July 7th Alternative Hypotheses
7. As above but the men thought they were carrying dummy 'bombs' because they were participating in an exercise testing London transport's defences against backpack bombers.
This hypothesis is underpinned by the drill taking place on the morning of July 7th 2005 by a company named Visor Consultants. Visor's MD, Peter Power, was the person who first mentioned the exercise, on the same day as the explosions. On the afternoon of July 7th, Peter Power gave a number of interviews in which he dramatically related the coincidence of his company running a terror exercise with the identical scenario to the events with actually occurred,
POWER: ...at half-past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for, er, over, 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 upright!
PETER ALLEN: 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, er, 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, '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.
Source: Radio 5 Live Drivetime
Power also gave an interview to the Manchester Evening News in which he mentioned that his exercise had also involved 'mock broadcasts' – something he omitted to mention in his other interviews,
Yesterday we were actually in the City working on an exercise involving mock broadcasts when it happened for real.
" When news bulletins started coming on, people began to say how realistic our exercise was - not realising there was an attack.We then became involved in a real crisis which we had to manage for the company."
Source: Manchester Evening News
Unsurprisingly, these rather sensational announcements garnered much interest from the alternative media. Curiosity was especially piqued by an off the cuff comment made by Power to an executive producer on CBS Television – on which Power appeared a few days after the London bombings – who had asked him why there hadn't been more media coverage of the drill which had so eerily reflected actual events. “They were trying to keep it quiet” was the enigmatic response from Power. Quite who “they” are or why "they" would want to “keep it quiet” was never elaborated on.
The alarm that Power's statements had caused appeared to compel him to issue an automated email in response, indicating that the hairs on the back of his neck were quite obviously lying back down again as his exercise appeared no longer to have been based at “precisely the locations” where the actual explosions had happened, but instead, Power said, only “one scenario in particular, was very similar to real time events.”
Nevertheless, Peter Power's rather hyperbolic initial statements - especially his knowledge that the explosions had been “simultaneous” days before the police apparently did – continued to ignite discussions of various conspiratorial scenarios due to the coincidental nature of an exercise involving a terrorist attack on the London transport system at virtually the same time as the transport system was attacked in reality. Terror drills, in fact, are as commonplace as business continuity firms, which have become extremely profitable in recent years, especially those involving terrorist attacks or other disasters on the transport system. Even large scale anti-terror rehearsal operations are nothing new and July 7th 2005 is certainly not the first time a rehearsal has been running at the same time as a 'real' 'terrorist' 'incident'. On September 11th 2001, in the USA, the CIA had been running "a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building" within a very short time of that actual scenario tragically occurring for real.
In September 2003, an exercise codenamed Osiris II took place in London, testing emergency responses to the scenario of a chemical terrorist attack on the underground network and in April 2005, a major international counter-terrorism exercise took place in London, codenamed Atlantic Blue. The aim of the exercise – known as TopOff 3 in the US and Triple Play in Canada - was to test the UK's response to “internationally linked terrorist incidents.” Many similar large scale operations are carried out globally, such as Exercise Northstar V in Singapore, and the annual exercise 'Golden Guardian' in the US,
Actors were recruited to play the role of bombing victims and they did their part. A heavy dose of fake blood and screaming added to the first responders tensions.
The goal was to make the simulation as real as possible. There were body parts mixed in with the debris.
A bus was blown up to get an accurate feel of what would happen if a terrorist attack did occur and how the debris would spread.
"This is going to cause them to think on their feet. To make real decisions and to react to real life potential situations," adds Sgt. Martinez.
The training was so realistic authorities closed down a portion of the 57 Freeway. There were concerns that drivers would be distracted by the pyrotechnics. The closure only lasted a few minutes.
