BCfm’s weekly Politics Show presented by Tony Gosling
At five – discussing the big stories in Bristol, Britain and around the world
After six – straight talking and investigative reports with Martin Summers
Listen live http://www.bcfmradio.com/player
Apologies – there have been faults on BCfm website ‘listen again’ facility since before Christmas 2014. Any probs mp3s should be on alternative links below by about 8:30 pm on tx date
First hour: News review: with Labour Councillor for St George West Ron Stone: Sikhs – Home Office wants to deport St George Sikh community leader with decade of experience in Bristol, what is Sikhism? Chinese stock market falls by about a third! £1.5tn in the last three weeks – Chinese own US national debt, ECB and QE – Bundesbank legally opposing ECB over QE Printing Money policy, Baltic Dry Index was falling, now climbing; Greece defaulting on debt – stock market and ‘short selling’ (sell stock to drive price down then buy it up); Greek court says Sunday’s referendum will be legal – restructuring of debt, banks are bust, derivatives, Greek banks will run out of Euros on Monday, defaulting of countries, likelihood of wider crash, Syriza and politics in Greece at moment, beginning of the end of austerity? Important legal terminology: Is Greece in arrears or has the country defaulted? Greece leading the fight against the Eurocrats and austerity for all of Europe. Four-fold increase in homeless families in Bristol since Government’s welfare reforms and doubling in last year – bedroom tax, cost of housing, using pension funds to build social housing; PMQs fairer funding for schools – housing associations; Horfield Prison: disturbances and protests by prisoners – privatised, cuts; PMQs Jack Lopresti – we should spend more on defence – NATO, aircraft carrier; PMQs closure of independent deep mined coal Hatfield Colliery – importing coal, compensation; Lawyers to protest next week against cuts to legal aid – for first time ever, what is price of justice?
download pages
BCfm audio file
Radio4all audio file
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpDS4AxjHg8]
Second hour: Investigative reports: Last Friday’s Tunisia massacre of British tourists. Plus lies and betrayal of victims families: Ten years after 7/7 London attacks: Tunisia – terrorist shooting of tourists: other shooters and grenade throwers; Craig Murray’s niece Kirsty shot; Gladio and false flag operations; Ghouta chemical attack in Syria – false flag; ISIL; Yemen 100 times more dead than Tunisia; Roland Dumas and west fermenting armed uprising in Syria. Clips from Cameron’s speech about terrorism – Tunisia and defeating terrorist threat: Rita Katz and ISIL videos; British families gone to Syria and harassment from police; western intelligence services behind ISIL; air strikes in Syria; radical narratives; Ofcom pre-vetting programmes prior to broadcast – NUT say teachers will not be ‘Thought Police’. Anniversary of London 7/7 terrorist bombings: clip of London Underground control room staff discussing possible explosion on London underground; clip Mark Honigsbaum – Guardian journalist on the scene of 7/7 Edgware Road – bombs under train; powerful military grade explosives; Peter Power terror drill – clip of him discussing spooky coincidence of three stations being the same; terror drills and false flags; clip of civil servant who’s worked for MoD and NHS Paul Oweson discussing chemical, biological exercises he saw on the day; no CCTV pictures of any alleged bombers on or getting on bombed tubes or buses on 7/7; clip of Daniel Obachike who says was on number 30 bus that was bombed; clip from ‘Ludicrous Diversion’ – independent inquiry needed; clip of families at press conference saying their questions haven’t been answered; clip of Graham Foulkes lost his 22 year old son David in the 7/7 attacks – terrorists not clean skins.
Fran Anderson special 7/7 report on bookshop where two alleged bombers were trained: Mohamed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, two alleged bombers, were trustees of Iqra Learning Centre and bookshop in Bude Road, Beeston, Leeds. It was run day-to-day by Martin McDaid, an (ex?) Special Boat Service (SBS) RN Special Forces ‘Muslim convert’. He also ran a terrorist training camp in the Lake District which Khan is known to have attended; BBC Newsnight reported that youth worker at Iqra, Mark Hargreaves, says McDaid had a hidden agenda in grooming young Muslim men in terrorist skills and the bookshop received six-figure sums in government and EU grants.
