by British politicians and media alike.
But how would we regard the virtue of the French model if, a decade after bombs ripped through the metro, enough evidence had been gathered to demonstrate that the attacks allegedly carried out by Islamist militants were not fuelled by fundamentalism, but instead were dreamt up and overseen by the Algerian secret service as part of a domestic political struggle that spilled over into Algeria's former colonial master? The most comprehensive studies - including Lounis Aggoun and Jean-Baptiste Rivoire's Françalgérie: Crimes and Lies of the State - argue that this is exactly what happened.
In 1991 Algeria's main Islamic party, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), won a first-round victory in the country's inaugural multiparty general elections, which threatened to strip away the power of the generals who had controlled the state from the shadows.
Exploiting Europe's fear of an Islamic government, the Algerian army intervened to halt the second round of voting, forcing the president to step down and a temporary commission to rule the country. But the legitimacy of this new arrangement could only be assured if the Islamic opposition could be discredited and crushed.
The DRS - the Algerian secret service - systematically infiltrated insurrectionary Islamist groups such as the GIA and from 1992 onwards launched its own fake guerrilla groups, including death squads disguised as Islamists. In 1994, the DRS managed to place Jamel Zitouni, one of the Islamists it controlled, at the head of the GIA.
"It became impossible to distinguish the genuine Islamists from those controlled by the regime," says Salima Mellah, of the NGO Algeria Watch. "Each time the generals came under pressure from the international community, the terror intensified". By January 1995, however, Algeria's dirty war began to falter. The Italian government hosted a meeting in Rome of Algerian political parties, including the FIS. The participants agreed a common platform, calling for an inquiry into the violence in Algeria, the end of the army's involvement in political affairs and the return of constitutional rule.
This left the generals in an untenable position. In their desperation, and with the help of the DRS, they hatched a plot to prevent French politicians from ever again withdrawing support for the military junta. As Aggoun and Rivoire recount, French-based Algerian spies initially given the task of infiltrating Islamist networks were transformed into agent provocateurs. In spring 1995, Ali Touchent, an Algerian agent, began to gather and incite a network of disaffected young men from north African backgrounds to commit terrorist attacks in France. The DRS's infiltrators, led by Zitouni, also pushed the GIA to eliminate some of the FIS's leaders living in Europe.
On July 11 1995 Abdelbaki Sahraoui, a FIS leader in France, was assassinated. The GIA claimed responsibility. Two weeks later the metro was hit by bombs, killing eight. After a further attack, Zitouni called on President Jacques Chirac to "convert to Islam to be saved". The resulting public hysteria against Islam and Islamism saw the French government abandon its support for the Rome accord.
So what happened to the perpetrators? The masterminds of the main attack were never caught. Despite being publicly identified by the Algerian authorities as the European ringleader of the GIA and by French investigators as the key organiser, Touchent evaded capture, returned to Algeria and settled in a secure police quarter of Algiers.
France's inability to bring to justice those genuinely responsible for the 1995 attacks was evidently more than an accident. According to Mohamed Samraoui, a former colonel in the Algerian secret service: "French intelligence knew that Ali Touchent was a DRS operative charged with infiltrating pro-Islamist cells in foreign countries." It has never been officially denied that in return for supplying the French authorities with valuable information, Touchent was granted protection.
This is not the only explanation for French collaboration with the Algerian government. Algeria is one of the main suppliers of gas and oil to France, and an important client. François Gèze of La Decouverte, a French publisher which exposed the involvement of the Algerian secret services in the dirty war, argues that at the heart of this economic relationship is a web of political cor ruption. "French exporters generally pay a 10 to 15% commission on their goods. Part of this revenue is then 'repaid' by the Algerians as finance for the electoral campaigns of French political parties."
What the true story of France's 1995 brush with "Islamic terror" reveals is that the attacks, while probably executed by a small number of Muslim extremists, were conceived and manipulated by vested interests. British policymakers would do well to understand the specific context and complex colonial legacy of French-Algerian relations before they go looking for direct comparisons. The 1995 case is also a warning against blaming "Islamists" for terror, while turning a blind eye to repressive actions of governments in the Arab world when they suit western governments' agenda.
· Naima Bouteldja is a French journalist and researcher for the Transnational Institute
naima.bouteldja@gmail.com
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1540752,00.html
Stephen Grey and Ian Cobain
Tuesday August 2, 2005
The Guardian
Al-Manaar mosque cultural centre in London where Benyam Mohammed was a volunteer. Photograph: Martin Godwin
A former London schoolboy accused of being a dedicated al-Qaida terrorist has given the first full account of the interrogation and alleged torture endured by so-called ghost detainees held at secret prisons around the world.
