The fifth anniversary of the terror outrage in London on July 7, 2005, passed off quietly – a little too quietly for some relatives of the victims.
According to a Government press release: “For the 7th July 2005 Inquests, evidence of identity and the causes of death have already been taken and the deaths have been registered. The Inquests were adjourned at the request of the DPP [Director of Public Prosecutions] until the end of the trials of the men charged with conspiring to cause explosions with the 7th July 2005 bombers”.
That’s interesting, because it means that they called off an inquest pending a trial of people accused of conspiring with the bombers before they had legally established who the bombers were.
What’s more, the jury in the trial was told by the judge that the four named bombers were quilty.
The accused were acquitted after a retrial, though two of them were found guilty of a charge that had not been brought, of conspiring to attend a place of terrorist training.
The Independent newspaper has a section in its website dedicated to the inquests () and that contains an description of subsequent events:
“The lead Coroner received notification of the outcome of that trial in May 2009 and since then Lady Justice Hallett has been given jurisdiction over the 56 inquests and has assembled a team to assist her. The first decisions she must make include whether there is ‘sufficient cause’ to resume the inquests and, if so, the scope of the inquiry she intends to make”.
That’s interesting, too. Not only did they cause the inquests to be adjourned by accusing innocent people of conspiracy, but when the inquests are reopened, they have to reestablish the need to hold the inquests. Following the pre-inquest hearings, a report was issued by the Coroner’s Court, headed “Decision following pre-inquest hearing from 26 to 30 April 2010”.
What struck me about that report was its complexity. Much of it was dealing with legal points for and against the need for the inquests, and the form of the inquests, and whether or not there should be a jury. Out of the 66 pages, 32 were concerned with the need and the scope of the inquests. This included seven pages which summarised what was known or what “it was said could have been known with due diligence before the bombings”. The accuracy of that information seemed to have been already accepted.
In fact, the report stated: “Save for Mr O’Connor who, on one occasion, went so far as to accuse MI5 of lying to the ISC, the families are not asserting MI5 was guilty of any intentional wrongdoing. They are concerned that there may have been failings and simply wish to know more. I make it clear that no failings either systemic or individual have yet been established and no evidence has been produced to me yet to justify the assertion any member of MI5 has lied”.
The idea of official wrongdoing had already been dealt with in a paragraph which stated: “I should also add that what have been called ‘conspiracy theories’ abound in the media and on the internet. Mr Christopher Coltart who appeared for some of the bereaved families summarised them for me. Some are more outlandish than others. Suffice it to say there has been widespread speculation about the wider circumstances of the plot and the identity of any mastermind”.
Later on, the report states that the inquests “will help put minds at rest, confirm or allay the rumour and suspicion generated by ‘conspiracy theorists’ …”. Under consideration of whether there should be a jury, the report states:
“In the absence of a jury, I could publish a full explanation of my conclusions. This may more suitably meet the expectations of the bereaved families, survivors and the wider public, including the ‘conspiracy theorists’."
What on earth does the Rt Hon Lady mean by ‘conspiracy theorists’? She herself uses the words ‘conspiracy’, and syntactically related words, seven times in her report, apart from the above three mentions of ‘conspiracy theorists’, and on each occasion she is referring to allegations of conspiracy by the state against individuals. The sloppiness of her references to ‘conspiracy theorists’, compared with the legal exactitude of the rest of the report, stands out like a sore thumb. Translated, I think it means: “This inquest will exclude the possibility of state complicity, irrespective of the evidence, and in defence will resort to name-calling”.
A more ballanced view was put forward in a local radio station in Bristol, in a slot run by Tony Gosling and Martin Summers under the title ‘BCfm Friday Drivetime’.
In an hour-long enquiry into the 7/7 London bombings, they interviewed a variety of witnesses and experts, including Robert Webb whose sister Laura died in the Edgware Road tube blast. Only 28 minutes into the programme did they ask, “Could this be a 'False Flag' attack?”.
The Guardian’s reporter Mark Honingsbaum had got to the scene of the Edgware Road explosion and interviewed witnesses immediately after the event. They were referring to an explosion UNDER the carriage of an underground train, yet when Mark Honingsbaum’s report appeared in print, that had been changed to ‘in’ the carriage. Other discrepancies in the official story emerge, and the programme suggests: “MI5 lied about the four alleged bombers, they had been known to the security services in the past - not 'clean skins' at all”.