13 holes in police, MI5, government and media account of 7/7 London bombings
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfC2DfCTjdo]
1. Train the alleged bombers are supposed to have caught from Luton was cancelled that day
2. Benjamin Netanyahu who was in London that day and Israeli embassy had a warning before the ‘surprise attack’ bombings according to AP journalist Amy Tiebel and Israeli embassy spokesperson Dan Sheham
3. After speaking to scores of survivors that day Guardian’s Mark Honigsbaum describes bombs were ‘under the carriage of a train’
4. French anti-terrorism expert Christophe Chaboud said tube train bombs were so powerful they were almost certainly C4 military explosives not home made TATP
5. Peter Power ‘terror drills’ at same three tube stations on same day, which he himself describes a ‘spooky coincidence’? Only about one in eight billion chance Peter Power is telling the truth.
6. Peter power’s drills were commissioned by Reed Elsevier, event organisers of Britain’s biggest annual arms fair, Exel in docklands.
7. Chemical and Biological attack police drills going on before the attacks that morning.
8. Despite hundreds of CCTV cameras, no CCTV images of any of four alleged bombers getting on to or on any of four tube trains or bus
9. Daniel Obachike says he was on the no. 30 bus believes he identified the bomber who was a white male, and that alleged bomber Hasib Hussain was not on his bus.
10. No trial because bombers are dead but Lady justice Hallett’s 2010 inquest into the 7/7 attacks was designed for a single death and held without a jury.
11. Victims’ families stonewalled: questions were not answered by the inquests, families were not allowed to have legal representation at the inquests.
12. Potential mastermind, Islamist organiser Al-Muhajiroun’s Haroon Aswat who spoke to the bombers in the days running up to the attacks is believed to have been working for MI6 and was never interviewed about 7/7, instead shipped out of UK legal jurisdiction.
13. Alleged bombers Mohamed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer were given terrorism training via Iqra bookshop in Beeston, Leeds by former Royal Navy Special Boat Service (SBS) soldier Martin McDaid
download pages
BCfm audio file
Radio4All audio file
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HqeN0Yp8Yg]
7/7 led to wars abroad and loss of freedoms at home … but do we know what really happened that day?
For the London media 7/7 is ‘done and dusted’, but for Tony Gosling, who helped cover the IRA London bombing campaign for the BBC, nothing could be further from the truth
Monday 6th July 2015 BRISTOL – At lunchtime of 7th July 2005 the Guardian’s Mark Honigsbaum was in the London Hilton Hotel opposite Edgware Road underground station uploading an audio report to the Guardian website. Mark had been talking to dazed and injured passengers as they emerged from the smoke and chaos below and listening back to the Guardian’s first report of the day is unsettling.
Despite the official story of Mohammad Sidique Khan blowing himself up in the carriage, Honigsbaum says ‘We believe there was an explosion this morning under the carriage of a train’. ‘The tiles, the covers on the floor suddenly flew up, raised up,’ he went on, derailing the Metropolitan Line carriages into the path of an oncoming train.
A former officer in Israel’s SAS, the Sayeret Matkal, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was due to be arriving at a Great Eastern Hotel conference just as Shehzad Tanweer’s Liverpool Street tube bomb was going off below the hotel. Netanyahu was reported that morning by Amy Teibel on Associated Press‘ Jerusalem Desk to have ‘changed plans due to a warning’ from Scotland Yard, and thankfully Bibi had not left his hotel.
The Israeli embassy have since denied having any warning but Israeli government Press Officer Dan Sheham told journalists, including the Scottish Sunday Herald’s foreign affairs editor David Pratt, embassy security was ‘beefed up’ around 7am that day. The four simultaneous bombs, three on tube trains and one on a bus were supposed to have been a surprise attack.
