I received an email from Peter Power late yesterday evening. I won’t quote it as it was private correspondence, I changed my mind – see below. although I suspect others have received copies, too. However, he wanted to respond to a YouTube video that was posted last week. I hadn’t known about this and Mr Power was at great pains to point out that the emergency exercise that he was running on the 7th July 2005 was entirely coincidental to the subsequent terrorist attacks.
Well, given that emergency exercises are a regular activity for the rail industry, the emergency services, local authorities and a number of other organisations such as BNFL, I’d be mildly surprised if there wasn’t some sort of similar activity going on that day. Having been involved in the planning of such exercises, I can concur with the comments made by Mr Power when he says that they are planned to be as realistic as possible. They draw on current and historical events to provide as much realism for the participants so as to test their readiness in the event of a real crisis. Mr Power’s exercise was a table-top. This means that it would be held in a room (usually with some sort of layout of the area) – no one would be outside acting out roles. The idea that this was in some way a part of what actually happened on that day or that the coincidence is infeasible is absurd and, frankly, the product of an over active imagination operating without access to facts, reason, logic or evidence. In fact, the typical profile of the conspiraloon.
To suggest that this was a black flag operation or that Mr Power’s organisation was involved demonstrates a lack of understanding of how emergency exercises are planned or take place. It also demonstrates a certain weakness of mind, too. The attacks in London, Madrid and New York were exactly what they appeared to be; attacks by disaffected Islamic extremists.
I did a quick search and discovered that the conspiracy loon site prison planet is hosting the video – however, it was recorded by a group calling itself We Are Change UK.
I have no plans to watch the video. I have better things to do than watch an innocent man being hounded by a bunch of conspiracy cretins. Oh, and as to the question they were asking; “who was your client?” Do these people not understand the principle of client confidentiality? Frankly, anyone who attempted to ambush me in this manner in an attempt to prize confidential information from me would receive an extremely short sharp response.
Update: Peter has been in contact again. As he wanted me to circulate to a wider audience, I quote his mail below. Also updated with more information on the source of the video.
——————————————-
I rarely respond to allegations that there was a direct connection between an exercise my company was running on 7 July 2005 and the real events that happened that day, but having just seen on You Tube a highly misleading video following a childish stunt against me on 12/12/07 I feel I have little choice but to make three important points:
First, I chose to meet 2 people that day who requested an interview with me while I was attending a conference in a London hotel. Having shaken their hands and asked where they were from I noticed I was being covertly filmed by one of them who denied it. As it is not possible to have a civilised conversation when deceit from one side was apparent from the outset, I apologised that I could not help in such circumstances and suggested another time perhaps? I then walked back to the conference – suddenly pursued by 2 or 3 shouting people trying to make it appear I was fleeing?
Second, it’s worth reminding some people that the London underground system has so far been the subject of terrorist bombings on 21 occasions, going back to 1885. Also, on the same day as our exercise, a major law firm in the City of London was running an exercise that involved bombs on the underground. A few days before so did a major German bank in London and even the Metropolitan Police. We were not alone.
Third, our table top exercise was to involve a very small group of crisis managers under test, from a company employing c1000 people. No one was on the streets at all. Just one part of the scenario was similar to IRA incendiary bombs planted on the underground in 1992 to start fires on three underground trains, albeit the locations were by sheer coincidence, more 2005 that 1992. That’s not so surprising when we had a limited number of underground lines to choose from, given the location of our client in the centre of London.
There will be no convincing some very odd people who think actors were on the bus that was actually bombed and the UK Government staged the whole thing on 7/7, the World Trade Centre was pre-wired with explosives on 9/11 and even that tragedy was a US Government setup.
At a time when this country is under a sustained terrorist threat it makes sense to base any exercise scenario on realism and historical events and in so doing hopefully increase our overall resilience to this threat. Had the odd people I met on 12.12.07 bothered to have a proper conversation with me I would have explained all this to them but fantasists will, no matter what I say, always prefer sensationalism to sense and conspiracy to coincidence.