For two and a half years US authorities moved Benyam Mohammed around a series of prisons in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, before he was sent to Guantánamo Bay in September last year.
Mohammed, 26, who grew up in Notting Hill in west London, is alleged to be a key figure in terrorist plots intended to cause far greater loss of life than the suicide bombers of 7/7. One allegation, which he denies, is of planning to detonate a "dirty bomb" in a US city; another is that he and an accomplice planned to collapse a number of apartment blocks by renting ground-floor flats to seal, fill with gas from cooking appliances, and blow up with timed detonators.
In an statement given to his newly appointed lawyer, Mohammed has given an account of how he was tortured for more than two years after being questioned by US and British officials who he believes were from the FBI and MI6. As well as being beaten and subjected to loud music for long periods, he claims his genitals were sliced with scalpels.
He alleges that in Morocco he was shown photos of people he knew from a west London mosque, and was asked about information he was told was supplied by MI5. One interrogator, he says, was a woman who said she was Canadian.
Drawing on his notes, Mohammed's lawyer has compiled a 28-page diary of his torture. This has been declassified by the Pentagon, and extracts are published in the Guardian today.
Recruits to some groups connected to al-Qaida are thought to be instructed to make allegations of torture after capture, and most of Mohammed's claims cannot be independently verified. But his description of a prison near Rabat closely resembles the Temara torture centre identified in a report by the US-based Human Rights Watch last October.
Furthermore, this newspaper has obtained flight records showing executive jets operated by the CIA flew in and out of Morocco on July 22 2002 and January 22 2004, the dates he says he was taken to and from the country.
If true, his account adds weight to concerns that the US authorities are torturing by proxy. It also highlights the dilemma of British authorities when they seek information from detainees overseas who they know, or suspect, are tortured.
The lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, says: "This is outsourcing of torture, plain and simple. America knows torture is wrong but gets others to do its unconscionable dirty work.
"It's clear from the evidence that UK officials knew about this rendition to Morocco before it happened. Our government's responsibility must be to actively prevent the torture of our residents."
Mohammed was born in Ethiopia and came to the UK aged 15 when his father sought asylum. After obtaining five GCSEs and an engineering diploma at the City of Westminster College in Paddington, he decided to stay in Britain when his father returned, and was given indefinite leave to remain. In his late teens he rediscovered Islam, prayed regularly at al-Manaar mosque in Notting Hill, and was a volunteer at its cultural centre. "He is remembered here as a very nice, quiet person, who never caused any trouble," says Abdulkarim Khalil, its director.
He enjoyed football, and was thought good enough for a semi-professional career. "He was a quiet kid, he seemed deep thinking, although that might have been because his language skills weren't great," says Tyrone Forbes, his trainer.
In June 2001 Mohammed left his bedsit off Golborne Road, Notting Hill, and travelled to Afghanistan, via Pakistan. He maintains he wanted to see whether it was "a good Islamic country or not". It appears likely that he spent time in a paramilitary training camp.
He returned to Pakistan sometime after 9/11, and remained at liberty until April 2002 - during which time, US authorities believe, he became involved in the dirty bomb and gas blast plots. His alleged accomplice, a Chicago-born convert to Islam, Jose Padilla, is detained in the US. Mohammed says interrogators repeatedly demanded he give evidence against him.
Mohammed was arrested in Karachi while trying to fly to Zurich - and thus entered a "ghost prison system" in which an unknown number of detainees are held at unregistered detention centres, and whose imprisonment is not admitted to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
His brother and sisters, who live in the US, say the FBI told them of his arrest in summer 2002, but they were unable to find out anything else until last February. In recent days the Bush administration is reported to have lobbied to block legislation, supported by some Republican senators, to prohibit the military engaging in "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment", and hiding prisoners from the Red Cross.
Mohammed alleges he was held at two prisons in Pakistan over three months, hung from leather straps, beaten, and threatened with a firearm by Pakistanis. In repeated questioning by men he believes were FBI agents, he was told he was to go to an Arab country because "the Pakistanis can't do exactly what we want them to".
The torture stopped after a visit by two bearded Britons; he believes they were MI6 officers. He says they told him he was to be tortured by Arabs. At one point, he says, they gave him a cup of tea and told him to take plenty of sugar because "where you're going you need a lot of sugar".
He says he was flown on what he believes was a US aircraft to Morocco, while shackled, blindfolded and wearing earphones. It was, he says, in a jail near Rabat that his real ordeal began. After a fortnight of questioningand intimidation, his captors tortured him with beatings and noise, on and off, for 18 months. He says his torturers used scalpels to make shallow, inch-long incisions on his chest and genitals.