An Israeli firm also had access to London’s tube tunnels, winning a CCTV contract when parts of the Underground were privatised a few months before the attacks. Verint Systems looked like a good bet but someone didn’t do due diligence because the fraudster chairman Kobi Alexander, of Verint’s parent company, Comverse Technologies, was on the run. He was evading the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) somewhere in Africa after disappearing with $13m of company money.
Leeds based bombers Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer were both trustees of the Iqra bookshop in Bude Street, Beeston. The shop was managed day-to-day by former Royal Navy SBS special forces soldier Martin McDaid who ran a terror training camp in the Lake District in his spare time. Speaking on the BBC’s Newsnight programme Iqra youth worker Mark Hargreaves, said McDaid had a hidden agenda in grooming young Muslim men to be terrorists.
But Hargreaves was not the only person at Iqra who had suspicions about McDaid’s terror training: years before the bombings Leeds anti-war campaigner and computer expert Martin Gilbertson says he handed a ‘dossier of evidence’ to West Yorkshire police detailing his suspicions about Khan and Tanweer and giving police and MI5 two years notice the pair might be dangerous. Pressed in 2006 West Yorkshire police force don’t just say they lost the documents. They deny ever having received them.
These four anomalies are just a handful from a litany of fragmented evidence which provides an alternative narrative to the Blair government tale of four ‘lone nutters’ being behind 7/7, hell bent on vengeance for Afghanistan and Iraq. They point to British government, MI5 and special forces complicity in the attacks as well as throwing considerable doubt on whether the four alleged bombers went to London that day intending to die or whether they were lured to London on some other pretext.
Irish journalist Hugh O’Shaughnessy quotes convicted terrorist who worked for the Italian State Vincenzo Vinciguerra: ‘The political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished: because the State cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.’ After a 1972 bomb killed three Italian police officers, police commanders ‘foiled a thorough investigation of the Peteano affair for years,’ he claims. ‘It was more convenient to cover it up than to turn on those who killed their comrades.’
The ‘False Flag’ attack is where corrupt powers murder their own people and blame an enemy to create a ‘causus beli’ for intervention abroad or destroying civil liberties at home. Evidence that the 7/7 London Bombings were a false flag attack, to get the nation to back foreign invasions in the Middle East has been studiously ignored by government, media and judiciary alike.
The term ‘False Flag’ comes from naval warfare where a rival flag is raised on a warship causing the enemy to drop their guard and allowing the unscrupulous captain to creep close in for a surprise attack. Scholars and military historians believe Hitler’s own men set the 1933 Reichstag fire which was blamed on Dutch Communist Marinus van der Lubbe and the Goebbels media furore it created gave Hitler the excuse he needed to introduce dictatorial powers.
Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland, which triggered World War Two, was built on a lie too. In August 1939’s ‘Gleiwitz incident’ the SS murdered Poles then use their bodies to stage a fake Polish attack on a German radio station. The lie was spread through the same Nazi propaganda machine as a pretext to invade Poland.
Anomalies ignored by press and courts alike
Former Dorset policeman turned ‘Disaster Management Consultant’, Peter Power, told the world’s media his ‘terror drill’ on the morning of 7/7 was at the same three tube stations, out of a total of 275 where the actual bombs exploded. On Canadian TV he described this as a ‘spooky coincidence’ which indeed it was at only around an eight billion to one chance (275 (no. of tube stations in London) x 3 x 365) of his ‘drill’ involving the same stations on the same day as the actual attacks.
Daniel Obachicke, whose front page story for black newspaper ‘The Voice’ quickly disappeared off the internet, says he was on the Number 30 bus which exploded in Tavistock Square and wrote a book, ‘The 4th Bomb’, about his experience that day. Daniel says he doesn’t believe alleged bomber Hasib Hussain was on the no. 30 bus, instead attributing the bombing to a white Caucasian man in his mid twenties with a grey two-tone rucksack, acting suspiciously who got off the bus just before it exploded.