Peter Power. Visor Consultants Limited. 15 December 2007
Update, 04/09/08: Despite this conversation having closed over nine months ago, I am still getting email correspondence from time to time about this nonsense. Before you nip over to my contacts page and regale me with your conspiracy theories, please pause to consider the following:
I am not remotely interested in your theories.
I will not respond to such correspondence as I am not remotely interested in your theories.
If, as the moron who did so today, you simply want to send me an abusive email, the following will happen: It will be deleted. I will not respond because I am not remotely interested in your theories. Your email address will be entered onto the SPAM databases as a sender of abusive unsolicited emails. I may contact your ISP and email provider and report you under the telecommunications act for sending malicious correspondence. You will be summarily banned
What strange people. I’m at a loss to understand what possible benefit there could be for supposed conspirators to run a simulation at the same time as the actual bombing – and then fail to tell the consultant to keep it under his hat.
It’s worth watching the video linked to – if only as a demonstration of some of the effects of care in the community.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O2cUN2t6S8
Yes, well, ranting aside…
The outcome of an inquiry is very likely to tell us what we already know; that four disaffected young men decided to blow up themselves and their fellow passengers on the London Underground. It might tell us that the response was not as good as it could have been, but we knew that already, too.
What it will not tell us is that there was some sort of conspiracy or cover up. This is because there is no evidence of either, this is because, well, the obvious. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
“What it will not tell us is that there was some sort of conspiracy or cover up. This is because there is no evidence of either, this is because, well, the obvious. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
con·spir·a·cy
1. the act of conspiring
2. an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons; plot.
3. a combination of persons for a secret, unlawful, or evil purpose:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/conspiracy
No evidence of a conspiracy? Even you admitted yourself there was a conspiracy:
“that four disaffected young men decided to blow up themselves and their fellow passengers on the London Underground”
And what about this nugget of nonsense:
“It might tell us that the response was not as good as it could have been”
Actually the response was pretty good. Your mate was running a training exercise that envisaged bombs going off at the precise times and precise same locations that they actually went off so….
(in Peters own words):
“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, ‘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.
http://julyseventh.co.uk/media/r5.live.peter.power.exercise.mp3
In actual fact they couldn’t have been better prepared for what actually took place.
I’m sorry, but are you being deliberately obtuse? I am well aware without your patronising dictionary quotation of just what a conspiracy is, thank you very much. It is pretty clear that what we are discounting is a conspiracy among government circles, not among the bombers themselves. Or do I have to spell everything out in single syllable words?
It is not a nugget of nonsense, for fuck’s sake! Do you have any experience or competence in incident management or post incident analysis? Any post incident analysis always identifies room for improvement. There is always something that could have been done more efficiently. So, yes, it is highly likely that an inquiry would identify that the response was not as good as it could have been.
But, given that you have linked to another conspiraloon site full of pure nudge, nudge, wink, wink, the-truth-is-out-there, horseshit, I shouldn’t be too surprised.
Peter Power is not “my mate”, he happened to contact me following the ambush he experienced last week. Prior to that, we have never communicated and have never spoken.
Thanks very much for printing this. I came accross the video today with mounting dismay (I wrote about here.
I’m particularly disturbed that they claim that they’re sent out by The Arts Council. This simply isn’t the case, they have a show on Resonance FM which receives some Arts Council funding – which, frankly, they’re jeopardising with they’re antics. I care because we also have a show on the station…
**cough*** “their antics” obviously…
Richard, quite.
although i don’t normally entertain such apparent nonsense, the fact that i had never heard of peter power before now raises my interest.
a couple of points:
1) longrider, you don’t seem to respond to the radio5 interview. have you listened to it?