Throughout, he was accused of being a senior al-Qaida terrorist and accomplice of Padilla. He denies these allegations, though he says that while tortured he would say whatever he thought his captors wanted. He signed a statement about the dirty bomb plot. At one point, he says, interrogators told him his GCSE grades, and asked about named staff at the housing association that owns his bedsit and about a man who taught him kickboxing in Notting Hill.
After 18 months, he says, he was flown to Afghanistan, escorted by masked US soldiers who were visibly shocked by his condition and took photos of his wounds.
During five months in a darkened cell in Kabul, he says he was kept chained, subjected to loud music, and questioned by Americans. Only after he was moved to Bagram air base was he shown to the Red Cross. Four months later he was flown to Guantánamo.
Mr Stafford Smith was first allowed to see him two months ago. He said there were marks of his injuries, and he is pressing the US to release the photos taken in Morocco and Afghanistan.
Asked about the allegations, the Foreign Office said the UK "unreservedly condemns the use of torture". After consulting with the Home Office, MI5, and MI6, a spokesman said: "The British government, including the security and intelligence services, never uses torture for any purpose. Nor would HMG instigate or condone the use of torture by third parties.
"Specific instructions are issued to all personnel of the UK security and intelligence services who are deployed to interview detainees, which include guidance on what to do if they considered that treatment in any way inappropriate."
The FBI, the US justice department, the Moroccan interior ministry and the Moroccan embassy in London did not return calls. The CIA declined to comment.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1540752,00.html
Pilger : 26 Jul 2005
http://www.johnpilger.com/print
by John Pilger
The New Statesman, London
The latest bombings in London have produced a strange political atmosphere here; I cannot recall anything like it. A truth is struggling to be heard. It is being said guardedly, apologetically. Occasionally, a member of the public breaks the silence, as an East Londoner did when he walked in front of a CNN camera crew and reporter in mid-platitude. "Iraq!" he said. "We invaded Iraq and what did we expect? Go on say it."
The Scottish MP Alex Salmond tried to say it on BBC radio. He was told he was speaking "in poor taste . . . before the bodies are even buried." The Respect Party MP George Galloway was lectured by BBC televison presenter that he was being "crass". The Mayor of London, Ken Livinstone, said the diametric opposite of what he had previously said, which was that the invasion of Iraq would come home to our streets. With the exception of Galloway, not one so-called anti-war MP spoke out in clear, unequivocal English. The warmongers were allowed to fix the boundaries of public debate; one of the more idiotic, in the Guardian, called Blair "the world's leading statesman".
And yet, like the man who interrupted CNN, people understand and know why, just as the majority of Britons oppose the war and believe Blair is a liar. This frightens the British political elite. At a large media party I attended, many of the important guests uttered "Iraq" and "Blair" as a kind of catharsis for that which they dared not say professionally and publicly.
The bombs of 7 July were Blair's bombs. Blair brought home to this country his and Bush's illegal, unprovoked and blood-soaked adventure in the Middle East. Were it not for his epic irresponsibility, the Londoners who died in the Tube and on the No 30 bus almost certainly would be alive today. This is what Livingstone ought to have said. To paraphrase perhaps the only challenging question put to Blair on the eve of the invasion, it is now surely beyond all doubt that the man is unfit to be prime minister.
How much more evidence is needed? Before the invasion, Blair was warned by the Joint Intelligence Committee that "by far the greatest terrorist threat" to this country would be "heightened by military action against Iraq". He was warned by 79 per cent of Londoners who, according to a YouGov survey in February 2003, believed that a British attack on Iraq "would make a terrorist attack on London more likely". A month ago, a leaked, classified CIA report revealed that the invasion had turned Iraq into a focal point of terrorism. Before the invasion, said the CIA, Iraq "exported no terrorist threat to its neighbours" because Saddam Hussein was "implacably hostile to al-Qaeda".
Now, an 18 July report by the Chatham House organisation, a "think tank" deep within the British establishment, may well beckon Blair's coup de gr?ce. It says there is "no doubt" the invasion of Iraq has "given a boost to the al-Qaeda network" in "propaganda, recruitment and fundraising" while providing an ideal targeting and training area for terrorists. "Riding pillion with a powerful ally" has cost Iraqi, American and British lives. The right-wing academic, Paul Wilkinson, a voice of western power, was the principal author. Read between the lines and it says the prime minister is now a serious liability. Those who run this country know he has committed a great crime; the "link" has been made.