Despite London’s public transport being at the time one of the most ‘camera’d up’ networks in the world, no CCTV footage has ever been revealed which showing any of the four bombers either in, or getting onto, the tube trains and bus where they are supposed to have blown themselves up. This glaring surveillance omission is even more shocking when it comes to the days and weeks before the 7th July 2005. Three of the four bombers had been under close surveillance by Britain’s Security Service MI5 yet as the names emerged MI5 told the world, and victim’s families, that all four were entirely unknown to them, or ‘clean skins’.
Were bodies of the victims dealt with, as one might expect, by the office of the London Coroner? No. A makeshift mortuary, or morgue, was set up under military security in the grounds of Liverpool Street’s ‘Honourable Company of Artillery’. Victims’ families were kept waiting for almost a week, some desperately posting ‘lost’ pictures of their loved ones on lampposts, before being eventually informed family members were dead and asked to identify bodies.
52 people died on 7/7, not counting the alleged bombers. Yet, rather than conduct a public enquiry where all deaths could be considered, an inquest, which is designed for investigating a single person’s death was held five years late in 2010, overseen by coroner Lady Justice Heather Hallett who decided, incredibly, not to allow victims’ families to ask any questions and to conduct it without a jury.
Haroon Rashid Aswat
In the years running up to the 7/7 attacks leaders at Finsbury Park Mosque asked Scotland Yard and the Security Service MI5 to do something about the Al-Muhajiroun sect, translated as ‘The Emigrants’, who were ‘infiltrating’ their Mosque. The faction, which first emerged during the Balkans crisis in the late 1990s, was led by hook-handed Abu Hamza who was often seen accompanied by his loyal assistant. Haroon Rashid Aswat. Reported by Fox News as having made phone calls to all of the four alleged bombers in the week of the attacks many have asked, was Aswat arranging for the four to come from Leeds and Aylesbury to London?
On the morning before the bombings Aswat boarded a plane at Heathrow for Pakistan where he was promptly imprisoned and then mysteriously ‘let go’ presumably after a call from British intelligence. Some time later he caught another flight to Zambia where he was again arrested, served a short term in the cells as a terror suspect then was released a second time, then finally handed over to the British police. Some law enforcement agencies, it seems, wanted him held and questioned, others, more powerful, didn’t.
American writer John Loftus, who US president Jimmy Carter made an FBI Special Prosecutor in the 1970s to hunt down Nazi war criminals hiding in the United States, said on Fox News he believed Haroon Aswat to be a ‘double agent’ secretly working for MI6 inside the extremist Al-Muhajiroun sect.
But Aswat would face no questioning about those calls to the alleged 7/7 bombers in the weeks running up to the attack. Instead he was shipped from London’s highest security Belmarsh prison to Broadmoor as a ‘mental patient’ with ‘delusions’. A protracted legal process began and, despite being certified clinically insane, he was finally extradited to the United States in October 2014.
He now faces charges dating back to 2000 for conspiring with his old friend Abu Hamza, who has already been sentenced to life in prison, for ‘plotting to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon’. Even if a private prosecution were brought in Britain by victims families to have Aswat questioned about the killing of their loved ones it would get nowhere. The potential mastermind of the attacks is now out of Britain’s legal jurisdiction.
Justice?
So like the running sores of Hillsborough, Dr David Kelly and Jimmy Savile, is 7/7 just another British Establishment cover-up? It took 25 years and three enquiries before there has been some closure for families of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, where 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death through South Yorkshire police negligence,
We know, through the cases of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six too, who were wrongly jailed for 20 and 16 years respectively, the criminal justice system has mechanisms to convict scapegoats when it falls down on the job. But what if the suspects are dead and never subjected to a trial or appeal, except trial by television? The real smoking gun for 7/7 is the lack of due judicial process for the injured and those that lost their loved ones.
What victims’ families have been demanding is an Independent Enquiry, but as one of the studious online-only documentaries on 7/7, ‘Ludicrous Diversion’, points out, the 2005 Enquiries Act hands control of Public Enquiries from judges, over to government ministers. It’s like asking turkeys to come home for Christmas. The government would grant a truly independent review only if they were somehow forced to.
