July 7th Alternative Hypotheses
4. Any of the above plots could have been monitored by one or more secret 'service' (MI5, MI6, CIA, Mossad, GIA) but they let it happen on purpose in order to exploit the subsequent situation.
This hypothesis appears to have been partly born from the reports of Israeli prior knowledge of the attacks. Israel's finance minister, Binyamin Netanyahu was warned to stay in his hotel room shortly before the blasts, instead of making his way to an hotel adjacent to Liverpool Street station, close to one of the explosions. The Israeli embassy claimed that the warning originated with Scotland Yard. It was also alleged that the warning did not occur just moments before the explosions but days earlier and was not acted upon for fear of disturbing the G8 summit in Gleneagles. This alleged warning, along with ex-Mossad head Efraim Halevi's strangely prescient article (also mentioned in Hypothesis 2) regarding the London attacks led many to suspect security service knowledge of the bombings – if not actual collusion, as discussed in Hypotheses 5 and 8.
The security services certainly had knowledge of the July 7th suspects. Both Khan and Tanweer were implicated in the Crevice Plot in 2004 (discussed in Hypotheses 1 and Hypothesis 2). Nicolas Sarkozy – the then French Interior Minister – claimed in July 2005 that he had been told of this by the then Home Secretary Charles Clarke. At the time, the authorities were attempting to convince the public that the four men were so-called “clean skins” with no known links to terrorism and previously unknown to the authorities. In the light of this, Clarke issued an outraged denial – and quite correctly; the two men had never been 'arrested' as part of the Crevice plot as Sarkozy claimed. But Clarke's denial was, of course, rather misleading since it suggested that there was no prior knowledge of the suspects at all. In fact, it was reported in November 2005 that all four deceased suspects had been monitored a year before the atrocities.
So how would MI5 – or any other security service – have known what the specifics were of a plot to carry out a terrorist attack in London? Simply monitoring, or even bugging, the suspects would have been unlikely to have told agents everything they needed to know. As mentioned in Hypothesis 1, during the 2007 trial of the Crevice suspects, it was claimed that the mysterious figure known as 'Q', later identified as Mohammed Quayyum Khan, had recruited both Mohammad Sidique Khan and Omar Khyam; the alleged ringleader of the fertiliser bomb plot investigated through Operation Crevice. Questions were asked after the trial regarding why 'Q' was not incarcerated along with the others,
Even more disconcerting is the revelation that Q is still on the loose, even though he only vanished just before the court’s verdict. The MI5 claims that there is no evidence to indict Q, therefore he cannot be arrested. But habeas corpus has been abolished in Tony Blair’s England, and the police have almost unlimited powers when it comes to "suspected terrorists." Hundreds of Muslims are sitting in British jails awaiting formal charges against them; why is Q not one of them?
The uncomfortable questions don’t end there. Why wasn't Q included on the the blacklists of al-Qaeda financiers? The trial transcripts confirm that one of his skills was securing funds and materiel [sic] for bombings. Mere suspicion of involvement is normally enough to land one on the lists, making it difficult to vanish, because access to funds is barred.Source: Anti War
Considering the UK is now a nation where possessing a CD of a document that is freely downloadable from the US Department of Justice, which you didn't even actually download yourself, and never viewed, gets you a sixteen month prison sentence, these are valid questions. Perhaps such questions are what led the BBC's Panorama reporter Peter Taylor to ask DAC Peter Clarke the following questions during the edition 'Real Spooks' broadcast in May 2007:
Why was 'Q' never arrested?
CLARKE: Decisions are made during the course of investigation based upon the evidence that's available, and the decision as to who should be arrested is based entirely upon what evidence is available at the time.
TAYLOR: Was 'Q' not arrested possibly because he was working for you or MI5?
CLARKE: I'm not prepared to comment on any speculation like that. It's pure speculation.
TAYLOR: Where is 'Q' now?
CLARKE: I said I'm not prepared to talk about 'Q'.
Source: BBC Panorama Transcript
Interestingly, in June 2006, Charles Shoebridge – a former detective with the Metropolitan Police now working as a 'terror expert', appeared on BBC's Newshour in response to the claims made by Martin Gilbertson (discussed in Hypothesis 3). Shoebridge observed:
"The amount of information coming out and the quality of information coming out. The fact that that has been so consistently overlooked it would appear by the security service MI5, to me suggests really only one of two options."