Blair's bunker-mantra is that there was terrorism long before the invasion, notably 11 September. Anyone with an understanding of the painful history of the Middle East would not have been surprised by 11 September or by the bombing of Madrid and London, only that they had not happened earlier. I have reported the region for 35 years, and if I could describe in a word how millions of Arab and Muslim people felt, I would say "humiliated". When Egypt looked like winning back its captured territory in the 1973 war with Israel, I walked through jubilant crowds in Cairo: it felt as if the weight of history's humiliation had lifted. In a very Egyptian flourish, one man said to me, "We once chased cricket balls at the British club. Now we are free."
They were not free, of course. The Americans re-supplied the Israeli army and they almost lost everything again. In Palestine, the humiliation of a captive people is Israeli policy. How many Palestinian babies have died at Israeli checkpoints after their mothers, bleeding and screaming in premature labour, have been forced to give birth beside the road at a military checkpoint with the lights of a hospital in the distance? How many old men have been forced to show obeisance to young Israeli conscripts? How many families have been blown to bits by America-supplied F-16s with British-supplied parts?
The gravity of the bombing of London, said a BBC commentator, "can be measured by the fact that it marks Britain's first suicide bombing". What about Iraq? There were no suicide bombers in Iraq until Blair and Bush invaded. What about Palestine? There were no suicide bombers in Palestine until Ariel Sharon, an accredited war criminal sponsored by Bush and Blair, came to power. In the 1991 Gulf "war", American and British forces left more than 200,000 Iraqis dead and injured and the infrastructure of their country in "an apocalyptic state", according to the United Nations. The subsequent embargo, designed and promoted by zealots in Washington and Whitehall, was not unlike a medieval siege. Denis Halliday, the United Nations official assigned to administer the near-starvation food allowance, called it "genocidal".
I witnessed its consequences: tracts of southern Iraq contaminated with depleted uranium and cluster bomblets waiting to explode. I watched dying children, some of the half a million infants whose deaths Unicef attributed to the embargo - deaths which US Secretary of State Madeline Albright said were "worth it". In the west, this was hardly reported. Throughout the Muslim world, the bitterness was like a presence, its contagion reaching many young British-born Muslims.
In 2001, in revenge for the killing of 3,000 people in the Twin Towers, more than 20,000 Muslims died in the Anglo-American invasion of Afghanistan. This was revealed by Jonathan Steele in the London Guardian and was never news, to my knowledge. The attack on Iraq was the Rubicon, making the reprisal against Madrid and the bombing of London entirely predictable: the latter "in response to the massacres carried out by Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan ...", claimed a group called the Organisation for El Qaeda in Europe. Whether or not the claim was genuine, the reason was. Bush and Blair wanted a "war on terror" and they got it.
Omitted from public discussion is that their state terror makes al-Qaeda's appear miniscule by comparison. More than 100,000 Iraqi men, woman and children have been killed, not by suicide bombers, but by the Anglo-American "coalition", says a peer-reviewed study published in the Lancet, and largely ignored.
In his poem "From Iraq", Michael Rosen wrote:
We are the unfound
We are uncounted
You don't see the homes we made
We're not even the small print or the bit in brackets . . .
because we lived far from you,
because you have cameras that point the other way . . .
Imagine, for a moment, you are in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. It is an American police state, like a vast penned ghetto. Since April last year, the hospitals there have been subjected to an American policy of collective punishment. Staff have been attacked by US marines, doctors have been shot, emergency medicines blocked. Children have been murdered in front of their families.
Now imagine the same state of affairs imposed on the London hospitals that received the victims of the bombing. When will someone draw this parallel at one of Blair's staged "press conferences", at which he is allowed to emote for the cameras about "our values outlast [ing] theirs"? Silence is not journalism. In Fallujah, they know "our values" only too well. And when will someone invite the obsequious Bob Geldoff to explain why his hero, Blair's smoke-and-mirrors "debt cancellation" amounts to less than the money the Blair government spends in a week, brutalising Iraq?
The hand-wringing over "whither Islam's soul" is another distraction. Christianity leaves Islam for dead as an industrial killer. The cause of the current terrorism is neither religion nor hatred for "our way of life". It is political, requiring a political solution. It is injustice and double standards, which plant the deepest
grievances. That, and the culpability of our leaders, and the "cameras that point the other way", are the core of it.
On 19 July, while the BBC governors were holding their annual general meeting at Television Centre, an inspired group of British documentary filmmakers met outside the main gates and conducted a series of news reports of the kind you do not see on television. Actors played famous reporters doing their "camera pieces". The "stories" they reported included the targeting of the civilian population of Iraq, the application of the Nuremberg Principles to Iraq, America's illegal rewriting of the laws of Iraq and theft of its resources through privatisation, the everyday torture and humiliation of ordinary people and the failure to protect Iraqis archaeological and cultural heritage.