Graham Foulkes lost his 22 year old son David in the attacks. Subsequently his grief was compounded by having his mobile phone voicemail messages hacked into by Rupert Murdoch‘s News of The World. In 2009 Graham told the BBC “David was my son, he was 22. We’ve had four years now of no answers to very important questions. The government have stonewalled everything. It’s been very, very difficult and continues to be very, very difficult.”
“We were told at the time by the government that the four bombers were ‘clean skins’, they were completely unknown to the intelligence services, that attack had come ‘out of the blue’ and that therefore there was no way to stop it. But the evidence that’s been presented in this trial proves that to be completely untrue. “
“MI5 had a huge file on Mohammad Sidique Khan” he continued, “and I can go into that chapter and verse about how he’d been to Pakistan repeatedly, how he’d been to Cumbria, how he’d been to North Wales. MI5 had this huge file.” “Their job is to collect the information, to collate it, to analyse it and to act. That didn’t happen and my son died.”
“Systems and processes which were in place then and failed to prevent the bombers are the same systems and processes that are in place now. And the government have chosen to maintain that status quo. I think that’s really worrying.” Finally raising the question of whether official criminals have been perverting the course of justice. “Its also important that we find out why the government told such untruths.”
So how to cut through the establishment cover-up? The enormity of the Hillsborough cover-up only began to be acknowledged 25 years after the event. Even now police commander David Duckenfield who many say made the fatal mistakes then entered into a conspiracy to Pervert The Course of Justice has not been tried for his crimes.
Even the finest 7/7 analysts have been forced to compromise: Before Nafeez Ahmed’s seminal 2006 book on the attacks ‘The London Bombings. An Independent Inquiry’ was published, editors at Duckworth insisted that the word ‘alleged’ be removed wherever Nafeez had written ‘alleged bombers’. Apparently, innocent or guilty, there was no need to protect the dead men’s reputation. The polar opposite to the sort of reputational protection afforded to wealthy war criminals and paedophiles.
In a press conference at the opening of legal proceedings into the bombings, victims and family members expressed disappointment that they had been tricked, denied any legal representation at the inquests and their questions would not be answered. “Again we’ve been shunted aside by officialdom… we’ve been led to believe that this would be an opportunity for us to have a voice, and now we don’t.” said one of the victim’s group which included Rosalind Morley who lost her husband Colin, Ernest Adams lost his son James, Jackie Putnam, Liz Kenworthy, Janine Mitchell and Tim Coulson.
Roots of the 7/7 cover up in the early 1990s
In 1990 and 1991 I had the privilege to work in the Marylebone High Street newsroom of BBC Greater London Radio 94.9 covering the IRA’s murder of Ian Gow MP and their bomb at the London Stock exchange. The early 1990s was a time of enormous pressure on what was a delicate eco-system of investigative broadcast journalism.
Journalists who worked on Thames TV’s ‘Death on the Rock’ could not understand why the Thatcher government of the day had tried to get it banned because their actions led to the expose of the Tories’ ‘Shoot To Kill’ policy getting an even bigger audience. But when Thames TV lost its franchise to Carlton Television, which counted among its employees a young David Cameron, some saw that a longer game was underway to castrate the fourth estate.
The judiciary too was under assault with what journalist Ian Fraser and former Scotland Yard detective Rowan Bosworth-Davis have pointed out as a line being drawn in the sand for ‘blue blood’ city fraudsters beyond which the police could not step. There was an informal declaration of impunity for top City of London fraudsters after the orchestrated collapse of the 1992 Blue Arrow trial.
Government is slipping out of our hands.
Forces way more powerful that the British people are now determining the direction of government policy and those forces want us to be part of an expansionist corporate NATO bloc gathering new resources to sell and service spiralling debt. The London media gives us our boogie-men, then discusses individually the rights and wrongs of each intervention but never the knotty question of whether ‘regime change’ in country after sovereign country is really justified.
Our politicians spend most of their time arguing over the latest public sector infrastructure to be auctioned off, at a loss of billions to the taxpayer, to the real rulers of the roost, the hedge funds and markets. Western ‘democratic’ Governments have been reduced to the role of ‘official receivers’. Families and victims of the 7/7 London bombings are just one more group that have been sold short.