2) given that you had never spoken to peter power before now, why would he choose to contact you to get the word out?
also, why do you lower yourself to their level and resort to swearing and petty insults to get your point across?
surely it would make more sense to destroy their arguments with reason & logic?
the j7 campaign seems to have the backing of some parliamentarians & j7 victims who, i assume, have the right to ask questions in the absence of a public enquiry.
I have. There is nothing to respond to. It was a simple coincidence. Nothing more to say.
I asked him the same question. He replied that he had seen my blog and hoped I would disseminate his response to the YouTube video.
Being facetious; because I feel like it. These people who claim to be applying common sense and then link to a conspiracy site with a pseudo wanted poster demanding that Peter Power “answer questions” is deserving of contempt. I have no patience with such nonsense and see no reason to disguise either my lack of patience or contempt. Reason and logic is wasted on the conspiracy theorist. Likely as not, they would simply decide that I am a co-conspirator, such is the idiocy we are dealing with.
As for that utterly stupid “Wanted” poster on the site, wanted by whom? The police? No; a bunch of conspiracy theorists. They have no rights to “answers” from Mr Power as he was not involved in the incident. That there are victims and parliamentarians backing the site does not make it any more worthy of consideration while it indulges in such reprehensible behaviour.
I do understand why the victims want a public inquiry, but I disagree with them on that matter as it will tell us nothing that we either do not already know or cannot be reasonably surmised and as such, will be a huge waste of taxpayers’ money that could be better spent elsewhere.
Sure, they have the right to ask questions. That does not give them the right to access evidence that may well be sub judice and it does not give them the right to demand that people who happened to have only a coincidental involvement answer their questions.
The british public would better accept the official governent story if there was any real CCTV footage of these alleged suicide bombers.
The only photographic evidence of the four together does not stand up to scrutiny the same as the cctv images of the alleged plane hitting the pentagon.
You cant just brush these incidents under the carpet, the new legislations have encroached our personal freedoms and we demand answers as tax paying law abiding democratic citizens.
The British public, by and large, accept that what happened was exactly what appeared to happen. If there isn’t decent CCTV footage, well, tough shit. There wasn’t any footage of the IRA bombers who nearly wiped out the Thatcher government – or was that a conspiracy by the home office? No, please, don’t answer that one…
It is only the conspiracy theorists who claim not to be satisfied (and, I accept, some of the victims) – the rest of us recognise that sometimes, there are no answers and that bad things happen and that it is not a government conspiracy or cover up. Frankly, a cursory observation of their record suggests that they lack the competence anyway.
To conflate conspiracy theories with legislation that encroaches on our freedoms does a disservice to the argument against that legislation as we all become tarred with the swivel eyed loony label. And that is one of the reasons why I am so contemptuous of the conspiracy theorist.
The British public, by and large, accept that what happened was exactly what appeared to happen. If there isn’t decent CCTV footage, well, tough shit.
There are up to 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain – about one for every 14 people – making it one of the most watched places on earth.
The British Transport Police control over 1400 cameras on the London Underground and another 1800 on Railway Stations from their control room by Victoria Station.
How can you tell me no further cctv images were recorded?
Why cant we see that footage?
Peter Power is a pawn in a much bigger game, bigger than any one person.
Its about creating a one world government, making us scared to leave the house or trust our neighbours
The machine that is being created to combat a made up enemy ie fundamental muslim terrorists will very shortly be rolled out and used against the taxpaying public.
Dont forget that a terrorist is basically anybody that commits a misdemeanour so the next time you forget to put on your seatbelt you could be in trouble………..(that includes you Longrider blaspheming in public is a convictable offence!!!!)
dont just listen to me see these links and judge for yourself
Moderation comment – links to loony conspiracy sites removed. Please do not do this again.
Bad things happen because freemasons
I suppose that it was inevitable that the conspiracy nuts would come crawling out of the woodwork sooner or later. Do you not think I’ve heard all this stuff before? Yes, I am well aware that our government is a menace – being a bunch of control freaks, they will jump on any bandwagon that enables them to further their own interests. Opportunism is undoubtedly rife, but that is all it is.