Blair is using the London bombing to further deplete our rights and those of others, as Bush has done in America. Their goal is not security, but greater control. The memory of their victims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and elsewhere demands the renewal of our anger. The troops must come home. Nothing less is owed to those who died and suffered in London on 7 July, unnecessarily, and nothing less is owed to those whose lives are marked if this travesty endures.
By Kim Sengupta
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article301010.ece
Published: 23 July 2005
The second wave of attempted bomb attacks have raised fresh questions over the ability of Britain's intelligence services to prevent terrorist atrocities.
As police yesterday released CCTV images of the men claimed to have made a bungled attempt to repeat the 7
July carnage on Thursday, security chiefs were forced to admit that they had once again been taken by surprise.
None of the men caught on the CCTV cameras was even known to the police, MI5 or MI6.
The Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, had admitted that the first attacks, which cost 52 lives, had "come out of the blue"; now it appears that the latest series had also come as a surprise.
Sir Ian Blair, the Scotland Yard Commissioner, acknowledged: "Officers are facing previously unknown threats ... great danger." He added: "We are learning fast, but I am afraid there are bound to be casualties along the way."
Just weeks before the 7 July blasts, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) had downgraded the security threat. Leaked documents also revealed that the security service had concluded Islamist terrorists did not have the capability to mount a major operation in London at the present time.
Just as after the first bombing, the investigation into the new attacks has moved at pace. This time, the police and the security agencies stress that they have crucial evidence lacking in the 7 July bombings: unexploded devices that could yield forensic clues. However, new information also emerged quickly after the first explosions including the identities of the bombers, details of their contacts, as well as the discovery of an explosives cache. That did not stop the second set of bombing attempts.
The new wave of attacks also came on the day that Tony Blair met senior officials from the police, MI5, MI6, and GCHQ (the Government's listening post) in what was, in effect, an inquest into the failure of two weeks ago.
Officials in the security and intelligence services, as well as the police, admit that they are suffering from an information vacuum. The nationalities of the second wave of bombers is unclear, but security sources say there is no reason to believe they were not "home-grown'", like the terrorists who were responsible for the 7 July bombings.
Therein lies a significant problem for the intelligence services. Dealing with an attack by foreign Islamists - be they Moroccan, Algerian or Syrian - would have been comparatively easier. There are international databases, recognisable suspects, and tranches of information from allied services in Europe and the Middle East.
What they have faced instead appears to have been a small, autonomous cell of Britons, hitherto unknown to the authorities, who carried out a fairly unsophisticated operation. Once they had the explosives, they simply had to get off a mainline train and on to the Underground lines and buses with their deadly packages.
There is, however, a foreign link to this, and it is Pakistan that is now internationally recognised as the de facto headquarters of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. It is a country whose military and intelligence services have been accused by both the West and Pakistani opposition figures of being deeply infiltrated by the Islamist extremists [and the CIA - ed.].
It appears perfectly natural for young British Muslims, the majority of Pakistani descent, to return to their ancestral homes and for those who have chosen the path of militancy to meet up with extremists just as the Leeds bombers are believed to have done.
"We are looking at a totally new and menacing situation," said a senior security source.
http://wagnews.blogspot.com/2005/07/how-black-ops-staged-london-bombings.html
by Fintan Dunne, BreakForNews.com
22 July, 2005 12:00pmET
Staged terror events --like magic tricks-- rely on misdirection to throw people off the track. The first step in uncovering how the London bombings were carried out by a Western black operations team -is to see through the key misdirections they built into the operation.
Here's the official spin on what happened:
Key evidence of the movements of the four alleged bombers comes from a single CCTV image of four similar-looking individuals entering Luton Station to catch a London-bound train. Three of them had driven to Luton to meet the fourth and carry on by train to King's Cross station in London.
The police claim to have another CCTV video of them splitting up at Kings Cross and heading in different directions to carry out the attacks. Papers identifying them were found at the scenes --where their bodies have also been recovered. Police also found bomb materials in the car they left at a pay carpark in Luton.
That's the tale of the "suicide bombers." The big problem with this account is that a terror group would never deliberately waste valuable human resources in suicide attacks, when suicide tactics are not needed.
In answer, mainstream media are now also pushing the line that they may have been duped --and didn't know the bombs would explode immediately they were set. In alternative media some are also pushing the idea that they simply thought they transporting drugs.
Both explanations assume the four did actually carry the bombs onto London's Underground trains and a bus.
Which of course, they didn't. All this has been misdirection.
Here's how it really went down:
The three who were driving from Leeds to Luton never completed their journey. Somewhere along the M1 motorway, a car with a flashing blue light came up behind them and both cars pulled over to the side of the road. The seeming police officers demanded identification and then insisted that the car be moved off the motorway for safety reasons and for further questioning.
