How the Call for "No Revenge" Is Made Sleight of Hand for "Defence of Our Way of Life"

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How the Call for "No Revenge" Is Made Sleight of Hand for "Defence of Our Way of Life"

London Underground Bombing "Exercises" Took Place at Same Time as Real Attack

Sword Play: Attacking Civilians to Justify "Greater Security"

Tony Blair, in his condemnation of "Islamic extremists", has right from day one of the London bombings cast the scenario of the outrages as one of the so-called "clash of civilisations", an Anglo-American scenario which moves on from "the end of history" to portray the struggles going on in the world as a clash between the religions of Christianity and Islam.

Tony Blair had been quick to claim that those responsible for the July 7 bombings acted "in the name of Islam". "We know that these people act in the name of Islam," he said in his televised address. "I think we all know what they are trying to do, they are trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cow us, to frighten us out of doing the things we want to do, of trying to stop us going about our business as normal as we are entitled to do and they should not and must not succeed."

Blair later vowed to bring to justice those responsible for the attacks. "There will of course now be the most intense police and security service action to make sure we bring those responsible to justice," he said. "When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated, when they seek to change our country, our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed."

The significance of this is that with the saturation reporting of the alleged identity of those who it is said carried out the atrocities, the government and media are pushing a scenario down our throats as though it were hard undisputed fact. Since the four alleged suicide bombers are dead, they cannot put forward any defence. They conveniently also cannot be brought to trial. Where is the caution of sifting through evidence and making a case, which is then examined before a jury? Brian Paddick, deputy assistant commissioner of London police, had originally said, "We are keeping an open mind as to who the perpetrators might be. We have received no claim in terms of who was responsible and so at this time we wouldn't speculate." Now we have abruptly gone from it being said the forensic evidence was being painstakingly gathered and patience is required to an open and shut scenario that four young Muslims from West Yorkshire were the perpetrators.

Thus Tony Blair’s premature accusations without evidence against Muslims are being brought to pass. The Queen’s breach of protocol with her New Labour speech that no one was going to sway us from following "our way of life" is being brought to pass. The scenario is being set in stone that these were "extremist" Islamic fanatics who are inspired by hatred of "our way of life" and are committing outrages to sway the British people. This is the "clash of civilisations" scenario.

The more the authorities harp on that the people should not carry out "revenge" attacks, the more they are promoting this scenario that Muslims and national minorities from South Asia are the communities against whom "revenge" is due. Of course, this is also done under the guise of separating "extremists" from the majority of those practising Islam, who, the implication is, in fact practise the Christian virtues of "tolerance" and "live and let live".

Thus on the one hand the call for "no revenge" is by sleight of hand transformed into the call for "defence of our way of life", which is part of the attack which has been carried out for some time on immigrants and particularly South Asians to "integrate" into a "British way of life" in order to divert the people from uniting to tackle the problems in society and fighting for the rights of everyone. On the other, by its very insistence, and in conjunction with the government’s focus right from the outset on "Islamic extremists", it is itself an incitement, a green light, for the very attacks it purports to be opposing. The whole outrage is being manipulated to set the people against each other, to inculcate suspicion, and to divert the mass of the people from their growing opposition to the programme of the state for fascism and war, for oppression, exploitation and a world subject to the domination of the monopolies. It is being manipulated to psychologically bludgeon the people from becoming aware of the context in which the atrocities took place.

The scenario which the government and monopoly-controlled media are promoting to the exclusion of all others cannot be accepted. The hands of the state are not clean, but as they are stained in the blood of the Iraqi people at present, so too, history shows, are they also stained with the blood of innocent civilians domestically. The state chooses its targets and mercilessly pursues them. The working class and people must heighten their vigilance and strengthen their unity against the reactionary outrages the imperialists are committing at home and abroad.

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones/Prison Planet | Updated July 11 2005

A consultancy agency with government and police connections was running an exercise for an unnamed company that revolved around the London Underground being bombed at the exact same times and locations as happened in real life on the morning of July 7th.

On a BBC Radio 5 interview that aired on the evening of the 7th, the host interviewed Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, which bills itself as a "crisis management" advice company, better known to you and I as a PR firm.

Peter Power was a former Scotland Yard official, working at one time with the Anti-Terrorist Branch.

Power told the host that at the exact same time that the London bombings were taking place, his company was running a 1,000 person strong exercise which drilled the London Underground being bombed at the exact same locations, at the exact same times, as happened in real life.