But the real masterminds and cover-up criminals of 7/7 are on a hiding to nothing. There is a limit to what propaganda can achieve and the London Bombings are a running sore with plenty of fingerprints for those that care to look. Is it such a gigantic leap of the imagination to suggest that the Anglo-American & Israeli establishment who have openly profited from the lies told and chaos wrought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, might do the same in London?
Why have none of the London media brought up the troubling precedents of the scores of terror attacks across Europe including the 1980 Bologna Railway Station bombing, 1985 Brabant supermarket massacres and 1980 Oktoberfest bombing in Germany which are now attributed, and the perpetrators know few will have the stomach to look, to NATO’s Operation Gladio for which British MI6 and American CIA were the lead agencies? After all the economic colonialism operated through IMF ‘structural adjustment’ does look remarkably like the austerity now meted out to the West’s domestic populations.
Stories of suicide bombers, with all the connotations of fanaticism, are rarely questioned. Genuine suicide bombings are against hard targets such as military bases. Why die when you can leave a bomb in a bag? It was a 2004 ‘suicide bombing’ that turned out to be no such thing that sparked the Shia insurgency in Iraq. Baghdad’s pro Al Sadr newspaper ‘al Hawza’ was forcibly closed down on 28th March 2004 by US governor Paul Bremer for printing a front page story quoting several eyewitnesses to a suicide bombing at a bus stop saying it was in fact a missile fired from a helicopter. Accompanied by pictures of tangled human body parts the how the explosion took place is habitually presented from anonymous official sources with no evidence to back it up.
Whether or not the four alleged London bombers were the driving force behind the 52 innocent deaths that day the one-sided presentation by press and to courts suggests they weren’t. The evidence for their defence, that someone else was responsible for the deaths and explosions, has trickled out piecemeal and attempts, like mine, to draw it together are dwarfed by the massive resources poured into consolidating the official story by Western governments and the London media.
My own experience as a journalist in the city where I grew up is today’s London media owners and editors treat certain stories such as the 7/7 London Bombings with a puritanical ferocity. The names of dissenting writers go into a ‘box marked trouble’ to be dealt with later. Journalists self-censor in the knowledge that pushing certain points will end their career. You can write about any old nonsense…. so long as you don’t any of raise the handful of questions that really matter.
Technology has made it too easy to control the news
The end result of the 1990s ‘purge’ is a more sophisticated version of the Josef Goebbels school of journalism where theatre becomes news. Ridiculous anomalies, such as BBC presenter Jane Standley’s 9/11 announcement on BBC World of the collapse of World Trade Centre Building 7, twenty minutes before it actually happened and with WTC7 still clearly standing behind her, are labelled ‘conspiracy theory’ and simply ignored.
On July 8th the article Mark Honingsbaum had written on the afternoon of the bombings appeared in The Guardian newspaper where he describes the bombs as exploding in the carriages making no reference to floor tiles being ‘raised up’. When I noticed this a few months afterwards I called him up to ask about the anomaly. After a pause he said, ‘Well Tony, all I can say is not everything I submit as copy ends up in the next day’s newspaper’.
Or as a certain former Indian propaganda broadcaster for the BBC, George Orwell wrote, in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ”He who controls the past, controls the present, he who controls the present, controls the future. On the big stories London’s mainstream media has become little more than a mouthpiece for unelected and unaccountable intelligence services working with their Goliath-like co-conspirators, the overmighty banks and multinational corporations of the Transatlantic elite.
Only by fighting for a Hillsborough style, victim-led enquiry into the 7/7 London Bombings can England get and give true closure to the injured survivors and the families of the 52 murdered victims. To whom, one day, we may even be adding the four alleged bombers.
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2015/08/02/18775666.php
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=170296#170296
http://rinf.com/alt-news/latest-news/77-led-to-wars-abroad-and-loss-of-freedoms-at-home-but-do-we-know-what-really-happened-that-day/