Meanwhile another team was intercepting the fourth person in as he made his way from nearby Aylesbury to Luton. None of them would be seen alive in public again. They did not participate in the bombings.
The CCTV image of them entering Luton Station is a cut and paste of prior surveilance photos taken of the four. This is the key misdirrection.
Intercepting the four would have been much to public once they entered Luton Station. They were taken out before that. Let's come back to what happened to them after we unveil the other key misdirection.
The bombs on the Underground were not in the tube carriages. They were under the floors of the carriages. The black-ops team would need access to rail or maintainance yards in order to plant these timed devices.
That's the reliable way. That's why this was inevitably how it would be done.
Confirmation of this comes from a number of reports, including this eyewitness account of the Aldgate East tube bomb by Cambridge dancer Bruce Lait. He and dance partner Crystal Main were the only passengers in their carriage who survived without serious injury - despite being nearest to the bomb blast.
Here's the Cambridge Evening News report:
"When I woke up and looked around I saw darkness, smoke and wreckage. It took a while to realise where I was and what was going on... " He and Crystal were helped out of the carriage. As they made their way out, a policeman pointed out where the bomb had been.
Moreover, Christophe Chaboud, head of the French Anti-Terrorism Co-ordination Unit, told Le Monde newspaper that the explosives used in the bombings were of military origin:
He added that the victims' wounds suggested that the explosives, which were " not heavy but powerful", had been placed on the ground, perhaps underneath seats.
Or perhaps under the floor.
Causing injuries such as those suffered by Emily Benton, one of two Knoxville, TN sisters on vacation in London who were injured in one of the tube blasts. She had broken bones and skin missing on her feet:
"Her feet were badly injured (the hospital doesn't think she will lose her feet), and she has a bad cut on her arm."
With much of the carnage taking place underground, it was useful that the bus bomb could provide an above-ground spectacle -and the only sighting of a bomber in action:
BUS blast survivor Richard Jones yesterday revealed how he came face-to-face with one of the London bombers. The Scots IT expert got off the doomed double-decker just seconds before it was torn apart in an explosion that killed 13 passengers.
Which doesn't sound anything like the blue-jeaned, unshaven, rather drably-dressed Hasib Hussain. But the tale of a nervous bomber served to add color to a London landscape which badly needed at least one eyewitness account of the bombers in action.
The bus -like the trains, had a concealed bomb.
Meanwhile, the alleged bombers had been whisked to a remote location to be ruthlessly murdered in a way that would be consistent with their participation in a suicide bombing. They died in a callous blast arranged with military precision.
Four more murders came easily to those who were meanwhile killing scores in London with the same ruthless precision.
Their bodies and body parts would be infiltrated into the forensic investigation. Their identity papers would be "found" at the scenes of the bombings. Their injuries would be consistent. Their names and their memory smeared forever.
It's war. This is what it's like. Stop it.
Credits: Team 8+ & WagNews Posters
20 July 2005 - Western Daily Press - letters
Sir - The rush to pass judgment on the Muslim community continues apace.
At the same time the awkward questions are on the increase.
Why, with no previous connections to any militant groups, did the four choose to die and kill for Islam?
Why did they pose for the CCTV cameras and carry wallets full of ID when they knew that their families, friends and the Muslim community would be abused, ostracised and punished?
Why did they hire a car instead of using one of the men's new red Mercedes?
Who warned Israeli minister Binyamin Netanyahu not to leave his hotel room adjacent to Liverpool Street Station?
Why, if they knew that they were carrying bombs, did they buy return rail tickets?
Why did they buy pay-and-display parking tickets?
Why were the explosives not strapped around their midriffs?
How were the three bombs detonated at precisely the same time without timers?
Who decided that timers and military explosives should be dropped and replaced with no timers and "home-made explosives"?
Did the police use extra-sensory perception to find out so much so quickly?
Why did the suicide bus bomber go to the top deck where the damage would have been much less?
As all the available evidence points to the four being murdered along with the rest, what did they believe that they had been given when they picked up their knapsacks?
If they were couriers what were supposed to be the goods?
Pat Rattigan Chesterfield Derbyshire
July 19, 2005
http://www.suntimes.com/output/osullivan/cst-edt-osul19.html
BY JOHN O'SULLIVAN
LONDON -- Do the four young men who blew up 55 people in London qualify as exceptional and terrifying ''suicide bombers''? Or were they run-of-the-mill, regular, ordinary terrorist bombers such as you meet Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays in any small provincial English town? It may seem that this is a slightly odd question to ask. What does it matter which they were? They still kill people, don't they?