The transcript is as follows.

POWER: 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.

HOST: 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?

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 met 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 fact that the exercise mirrored the exact locations and times of the bombings is light years beyond a coincidence. Power said the drill focused around "simultaneous bombings". At first the bombings were thought to have been spread over an hour, but the BBC reports just today that the bombings were in fact simultaneous.

Mr Power and Visor Consultants need not have been "in on the bombing" or anything of that nature for this to be of importance. The British government or one of their private company offshoots could have hired Visor to run the exercise for a number of purposes.

We are not suggesting that Mr Power had any knowledge of the real purpose of the exercise, and the open shock he exclaims in relating the story underlines this.

The exercise fulfils several different goals. It acts as a cover for the small compartmentalised government terrorists to carry out their operation without the larger security services becoming aware of what they're doing, and, more importantly, if they get caught during the attack or after with any incriminating evidence they can just claim that they were just taking part in the exercise.

This is precisely what happened on the morning of 9/11/2001. The CIA was conducting drills of flying hijacked planes into the WTC and Pentagon at 8:30 in the morning.

It is clear that at least five if not six training exercises were in operation in the days leading up to and on the morning of 9/11. This meant that NORAD radar screens showed as many as 22 hijacked airliners at the same time. NORAD had been briefed that this was part of the exercise drill and therefore normal reactive procedure was forestalled and delayed.

The large numbers of "blips" on NORAD screens that displayed both real and "drill" hijacked planes explain why confused press reports emerged hours after the attack stating that up to eight planes had been hijacked.

The Anglo-American establishment that controls the military-industrial complex of the West has been caught over a hundred times carrying out bombings and other terrorist attacks around the world to further their corporate aims and to blame their enemies.

The US government has been caught planning to carry out attacks and carrying out attacks. The British government has been caught red-handed as well. Members of Vladimir Putin's FSB were caught planting bombs in a Russian apartment building in 1999 by the Moscow police.

This is not speculation. Kermit Roosevelt admitted on NPR radio that in 1953 the CIA and British intelligence carried out a wave of bombings and shootings in Iran. He then went on to brag about how they subsequently blamed the bombings on Iran's President, Mossadegh. Do you understand, these people brag about what they do 40 years later?

The London bombings have the same signature as the Madrid bombings of 3/11. Both of these bombings are almost indistinguishable from the Bologna bombing in 1980 that killed over 80 people.

The bombing in Bologna was part of a CIA operation code named Gladio, where the US government would pay right-wing terrorists to carry out bombings to be blamed on leftists in Europe. All of this was blown wide open when two of the Bologna bombers were convicted in an Italian court, forcing them to spill their guts admitting that they were neo-fascists contracted by the CIA. Operation Gladio documents have since been declassified.

The London terror alert level was lowered before the bombings took place. This gave the perpetrators extra cover to plan and execute the attack without having to evade the most stringent security.

In any crime you look at history and motive, The British government has been caught in multiple examples of carrying out bombings in London which were then blamed on the IRA. They even had one of their own MI5 agents within the Omagh bomb squad.

The wider agenda will become clearer when Blair firmly points the finger at the selected patsies designated to take the fall. But for the moment he's happy to grandstand as the courageous leader who immediately returned to London to take control of the chaos.

BBC polls that were showing 80 per cent plus opposed the ID card will now likely flip back in the opposite direction. Support for the European Union and increased globalisation through the G8 will rise. Who stands to gain from all this? Who has the motive?

From Putin blowing up his own apartment buildings to Israel being behind Hamas, the evidence is consistently clear that large scale terrorism is always state sponsored.

The Madrid train bombing is another example. The bombers were found to be police informants with close links to the Spanish security services. They had access to the most secure areas of the Madrid train system. The Spanish government initially tried to blame the Basque group ETA for the blast in the hope that the people would rally behind the government and get them re-elected. After ETA denied involvement and the people started saying the government was involved, the Spanish government had to blame Al-Qaeda and kill some patsies by claiming they blew themselves up during a raid.

The London Underground exercises were used as the fallback cover to carry out the attack. This is the biggest smoking gun yet pointing directly to the most secretive levels of the British establishment itself being behind the attack.

More on this story as and when it develops.

By Chris Floyd | Prison Plant/February 29 2005

"You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force ... the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security."