Finally, they included part of a talk by MI5 whistleblower Annie Machon, who had some interesting things to say about the privatisation of intelligence on a massive scale, involving “many, many large companies”. The programme website is at (http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/43887).
In the meantime, the Chilcott inquiry into the Iraq war has resumed. I think a result of the interviews so far has been an increase in healthy scepticism amongst the public about what they are told by politicians. That may be hard for decent well-meaning MPs who will occasionally behave less than perfectly, but the important thing is that people are now accepting that leading politicians can lie in a big way about crucial issues of war and peace. People I get chatting to down town or wherever now seem much more willing to accept the idea that 9/11 was very different from how it was told. I find that promotion of 9/11 truth is now mainly a matter of listening to people’s concerns about not believing what they are told any more, and helping them along. They are also increasingly perplexed about why we are in Afghanistan. That means that they are no longer completely fooled by the Osama bin Laden myth.
On Sunday 27th June a group of hardy anti-war protesters in London set out on a five-day walk to Colchester in an act of solidarity with former soldier Joe Glenton, who is in military prison there.
Sooner or later there will have to be an inquiry into the invasion of Afghanistan. Apart from the attacks of 7/7 and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, there are other issues which used to be called ‘conspiracy theories’ which are overdue for proper investigation.
The government has announced their intention of setting up an inquiry into torture and rendition.
In the court cases, it appears that the government has been hiding behind national security in refusing access to key documents.
An inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly is long overdue, and an announcement must be coming soon, since two members of the coalition cabinet have been calling for one. Norman Baker, who is now transport minister, wrote a book on the topic:
Home Secretary Dominic Grieve called for an inquiry during the election campaign.
It was revealed in January that Lord Hutton, after the Hutton inquiry, quietly decreed that vital documents be kept from the public for seventy years.
So the government does have something to hide. Hiding documents is becoming something of a habit.
Documents which were submitted to Lord Cullen's inquiry into the Dunblane massacre were subsequently placed under a 100-year Closure Order, though that was subsequently lifted.
Why was a gagging order placed on the Hollie Grieg case, prohibiting campaigner Robert Green from speaking out? and Why were investigations blocked in the Downs Syndrome Association and the BBC?
What on earth do these issues have to do with national security? Or is national security being used to protect influential people? We need to know.
Withholding crucial information is also a key ingredient in creating a war, as the video ‘War Made Easy’ shows:
So is provocation.
Prison Planet has reported on infiltration and provocation in the G20 demonstrations
In a second video on the same page they show how police provocateurs are spotted during a peaceful demonstration:
This is an excerpt from a new film ‘You, me and the SPP’ (http://www.youmespp.com/), which has just had a screening in Toronto, and is available on DVD. In this video the crowd wasn’t provoked. The video demonstrates what happens when one person understands the situation and manages to persuade others. When a second person speaks out others begin to follow, and very quickly the whole situation can be turned around.
Provocation can be much more subtle, though. Look at what happened on the Green in Parliament Square. In my June newsletter I reported on talk of possible agents, or provocateurs amongst them, and that Brian Haw had wisely dissociated himself from the Democracy Village in anticipation of what was about to happen. Well, it happened (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1296162), and apparently Brian Haw survived yet another legal assault.
Look also at what happened in the UK 9/11 Truth movement. Since I joined in December 2006 there have been two frenzies of antisemitism abuse, both of which caused severe disruption to the movement. Unless a second person speaks out, the provocateurs win. Negative talk can be infectious.
I first noticed this in the Esperanto movement when I mentioned the name of a former president, who had done much to build the movement up in the UK, to a positive and well-meaning friend. Within thirty seconds he was saying, “The trouble with [the former president] is ...”. I asked: “How is it, that whenever a good guy’s name is mentioned, within thirty seconds people find something negative to say about him?” He saw the point and didn’t do it again. The way the provocateurs implant such suggestion can be by as little as gesture and tone. It means that in the end good guys are doing the wreckers work for them.