I’m not telling you anything. I have no idea what was or was not recorded and care even less. But, then, I don’t suspect that the government carried out the bombings, because, quite frankly, they lack the competence to do so and keep it under wraps – and believe me, if there was a conspiracy, it would be kept under wraps. I also do not believe, despite their undoubted faults, that they are sufficiently misanthropic to engage in such an assault on their own population – the evidence does not support such an absurd assertion. The most rational and logical explanation is the one that is the most banal.
Why should you? It’s none of your business. Just as it’s none of mine. If the police believe that such footage may be useful in a prosecution at a later date, they would be foolish to publish it.
No, he isn’t. Did you read nothing that he said? Have you taken no notice of what I have written about incident management and emergency planning? I know what I am talking about as I have occupational experience. Do you? The likelihood of someone carrying out a similar exercise to real events is a coincidence – a reasonably likely coincidence given the amount of agencies required to engage in emergency planning.
Yawn… If you wanted to convince me, you just lost me.
There will always be those who will seek to destabilise our way of life. The “enemy” is not artificially created; merely it is the level of threat posed that is being inflated.
And the threats to our freedom need to be fought – but deranged conspiracy theories simply undermine a rational response to such legislation as the government can choose to dismiss us as a lunatic tinfoil hat fringe. That is why I want nothing to do with the conspiracy theorists.
Oh, do grow up.
“Bad things happen because freemasons”
that was a typing error my apologies
Ah. Okay, fair enough.
ok back to the main point, those guys were mugs the way they approached mr power who i know is a well respected and highly succesful public servant.
You must be aware that mr power has been accused as being involved in a government conspiracy, millions of people have watched terrorstorm worldwide.
How will Mr Power respond to these accusations? If somebody had accused me of this sort of thing I would want to clear my name.
Longrider, it is false to suggest that those who allege that the 7/7 attacks occurred because of official complicity are ‘conspiracy theorists’ while those who accept the official account are not. People differ on this issue merely in terms of which conspiracy theory they hold to be true, or at least most probable.
Great job ‘we are change uk’ – i salute you!
Mugs isn’t the expression I would use. What they were doing was harassment. Mr Power is not a public servant, he is a private consultant, just as I am, incidentally. A couple of years back, I did some similar work for a client. I would feel under no obligation to discuss this work or “answer questions” just because some folk might think it “sinister” or “suspicious”. People are entitled to hold whatever wacky views they please but they are not entitled to extort answers from people they choose to accuse.
Indeed, and it’s twaddle. An accusation does not make it true. It’s not even a credible accusation, merely a refusal to accept the obvious.
Er… he just did.
Critical, you are engaging in a false dichotomy here. When I see a cigar, I see a cigar. It does not mean that I “accept the government explanation”, because there is nothing to accept or not accept. It is the conspiracy theorist who is arguing that I am not looking at a cigar, it is the conspiracy theorist who must provide evidence, therefore, that it is not – and simply linking to spurious websites full of wild supposition and nudge, nudge, wink, wink theorising won’t cut the mustard. I am only convinced by hard, verifiable evidence. Until then, as far as I am concerned, that cigar shaped object is a cigar.
We are Change UK are, frankly, just the type of conspiracy theorists who do those of us wishing to defend liberties a disservice. Bullying an innocent man is not an example of a job well done, it is at best, the activities of people who are somewhat deranged, at worst is is assault. Mr Power has been remarkably restrained considering. I’d have been less polite, I suspect.
I think Peter Power owes it to himself, his company and the victims of 7/7 to state exactly what his training drill involved.
Details are a bit vague to say the least.
Two points:
Firstly, he has already explained exactly what he was doing; carrying out a table-top exercise. That is plenty sufficient details wise.