"Either, a) we've got a level of incompetence that would be unusual even for the security services. But b) possibly, and this is a possibility, that this man Khan may even have been working as an informant for the security service."
"It is difficult otherwise to see how it can be that they've so covered his tracks in the interim."
Source: BBC News
The use of informants and infiltrators is not a new concept to the secret services. In 2007 it was revealed that MI5 had attempted to recruit two British Muslim residents; Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna. The pair refused and later found themselves incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay. In September 2001, The Telegraph reported that MI5 were targeting Muslim university students for recruitment. A Muslim publication in the USA reported that Muslims were finding themselves targets for security service recruiters at their local Mosque.
Regarding infiltrators, Professor Emile George Joffé of the Centre for North African Studies, speaking at the Centre for International Studies in the University of Cambridge, stated,
The situation is complicated by the fact that there is considerable evidence that the original GIA (Groupe Islamique Armé) was infiltrated by the Algerian army’s military security service under the command of General Mohamed “Tawfig” Mediène.....The result has been that since the mid-1990s, many of the GIA's activities have been indirectly controlled by the security services and used to discredit the movement overall.
Source: Page 15 New Zealand REFUGEE APPEAL NO. 74540 (Aug 2003)
The concepts of group infiltration, and the consequential actions, are discussed further in Hypotheses 5 and Hypothesis 8.
This theory clearly has some basis in fact. That the authorities were aware of the suspects long before July 7th 2005 is indisputable. Not only were they aware of Khan and Tanweer's involvement with the Crevice suspects, as also discussed in Hypotheses 1 and 2, but it was also reported that the United States had issued an alert on Mohammad Sidique Khan in 2003. The claims made by Mohammed Junaid Babar, as discussed in Hypotheses 1 and 2, surfaced as early as mid July 2005 and again in February 2006. MI5 denied in April 2007 at the conclusion of the Crevice trial, that Sidique Khan's car had been 'bugged', insisting that the tracking device discovered by police had been placed there after the July 7th attacks. They also denied that recorded conversations, in which Khan and Tanweer participated, had indicated terrorist intent that could have been acted on prior to July 2005. However, since they robbed the Parliamentary 'watchdog', the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) of the opportunity to view transcripts or listen to the tape recordings – thereby allowing the ISC's first investigative report into the London bombings to have significant information missing – it is difficult to have faith in their statement. MI5 clearly knew enough for us to legitimately question why on earth no intervention occurred prior to the tragic events in London in 2005.
However, in respect of the claimed 'prior knowledge' of the London bombings by the Israeli secret service, it is worth pointing out that both the Israeli Foreign Minister and Netanyahu himself denied that the warning for him to stay in his hotel was given before the explosions had occurred. There is no way of verifying this story either way. The remarks by Charles Shoebridge referring to Khan have some credence given the evidence that the security services do regularly recruit informants as a way of gaining 'inside knowledge'. Shoebridge himself, though, had his credibility questioned during legal action that he took against the Metropolitan Police. Shoebridge claimed that the Met pressured SKY News and ITN to stop employing his services as a 'terror expert' due to bitterness over earlier successful legal action he had taken against his former employers. Simon Cole, the deputy head of SKY news said during the 2005 case – which Shoebridge later won - that Shoebridge was dropped because he was “not very good” and because staff personally disliked him, with one branding him "a creep", and that he lacked knowledge on all the topics he was willing to talk about. SKY news continued to deny that they had 'bowed to pressure' not to use Shoebridge after the tribunal found in his favour. Many alternative news sites took Shoebridge's suggestion that Khan may have been an informant as evidence that the security services were behind the attacks themselves (see Hypothesis 8), when it was simply an observation made by a man who makes a living, like many others, from providing the public with a non-stop narrative regarding the 'terror threat'.
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Alternative Hypotheses Navigation
1. al-Qa'ida mastermind recruited British Muslims as suicide bombers
3. Homegrown and autonomous action by four British Muslims with no mastermind.
4. Any of the above plots could have been monitored by one or more secret 'service' (MI5, MI6, CIA, Mossad, GIA) but they let it happen on purpose in order to exploit the subsequent situation.