Something similar happened on the 9/11 Forum in connection with an excellent public meeting at The Friends Meeting House opposite Euston Station in London on July 14. The meeting had been organised and paid for by US truth campaigner Professor Jim Fetzer, who was also one of the speakers, together with Dr Kevin Barrett, Co-Founder of Muslims for 9/11 Truth, also from the US. They had teamed up with Israeli-born London-based jazz saxophonist and political commentator Gilad Atzmon, who talked about the Middle East situation. The compere was Kenneth O’Keefe, who had been on the Mavi Mara relief boat to Gaza. There was a problem, though. As Jim Fetzer explained on the night, they had to be careful how they organised such a meeting, because there could be interventions. Indeed, he said that there had been a problem regarding the venue, which they had managed to overcome. That meant that they were using just people in London whom they knew and could trust. They would probably have been unaware of the ludicrous interventions in the launch of Nick Kollerstrom’s book ‘Terror on the Tube’, which I reported on in my newsletter of September 2009. So they were right on that count. There used to be regular monthly meetings in London with at least fifty people present, but organising that sort of thing now is not easy. Some of us managed to reestablish the informal discussion group which became known as the ‘Keep Talking’ group, from the catch phrase at the end of this newsletter. We latched on a little late to what was happening with the Euston meeting, and my immediate fear was that we could have fewer than twenty people turning up in a hall with a capacity of a thousand. So when in the end some 60 to 70 turned up, I felt a little relieved. I think we all felt grateful to the organisers and the speakers. I know that Declan Heavy in London did a lot of work visiting mosques, in order to create interest in the Muslim communities. Despite the sympathetic responses he was receiving, I think we can all understand the pressures these people will be facing, and why they may stay away from an event of this nature. So how is such an event treated in the 9/11 Forum, of which I used to be a moderator (http://911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=148947)? Well, the numbers are derided, and the speakers are criticised for raising so-far unexplained issues. I, too, have a problem in understanding the video images of aircraft which appear to slice through tons of steel and concrete as if they were butter. If I thought it was possible to create a massive hologram in the sky, I would be looking at that, but I don’t. If I thought it was possible to graphically edit all the videos taken, professional and amateur, then I’d be looking at computer generated imagery, but I don’t see that one either. That doesn’t make me a ‘no-planer’, though. I don’t work from beliefs; I did physics. Perhaps a gaping hole was created moments before impact by thermite explosions. Perhaps Osama bin Laden, coming from Saudi Arabia, had mastered the art of miragery, and could create a plane mirage over New York from his cave in Tora Bora. If that’s what people had been told by Bush and Blair, many of them would be believing it.
Some parts of the 9/11 truth movement have somehow developed their own orthodoxy, which cannot be questioned any longer. OK, the press will have a field day with its myriads of conspiracy theories, but they don’t have to be bound by the truth. The truth is that we don’t know. Similarly, you don’t need to believe in ‘directed energy’ and ‘molecular dissociation’ in order to see that something weird happened to the top thirty stories of the South tower. I personally have a high regard for Professor Steven Jones’s work, which resulted in the thermite theory of controlled demolition. I can accept that as the primary mechanism. But can it explain the spectacular pulverisation of the top thirty stories? That doesn’t look like controlled anything. Perhaps nanothermite could explain it, if used in sufficient quantities, but we would need a coherent theory and some figures. There’s not much doubt that something weird happened, and we don’t know what it was. By labelling people who raise such questions, good people are doing the wreckers work for them.
In membership associations, the agent provocateurs can be the Awfully Nice Brigade. I’ve just had an article published on the website of The British Humanist Association in their series ‘My humanist hero’ (http://www.humanistlife.org.uk/2010/06/humanist-heroes-ludovic-lazarus-zamenhof/). I wrote about peace campaigner Ludovik Zamenhof, who is better known for launching Esperanto in 1887. For twenty years he was working with a Very Persuasive Person posing as an French aristocrat, who was seen to be working hard for the language but mysteriously undermining the humanitarian principles behind the movement. Then in 1907 the Awfully Nice Brigade played dirty tricks and split the movement in what became known as the ‘Ido-skismo’. Zamenhof may have latched on to the idea that the interventionists could have been hypocritical language chauvinist agents for the French state yet remained quiet in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair in order not to create a diplomatic incident, but I couldn’t find any evidence that anyone had even thought of that until 2007. I had been discussing the ‘Ido-skismo’ with a friend who was researching it and writing it up as a lawyer would, making out a case that it was fraudulent (http://rik.poreo.org/documents.html) when I reread an old account, and said “Ah!”. It had taken a hundred years to see the obvious.My article on Zamenhof is the first of three. The third is a good solid account from a genuine Esperantist and language teacher, but the second is hypocritical. It was written by the editor of The British Esperantist, who would undoubtedly, had Zamenhof been alive and living in the UK, have given him similar treatment to the treatment he gave me.