This was the essence of Operation Gladio, a decades-long covert campaign of terrorism and deceit directed by the intelligence services of the West – against their own populations. Hundreds of innocent people were killed or maimed in terrorist attacks – on train stations, supermarkets, cafes and offices – which were then blamed on "leftist subversives" or other political opponents. The purpose, as stated above in sworn testimony by Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra, was to demonize designated enemies and frighten the public into supporting ever-increasing powers for government leaders – and their elitist cronies.

First revealed by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in 1991, Gladio (from the Latin for "sword") is still protected to this day by its founding patrons, the CIA and MI6. Yet parliamentary investigations in Italy, Switzerland and Belgium have shaken out a few fragments of the truth over the years. These have been gathered in a new book, "NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe" by Daniele Ganser, as Lila Rajiva reports on CommonDreams.org.

Originally set up as a network of clandestine cells to be activated behind the lines in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, Gladio quickly expanded into a tool for political repression and manipulation, directed by NATO and Washington. Using right-wing militias, underworld figures, government provocateurs and secret military units, Gladio not only carried out widespread terrorism, assassinations and electoral subversion in democratic states such as Italy, France and West Germany, but also bolstered fascist tyrannies in Spain and Portugal, abetted the military coup in Greece and aided Turkey's repression of the Kurds.

Among the "smoking guns" unearthed by Ganser is a Pentagon document, Field Manual FM 30-31B, which details the methodology for launching terrorist attacks in nations that "do not react with sufficient effectiveness" against "communist subversion". Ironically, the manual states that the most dangerous moment comes when leftist groups "renounce the use of force" and embrace the democratic process. It is then that "US army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger". Naturally, these peace-throttling "special operations must remain strictly secret", the document warns.

Indeed, it would not do for the families of the 85 people ripped apart by the Aug. 2, 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station to know that their loved ones had been murdered by "men inside Italian state institutions and ... men linked to the structures of United States intelligence," as the Italian Senate concluded after its investigation in 2000.

The Bologna atrocity is an example of what Gladio's masters called "the strategy of tension" – fomenting fear to keep populations in thrall to "strong leaders" who will protect the nation from the ever-present terrorist threat. And as Rajiva notes, this strategy wasn't limited to Western Europe. It was applied, with gruesome effectiveness, in Central America by the Reagan and Bush administrations. During the 1980s, right-wing death squads, guerrilla armies and state security forces – armed, trained and supplied by the United States – murdered tens of thousands of people throughout the region, often acting with particular savagery at those times when peaceful solutions to the conflicts seemed about to take hold.

Last month, it was widely reported that the Pentagon is considering a similar programme in Iraq. What was not reported, however – except in the Iraqi press – is that at least one pro-occupation death squad is already in operation. Just days after the Pentagon plans were revealed, a new militant group, "Saraya Iraqna", began offering big wads of American cash for insurgent scalps – up to $50,000, the Iraqi paper Al Ittihad reports. "Our activity will not be selective," the group promised. In other words, anyone they consider an enemy of the state will be fair game.

Strangely enough, just as it appears that the Pentagon is establishing Gladio-style operations in Iraq, there has been a sudden rash of terrorist attacks on outrageously provocative civilian targets, such as hospitals and schools, the Guardian reports. Coming just after national elections in which the majority faction supported slates calling for a speedy end to the American occupation, the shift toward high-profile civilian slaughter has underscored the "urgent need" for US forces to remain on the scene indefinitely, to provide security against the ever-present terrorist threat. Meanwhile, the Bushists continue constructing their long-sought permanent bases in Iraq: citadels to protect the oil that incoming Iraqi officials are promising to sell off to American corporations – and launching pads for new forays in geopolitical domination.

Perhaps it's just a coincidence. But the US elite's history of directing and fomenting terrorist attacks against friendly populations is so extensive – indeed, so ingrained and accepted – that it calls into question the origin of every terrorist act that roils the world. With each fresh atrocity, we're forced to ask: Was it the work of "genuine" terrorists or a "black op" by intelligence agencies – or both?

While not infallible, the ancient Latin question is still the best guide to penetrating the bloody murk of modern terrorism: Cui bono? Who benefits? Whose powers and policies are enhanced by the attack? For it is indisputable that the "strategy of tension" means power and profit for those who claim to possess the key to "security". And from the halls of the Kremlin to the banks of the Potomac, this cynical strategy is the ruling ideology of our times.