Secondly, he doesn’t owe anyone anything; he was carrying out a private transaction with a private client. As a consultant, I would equally guard my client’s confidentiality. No one, not the press, not conspiracy theorists and not the victims are owed an explanation of what he was doing because it had nothing to do with the attacks and his client is entitled to confidentiality. What he was doing is no one’s business but his and his clients’
Longrider think carefully about who you are blindly defending. Peter ‘the cleaner’ Power was involved in an exercise that switched from ‘drill’ to ‘live’ that envisaged bombs going off on trains at the EXACT same locations and at the EXACT same times. Hello?
If 7/7 was a false flag operation then how would you ensure the stability of the stock market and make sure the clean-up after was swift?
Call in Peter ‘the cleaner’ Power of course.
And please drop this ‘conspiracy theorist’ crap. Conspiracies occur every single day of the week and fill the pages of newspaper in the country – every televised and radio broadcast. To suggest that ‘we are change uk’ are ‘conspiracy theorists’ and every other media institution and it’s readers/listeners/viewers are not is de facto ridiculous.
The only crap here is the bollocks you have just come out with;
I am not blindly defending anyone. I have enough occupational experience to understand exactly what was going on – and there is nothing sinister about it. Indeed, if I had been running an exercise and the real thing happened, I’d have switched in exactly same way. It was a coincidence, nothing more. While the conspiracy theorist points to this with arched eyebrows and a Harry Hill style “what’s the chances of that?” a black flag operation is even more unlikely. You have to be seriously deluded to even think that one is possible – and, please, don’t suggest that this is comparable to the Reichstag. Whatever their faults, New Labour are not Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, no matter how much you might want to believe it. So the “HELLO” nonsense is just that. Please refrain from patronising me with the black flag conspiracy guff. I understand what I am talking about as I have run similar exercises myself, so am not going to be convinced by your inability to accept a coincidence without presuming some deeper, hidden agenda.
This is risible horseshit so typical of the tinfoil hat brigade. Black flag operation, my arse. The stock market looks after itself – it isn’t run by the government. And “London Resilience” was designed to deal with exactly this type of scenario – it wasn’t too difficult to figure out what might happen, given historical information. And, yes, I was (albeit briefly and only in a small capacity) involved with London Resilience – so, again, I know what I’m talking about.
We Are Change UK are exactly that – a bunch of tin foil hatters who see conspiracy where there is none. I also see a bunch of nasty little bullies who ambush an innocent man going about his legitimate business. If you see conspiracies everywhere you go, then that is your problem. Don’t project your mental illnesses on others. If you think that the ambush of Peter Power was in any way ethical, it says much about you. What We Are Change did was despicable I despise them for it. That said, I despise conventional media when they play the same tricks. Because the media presume that there is a conspiracy, doesn’t make it so. I don’t believe everything I read in newspapers and see on television.
Addendum Given that this has degenerated into a childish taunting exercise based on picking me up for mixing my terms, I’m imposing my moderation policy and have deleted the comment as it adds nothing to the debate – I suggest you read my comments policy. I’ll put up with robust language and even a certain amount of insult providing the comment adds to the debate. Simply insulting me for mixing the terms “black ops” with “false flag” adds nothing to the discussion – but, then, you haven’t actually added anything of value anyway.
I am also closing this thread. Talking to conspiracy theorists is not only wearing, it provides no illumination. I have better things to do. Tin foil hatters have their silly theories and assertions – unsullied by anything so mundane as evidence. Yet every point made by conspiracy theorists here has been thoroughly debunked elsewhere by people who have looked at the evidence. Inconsistencies in the official version of events do not add up to a conspiracy and simply repeating it ad nauseam doesn’t make it so. There is no evidence of false flag operations or government cover-ups with either 9/11 or 7/7.
There has been nothing new offered here and as the post is now heading for a month old, nothing is likely to be added that offers anything new. So, enough