It all started with an undermining editorial in Autumn 2004 (http://esperanto-gb.org/lbe/arkivo/957/01.html (eo)) with a mixture of distortion, untruth and innuendo about my work not as just “one individual”, but as the association’s Information Officer, and it culminated in attempts to wreck the British Esperanto Congress in 2007, whose theme was ‘Renewal’. This resulted in the resignation of their own conference coordinator (http://rik.poreo.org/esperanto_truth_1.doc (page 2)). Following the first article, I requested a meeting with the president, Professor John Wells, to discuss it with him. Requests were ignored, but when I did eventually approach him in person at The London Esperanto Club he went into an infantile tantrum, saying “You’re childish and like Lapenna”. That shook me; I had considered him a friend and colleague for forty years. Just thirty years earlier, and three meters north of the spot where he was now standing, he had told me, “Lapenna is paranoid”. Professor Ivo Lapenna had been forced to resign as President of the Universal Esperanto-Association in 1974, following a furore, started by provocative articles in The British Esperantist. Professor Wells later criticised Professor Lapenna for ‘behaviour’ (http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/lapenna.htm (eo)). History was repeating itself, and he himself had given me the link. A year after that incident I was on the Management Committee, and in order to block me, they had tasked me with ‘Research’. I submitted to the President what should have been a rather boring draft financial report, and requested a meeting to discuss it. The meeting was refused and the message came back that I was paranoid. I then received an intimidatory message about ‘active opposition’ should I be a candidate at the next AGM. They passed a motion of censure on the grounds of ‘behaviour’, then cut off contact, effectively expelling me, which they had no legal power to do. They then published a statement about me in their newsletter (http://esperanto-gb.org/eab/eab_update/gxisdate33.pdf page 6). I myself became a persona non grata in the association I had done so much to build up. But eventually the President shot himself in the foot by publishing the most incredible statement to the members. This is worth careful study by anyone interested in how propaganda works, not just in tiny membership associations, but on the world stage, too. It should go into the English curriculum for all schools in the UK. He used four techniques, carefully interwoven: the red herring, table-turning, ambiguity and insinuation. Furthermore, he actually managed to confess that if my facts were right, then the implication would be that he and other trustees were dismantling the association. He then shot himself in the other foot by publishing his statement on the Internet (http://esperanto-gb.org/eab/eab_update/gxisdate41.pdf page 3), where it could be examined by people who were perhaps not quite so brainwashed as the members were. The answer sheet, to go at the end of the kids’ English textbooks, is my open letter asking for clarification, which has remained unanswered despite reminders at the AGMs, and is available on request, or alternatively, a letter of explanation to their own former solicitor (http://rik.poreo.org/response_to_wells.doc). The attitude of ordinary members can be summed up by: “I don’t understand what’s going on; leave it to the committee”, and “I don’t know what you’ve said, but you’re wrong”. The defence from the President has been consistently, “That’s history”, to which, in desperation, I eventually replied, “Yes, and so are you”. The members see my activities as negative, but I see them as positive.
In 2005 I was looking for parallel cases of associations which may posssibly have been infiltrated and taken over by the state. Now I’m wondering if there is a progressive association that’s not been taken over by the state, and if so, what’s wrong with it. At first sight, you wouldn’t notice anything wrong. The Esperanto association in the UK has just launched a marvellous new postcard publicity campaign. That’s a throwback to 1963 when they had impressive enquiry postcards printed – and in colour! That was phased out by the current lot about a decade ago. Who could the present drab black-and-white cards be targeting other than the members themselves? So when in the 9/11 movement emails were coming from the Awfully Nice Brigade, targeting key individuals, and suggesting that they may be sympathisers with the Nazis, we could learn from history. The lesson is to trace where that sort of thing is coming from, rather than to just walk away.
But that’s not the point. Where was the attack coming from and what did it mean? Could it have meant: “Watch it, mate, or we’ll cut off your funding”? If so, then someone should have been telling us that there was a major cause for concern over national security. We see here the same four techniques of propaganda: the red herring (antisemitism), ambiguity (the Palestinians are semites), the table-turning (what is Netanyahu doing to the people of Gaza?), and insinuation (sympathisers with the Nazis). Of course it’s not antisemitic to stand up against tyranny or to question the offical version of events. Nor is it anti-British.
In the pre-inquest report of the Coroners’ Court for 7/7, we see similar use of the term ‘conspiracy theorists’. Turning the tables in such an intricate manner may suggest that they know something. It’s usually easier to see the obvious from the outside than from the inside, but it’s easier to do something about it from the inside than from the outside.
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