Those routine bizarre coincidences

The London tube bombings interrupted a drill testing responses to the very same kind of event, just like 9-11

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

Several London tube passengers have reported that on the morning of July 7, some sort of security personnel had been entering trains searching for bombs. They then explained to alarmed passengers that everything was fine, it was only an anti-terrorism drill. Moments later, three real bombs exploded on trains and a fourth struck a bus possibly en route to a train.

The mystery was partially solved later the evening of July 7, when BBC Five Live radio show host Peter Allen interviewed disaster preparedness expert Peter Power:

Peter Power, Visor Consultants : At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.

Peter Allen, BBC : To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?

Peter Power : Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd meet, and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one, and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking, and so on.

The comment elicited a barrage of emails to Visor Consultants where Power is Managing Director. To head off a potential public relations disaster, Power responded to all email inquiries by posting a general reply: “It is confirmed that a short number of 'walk through' scenarios planed [sic] well in advance had commenced that morning for a private company in London (as part of a wider project that remains confidential) and that two scenarios related directly to terrorist bombs at the same time as the ones that actually detonated with such tragic results. One scenario, in particular, was very similar to real time events.” Power then went on to dismiss the significance of this correlation as a “bizarre coincidence.”

Curiously, a remarkably similar explanation was offered when it was revealed that a US government multi-agency exercise involving planes hitting buildings in Washington and New York had been planned, and was running, the morning of September 11, 2001. An Associated Press report by John J Lumpkin on August 21, 2002, reads, in part: “In what the government describes as a bizarre coincidence, one US intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings. . . . ‘It was just an incredible coincidence that this happened to involve an aircraft crashing into our facility,’ [National Reconnaissance Office spokesperson Art] Haubold said. ‘As soon as the real world events began, we canceled the exercise.’”

Peter Power of Visor Consultants, whose private disaster-preparedness company was carrying out the terror bombing exercise drills the morning of July 7, mentioned in a CTV news interview on July 11 that the client who hired Visor to conduct the exercise played a key role in determining the locations and the timing of the simulated attacks. However, Power has remained tight-lipped about who that client was.

But in February 2002, Power wrote an article for the Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness entitled “The changing face of disaster management.” In it, he wrote, “my company regularly supplies to organizations ranging from the 7th largest in the USA to the departments of UK government.” The latest available Fortune 500 ranking of largest US companies available to Power at the time of his writing would have been the year 2000 rankings. That year, the number seventh spot was held down by none other than Enron Corporation.

Then-CEO of Enron, Kenneth Lay, was among the largest single donors to George W Bush’s first election campaign, attending his first presidential inauguration standing immediately to Bush’s left hand side. He became the Bush regime’s key first-term energy advisor and contributed enormously to US Vice President Dick Cheney’s new, and largely still secret, US energy policy. The documents comprising that energy policy are suspected of containing information related to the advent of the US war on Iraq in 2003, but despite Congressional threats of lawsuits, Cheney has refused to hand over the documents for review. It was British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to join the US in that war which many critics say is to blame for London becoming subject to the terrorism unleashed on tube trains July 7. In other words, our speculation is that Enron played a key role in instigating a US and UK war on Iraq, and in the bombings in London that were purportedly a reaction to that war.

Enron quietly emerged from bankruptcy late last year and is back in business with a vengeance. In August this year, Enron won a US$1 billion settlement with JP Morgan Chase, whom the company sued for aiding and abetting its own illegal bookkeeping activity which plunged the huge energy trader into bankruptcy. JP Morgan Chase is another of Visor Consultants’ nine listed clients. The Enron Europe office in London is located less than three kilometers from one of the train blast sites in London, and the JP Morgan Chase office is located about half a kilometer from the other two train blast sites.

Interestingly, Power also was involved in a BBC production broadcast in May 2004 called “Panorama: London Under Attack.” This investigative journalism-style docudrama examined whether London businesses and emergency services were truly prepared for terrorist attacks. The fictional scenario explored in the film involved three bombs planted on London tube trains and a fourth on a truck. One bomb, at Liverpool Street, was exactly where a real bomb detonated July 7; another, near Hyde Park, was just four stations south on the same line as where another real bomb went off; a third was one station west of where a third bomb detonated on the same line; and the fourth fictional bomb was some distance away from where a bus exploded the same morning a little over a year later.

Yet more oddly, BBC’s Panorama show produced another documentary in July this year exploring the actual bombing attacks, but used nearly the same title: “Panorama Special: London Under Attack.” In the fictional program called “Panorama: London Under Attack” broadcast May 16 2004, three bombs exploded on trains and one on a truck between 8:10 am and 8:40 am. In the non-fiction program called “Panorama Special: London Under Attack,” broadcast July 11, 2005, it was reported that three train bombs and one bus bomb all exploded at 8:50 am, and all of them within one or two kilometers of the fictional sites. We have no speculation to offer on that.

A part of the fictional transcript from the May 16, 2004 broadcast reads: “It's 1 o'clock, the headlines. London has come under attack this morning. Three explosions on the underground were followed by a chemical tanker which exploded releasing lethal chlorine gas. Police are continuing to encourage the public to stay indoors. 40 people are now confirmed dead and there are many hundreds injured. The Home Secretary has said the attacks bear the hallmark of Al-Qaeda.” And a fictional survivor in the 2004 broadcast says to reporters: “By the time I knew what had happened, everywhere were full of smoke. At that point I really thought I was going to die, people started coughing and crying and trying to find their way out in the dark, and we didn’t know if there was going to be another explosion or what.”

In July of this year, the real Home Secretary quickly established a link between the tube bombings and al Qaeda and coverage of the bombing’s victims featured several survivors talking of the smoke and darkness, and trying to find their way out of train tunnels.

At the end of the fictional 2004 program, Power says, “When we've got something like this, there's no normality other than the new normality that follows after this. For all of those people this is a new life. The messages from people in the Manchester bombing all those years ago and so on, they're going to repeat this every time. It's on the news again, every time they smell it in the swimming pool. It's going to have a resonance that will go on for decades.” On July 11, four days after the real bombs detonated killing 56, Power said, “We’ve had exercises on the tube trains many, many times.”

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