7/7: The Untold Story? (The Big Issue in Scotland)
Adam ForrestJuly 20, 2009
Four years on from the July 7 bombings in central London, conspiracy theories are still rife. The Big Issue in Scotland’s Adam Forrest finds out why survivors and analysts believe an independent inquiry is the only way to get to the truth. (1,617 words, English + picture)
7/7: The Untold Story?
For those injured in the central London bombings, the story of 7/7 returns to them only in fragments. Jagged memories of the awful, piercing moments are surrounded by understandable confusion. John Tulloch, a university lecturer on his way back to Wales that day, was sitting just a few feet away from Mohammad Sidique Khan on a Tube train to Paddington when his world turned upside down.
"I was so concussed I wasn't aware,” he says of his miraculous survival. “I was either being stood up to go into an ambulance or I was being moved from one to the other. That was when I got that dreadful feeling of vertigo. I was probably thinking: 'What the hell is this?' It was like the floor had fallen away."
Individual experiences are inevitably disjointed, but four years on, survivors and family members of those killed expect the authorities to have pieced together a more complete story by now. Remarkably, there has yet to be a full public inquiry into the 7/7 attacks, despite the terrible loss of life (52 dead) and myriad ramifications for security and emergency operations.
Rachel North is one of those caught up in the blasts still looking for answers. She describes the aftermath of the explosion on the Piccadilly Line tube train as “a dream you can’t remember, a puzzle you can’t solve”. North is part of a group pursuing legal action in the High Court for a inquiry to shed light on the intelligence failures only hinted at in the Home Office report and two Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) studies.
“It’s important to know who knew what when, and why operational decisions were made,” she tells The Big Issue. “There’s a difference between studies by certain bodies and a full public inquiry - a big helicopter view, where a senior judge can go through it forensically, witnesses can be compelled, all the information can be put in one place, and findings and recommendations can be made.
“It’s normal to have a public inquiry for a train crash or an industrial accident, something where there is clear need for learning. So the fact the government hasn’t had one adds to the lack of trust and feeling there is something to hide. If Mohammad Sidique Khan and his friends were falling through the gaps, that’s the sort of thing a public inquiry should be looking at. When you have an information gaps, some people will fill it with conspiracy theories.”
Andy Hayman, former head of counter-terrorism at the Met who was made a CBE in the aftermath of the bombings, has also now called for an inquiry: “There has been no overview, no pulling together of each strand of review - no-one can be sure if key issues have been missed.”
The government’s own account, read to the Commons in May 2006 by Home Secretary John Reid, described the four bombers - Mohammad Sidique Khan, Shedzad Tanweer, Germaine Lindsay and Hasib Hussain – as “clean skins”; out-of-the-blue home-grown attackers that the intelligence services had no reason to suspect. Yet the trial of five men found guilty of a fertiliser bomb plot connected to al-Qaeda revealed evidence Sidique Khan was known to MI5. Khan was in contact with at least one of the convicted men under surveillance, and had been placed on a watch-list in 2004. Intelligence officers had taken pictures of him as far back as 2001.
Even the nature of the explosives used in the July 7 bombings remains unclear. The ISC report, one undertaken by a group of MPs chosen by the government, says only that it “appears” they were home-made. Yet the extent of the flames and heat reported by eyewitness survivors suggests more sophisticated explosives than the TATP materials found in the bombers’ bathtub in a Leeds flat.
Nafeez Ahmed, director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development, and author of The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry, finds it “remarkable and untenable” that the ISC continues to insists British intelligence could not have foreseen the serious threat from Khan and his associates. He believes evidence of wider al-Qa'ida involvement has been suppressed to deflect awkward questions about how a well-organised terror network carried on unchecked in Britain for a decade.
Although the second ISC report acknowledges Khan and Tanweer travelled to Pakistan for operational training, it ignores the regular telephone contact between Khan and Haroon Rashid Aswat, an al-Qa'ida lieutenant once in direct contact with Osama Bin Laden, and believed by some US investigators to have a key role in masterminding 7/7.