But the fact is that this question actually worries the British government, police, intelligence services and ''chattering classes'' even if most ordinary Brits take the attitude of the medieval pope who ordered ''Kill them all -- and let God decide.'' It is not too much to say that the elites desperately hope the bombers will turn out to be ordinary terrorists (or, as the BBC would put it, ''militants''). This hope does not rest on an easy confidence that Britain handled conventional terrorism before and knows how to do so. IRA terrorists murdered 2,200 people over 30 years, and as part of the Good Friday agreement, they were released to wander about the streets, intimidate their neighbors, kneecap dissenters, run rackets, and in general live like semi-retired Mafiosi in a lax witness protection program.
But the IRA faced one great difficulty: Its terrorists wanted to live. They wanted to plant bombs and get away. And if you want to get away, that complicates the difficulty of exploding the bomb. It has to be detonated either by a timer or by remote control; it has to be left lying around. These difficulties explain the IRA's ingenuity in inventing more and more ways of planting bombs without being caught. They explain why IRA ''experts'' are sought by less experienced terrorist groups like the Colombian FARC to train their operatives. It is no exaggeration to say the IRA pioneered almost all the modern methods of terrorist murder: car bombs, pub bombs, remote control detonators, even suicide bombers.
In the IRA's case, however, the suicide bomber was involuntary. They took a hostage, packed him with explosives, drove him to a British Army checkpoint, and threatened to murder his family unless he approached the soldiers. The poor man tried to warn the soldiers -- God rest his brave soul -- as he drew near and was blown up. Now, the fascinating theory has emerged in British intelligence circles that the four young Muslim terrorists may have been ''suicide'' bombers of the same involuntary kind.
Here is the evidence: They bought return railway tickets. Their bombs were not strapped to their bodies but carried in knapsacks as if to be left behind on the trains. None of them was heard to shout the customary ''Allah Akhbar'' before the bombs exploded. Unusually for suicide bombers, they left identification on their bodies. And surveillance videotapes show them laughing and joking casually -- rather than grimly determined or prayerful -- as they caught the Underground train.
These little pieces of circumstantial evidence suggest the possibility the bombers were duped. Maybe they were told by their controllers that the bombs were timed to go off five minutes after being detonated rather than immediately. It would not be the first time that al-Qaida had deceived its devotees: Osama bin Laden revealed that not all the 9/11 hijackers were aware that the planes were to be flown into buildings. And the bombers' ''suicide'' would protect the terrorist network against the chance that they might be caught and persuaded to talk.
This is no more than a theory. It may never be conclusively established or disproved. But it is a tempting theory because the British authorities find the prospect of suicide bombing so terrifying.
Like the U.S. authorities, they fear that bombers who don't have to plan an escape route (because they will be dead) cannot be deterred. If they were born and brought up in Britain, they cannot easily be detected. And if they exist in even modest numbers in Muslim and immigrant communities, they will pose an insuperable security threat. These fears are reasonable. But we should not terrify ourselves by exaggerating them. Israel has succeeded in greatly reducing the extent and success of suicide terrorism by good intelligence, by penetrating the terrorist groups, and by focusing attention less on the suicide bombers than on the networks required to sustain them and the surrounding community from which they come.
The pool of potential suicide bombers is not vast. It consists of radical Muslims who are brave and dim. Reluctant though we may be to admit the fact, it undoubtedly requires courage to blow oneself up. To kill oneself and innocent passersby, however, in the belief that God will reward you with Paradise and instant Playboy centerfolds, suggests a silliness of epic proportions.
But courage and stupidity are still not enough for suicide bombing. You have to be psyched up for it. The testimony of failed suicide bombers reveals that a network of persuaders constantly reinforces their loyalty -- and not just that. Every bomber is shepherded by large numbers of recruiters, trainers, explosives experts, ''mentors,'' and controllers to direct their crime. Remove even one link in this chain and the entire apparatus has to be built again in an atmosphere of fear.
Here the Brits have been given a useful lead by the evidence that at least two of the bombers had recently visited Pakistan. Every young British Muslim who has recently visited Pakistan is a potential informant on these networks. So are Saudi-financed imams and academics who advocate ''jihad.'' If Muslim pressure groups are inclined to protest at their interrogation, they should have the words of Abdel Rahman al-Rashed of the Al-Arabiya news channel quoted at them: ''It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims.''
Britain does not have the resources to question everyone; so it is justified in questioning those most likely either to be terrorists or to know them. This is not Islamophobia; it is common sense. Ordinary law-abiding Muslims in Britain accept that. They know the radical Islamists among them threaten their daughters' lives and their sons' souls. Until now, Britain has not asked them to take sides. And since it is human nature to avoid painful choices, they have remained quiet -- and the cancer within Islam has spread. Over the weekend, however, Prime Minister Tony Blair attacked Islamism as a ''perversion'' of Islam and as an ''evil ideology.''