Source: ABC News
Additionally, the BBC's Panorama broadcast a programme in May 2004 entitled 'London Under Attack' in which a mock broadcast attempted to reconstruct what would happen if London suffered a terrorist attack. The rather visionary scenario used was that of three underground trains and a road vehicle being blown up by terrorists. Peter Power was one of a panel of advisors on the programme, the 'mock' newsreader of which was, Kirsty Lang - coincidentally the 'real' newsreader, broadcasting the rolling news of three underground trains and a road vehicle exploding, on BBC World on July 7th 2005.
From the descriptions of the various preparatory exercises outlined above, it is reasonably clear that, as stated in the ABC news story for instance, that the goal is to “make the simulation as real as possible” and actors have demonstrably been employed by organisers of such drills. With this in mind, it is feasible that people are commonly recruited to play specific roles, and therefore feasible that the four July 7th suspects could have been recruited for such an exercise.
However, Peter Power's Visor Consultants exercise does not appear to have been a major drill, involving the closure of stations or testing emergency service response – Power himself stated that he was simply “in a room full of crisis managers” and despite, in the same interview quote, saying that he was working for a “company of over a thousand people” it does not appear that all personnel were by any means involved in the exercise.
In mid July 2005, a story appeared on the Channel 4 News website suggesting that a 'room full of people' was also an exaggeration,
In the frenzy of linking, cross linking and careless speculation, however, it appears most self-publishers - and Al Jazeera - failed to contact Visor to corroborate their claims. In fact, the 'exercises' he spoke of on Five Live were carried out purely 'on paper', or at least PowerPoint, by a small group of seven or eight executives (Power remains tight-lipped about the client) seeking to examine the impact on corporate decision-making of a potential crisis situation.
Source: Channel 4 News
Perhaps the “room full of crisis managers” was very small. Regardless, the Channel 4 piece had also pointed out that the exercise had taken place “'on paper' or at least on PowerPoint” - although again this seems to contradict Power's own statement to the Manchester Evening News referred to earlier, that his company was “working on an exercise involving mock broadcasts when it happened for real. When news bulletins started coming on, people began to say how realistic our exercise was - not realising there was an attack.”
He had also rather confusingly, told CBS television “There were a few seconds when the audience didn't realise whether it was real or not.” He did not elaborate, however, on who he meant by the 'audience'.
In response to an approach – not made by J7 – in December 2007 where Power was asked who his client was on the morning of July 7th 2005, Power elected to leave a comment on the J7 website instead of responding directly to the group which approached him, downgrading the situation once more from “a room full of crisis managers” to “a very small group of crisis managers under test, from a company employing c1000 people”.
In fact, much of the speculation over the Visor exercise has focussed on who exactly had commissioned the company's services that morning. Power refused to name the client for which Visor were working, although he gave a bizarre clue in his radio interview to the reasoning behind the drill:
And we chose a scenario - with their assistance - which is based on a terrorist attack because they're very close to, er, a property occupied by Jewish businessmen, they're in the city, and there are more American banks in the city than there are in the whole of New York - a logical thing to do. And it, I've still got the hair....
Source: ITV News
In September 2008, Power elected to reveal in the comment section of a blog relating to 'emergency management', that his client on the morning of July 7th 2005 was Reed Elsevier, a publishing company which owns the Defence Systems and Equipment International (DSEi) exhibiton, an annual arms fair in London. Power also elaborated in his comment on the significance of the reference to the company's proximity to a “property occupied by Jewish businessmen”, explaining that “an above ground ficticious bomb” was factored into their scenario with the “head office of the protected Jewish Chronicle magazine” being the intended target. What Power means by “protected” isn't quite clear.
Despite the conjecture, there is not much evidence to suggest that the four men would have been in any way involved with the exercise Peter Power was conducting on the morning of July 7th 2005. Moreover, despite his interesting and somewhat chequered career, and his revisions of his initial description of his company's activities, it can be argued that his involvement in the events of July 7th 2005 are limited to a rather mercenary publicity drive for his own company to drum up trade at the exact time when such business looked like it would be exceptionally brisk.
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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.
7. As above but the men thought they were carrying dummy 'bombs' because they were participating in an exercise testing London transport's defences against backpack bombers.