“If you look at the totality of the information that’s come out, there is a fairly coherent picture that there was an international network,” Ahmed tells The Big Issue. “How can you be a youth worker in Dewsbury (Khan) and suddenly get connected to al-Qaeda camp in Pakistan? It doesn’t work like that. There were circles they were moving in, and there are consistent connections between several different plots. There was a social network there.
In 2005, former Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus claimed MI6 had used Haroon Rashid Aswat as a double agent, leading to suspicions the intelligence services are compromised by deals made with senior Islamist figures. Though he is believed to be in Broadmoor high security prison awaiting extradition to the US, the UK has not charged Aswat in connection with the July 7 bombings.
“By ignoring these issues, the government is leaving us in a state of insecurity,” Ahmed adds. “By not resolving the questions, the government fuels suspicions that something murky is going on, and can lead to more outlandish ideas.”
It should be no surprise that conspiracy theorists have piled fancies upon these anomalies to come up with all kinds of sinister plots by MI5, Mossad and the New World Order. The giddiest of the amateur films swirling around the internet, ‘7/7 The Ripple Effect’, alleges that the four bombers were tricked into thinking they were taking part in a mock-attack exercise.
Made by someone calling himself Muad Dib, it points towards Nick Kollerstrom’s discovery that the 7.40am train from Luton to London (the one used by the bombers, according to the government account) was cancelled, and the published CCTV picture of the four men looked doctored. In another odd twist, a controlled explosion company van was pictured next to the blown-up bus in Tavistock Square.
Ideas of a carefully designed cover-up are easy enough to dispel. Subsequent evidence indicated the bombers boarded the earlier 7.25am train, and more CCTV footage finally released earlier this year showed clearly that the suicide bombers did gather at King’s Cross station that morning. It turns out the suspicious van belonged to company specialising in small-scale, non-explosive construction demolition.
Much of The Ripple Effect’s warped logic depends on a tube attack simulation prepared on the morning of July 7 by Peter Power, head of a London-based crisis management firm. Power appeared widely on news networks that day, explaining both the coincidence, but also why the central London transport network was an obvious, and widely-acknowledged target.
The former Scotland Yard officer describes the spread of the film’s theory that the bombers were conned into taking part in a live simulation – though Power’s company only organises lecture presentations - as “quite menacing and worrying”. He has passed on anonymous hate mail threatening him with “no mercy” to the Metropolitan Police.
As for the conspiracy creator Muad Dib - he has now been identified as John Hill, a white-bearded Sheffield man living in County Meath in Ireland. He faces extradition to the UK on a charge of perverting the course of justice for sending his DVDs to the judge and jury of a trial linked to the attacks.
“The reason I’m against the conspiracy theories is that you can’t tackle home-grown terrorism if you’re not willing to admit that it exists,” explains North. “To deal with it, you have to accept it’s real. It’s like people refusing to accept measles exists, refusing to get vaccinated, and then going around spreading it.”
As a regular blogger, North has also been sent nasty messages by some of the wilder theorists, but is more worried that seeds of unnecessary suspicion are been sown in communities where DVD copies are passed around. One opinion poll for Channel 4 found around a quarter of British Muslims thought the government or MI5 were involved in the bombings.
“The eccentricities of Mr Kollerstrom and Muad Dib are really not that important,” she explains. “But if it’s having an effect on people who might then not report things, because they simply don’t accept that there’s such a thing as Islamist home-grown terrorism, then that’s a catastrophically crippling blow for anyone trying to prevent terrorism.”
Tony Gosling, a 7/7 ‘truther’ who runs a website examining the Bilderberg group, believes conspiracy researchers don’t always offer such neat and tidy versions of events. “The problem with The Ripple Effect documentary is that it presents the idea of the bombers as patsies as fact,” he says. “It is by far the most bizarre (of the online conspiracy films), it has been discredited in some important places, and mixes fact and speculation.
“There are all sorts of possibilities, and I don’t pretend to know the answers. What I’m interested in, and what a public inquiry would do, is sift through the evidence. We’re not stirring up discontent. We’re saying there are all these questions and develop your own understanding of what happened.”
Ours is a skeptical age, and truth appears an increasingly relative quality. Without a more thorough attempt by the government to explain one of the most important events in recent British history, too many are left to invent their own nightmares.
By Adam Forrest
Reprinted from The Big Issue in Scotland
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