Now that appeasement of radical Islamism is no longer British policy, neutrality is no longer an option for British Muslims.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/osullivan/cst-edt-osul19.html
By Webster G. Tarpley
http://www.waronfreedom.org/777.html
Washington DC, July 11 2005
Last week's London explosions carry the characteristic features of a state-sponsored, false flag, synthetic terror provocation by networks within the British intelligence services MI-5, MI-6, the Home Office, and the Metropolitan Police Special Branch who are favorable to a wider Anglo-American aggressive war in the Middle East, featuring especially an early pre-emptive attack on Iran, with a separate option on North Korea also included. With the London attacks, the Anglo-American invisible government adds another horrendous crime to its own dossier. But this time, their operations appear imperfect, especially in regard to the lack (so far) of a credible patsy group which, by virtue of its ethnicity, could direct popular anger against one of the invisible government's targets. So far, the entire attribution of the London crimes depends on what amounts to an anonymous posting in an obscure, hitherto unknown, secular Arabic-language chatrooms in the state of Maryland, USA. But, based on this wretched shred of pseudo-evidence, British Prime Minister Tony Blair - who has surely heard of a group called the Irish Republican Army, which bombed London for more than a decade - has not hesitated to ascribe the murders to "Islam," and seems to be flirting with total martial law under the Civil Contingencies Act. We are reminded once again of how he earned his nickname of Tony Bliar.
That the British Government knew in advance that blasts would occur is not open to rational doubt. Within hours of the explosions, Israeli Army Radio was reporting that "Scotland Yard [London police headquarters] had intelligence warnings of the attacks a short time before they occurred." This report, repeated by IsraelNN.com, added that "the Israeli Embassy in London was notified in advance, resulting in Foreign Minister Binyamin Netanyahu remaining in his hotel room rather than make his way to the hotel adjacent to the site of the first explosion, a Liverpool Street train station, where he was to address an economic summit." This report is attributed to "unconfirmed reliable sources." At around the same time, the Associated Press issued a wire asserting that "British police told the Israeli Embassy in London minutes before Thursday's explosions that they had received warnings of possible terror attacks in the city," according to "a senior Israeli official." This wire specifies that "just before the blasts, Scotland Yard called the security officer at the Israeli Embassy to say that they had received warnings of possible attacks…."
According to eyewitness reports from London, BBC claimed between 8:45 and some minutes after 10 AM that the incidents in the Underground were the result of an electrical power surge, or alternatively of a collision. Foreign bigwigs, presumably not just Netanyahu, were warned, while London working people continued to stream into the subway. These reports have been denied, repudiated, sanitized, and expunged from news media websites by the modern Orwellian Thought Police, but they have been archived by analysts who learned on 9/11 and other occasions that key evidence in state-sponsored terror crimes tends to filter out during the first minutes and hours, during the critical interval when the controlled media are assimilating the cover story peddled by complicit moles within the ministries. These reports are not at all damaging to Israel, but are devastating for British domestic security organs. An alternative version peddled by Stratfor.com, namely that the Israelis warned Scotland Yard, is most probably spurious but still leaves the British authorities on the hook. Which Scotland Yard official made the calls? Identify that official, and you have bagged a real live rogue network mole.
Another more general element of foreknowledge can be seen in the fact reported by Isikoff and Hosenball of Newsweek that, since about November 2004, the US FBI, but not other US agencies, has been refusing to use the London Underground.
Operations like these are generally conduited through the government bureaucracies under the cover of a drill or exercise which closely resembles the terror operation itself. So it was with Amalgam Virgo and the multiple exercises held on 9/11, as I show in my 9/11 Synthetic Terror - Made in USA (Joshua Tree CA: Progressive Press, 2005). So it was with the Hinckley attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan, when a presidential succession exercise was scheduled for the next day, as I showed in my George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (1992; reprint by Progressive Press, 2004). An uncannily similar maneuver allows the necessary work to be done on official computers and on company time, while warding off the inquisitive glances and questions of curious co-workers at adjoining computer consoles.
Such a parallel drill was not lacking in the London case. On the evening of July 7, BBC Five, a news and sports radio program, carried an interview with a certain former Scotland Yard official named Peter Power who related that his firm, Visor Consulting, had been doing an anti-terror-bombing drill in precisely the Underground stations and at the precise times when the real explosions went off. Peter Power and Visor had been subcontractors for the drill; Power declined to nam