terrorism
 
         
   

Chasing the Conspirators’ Shadow

It is easy to mock the suspicious, the paranoid and the insane. Sitting on a national newspaper newsdesk, fielding calls from the public about potential stories, you soon learn to recognise the stilted intonation or shrill gush of the certifiable fruitcakes. There’s Darren, the paranoid schizophrenic who believes the Ministry of Defence have drugged him and put a camera in his eye so they can observe his every move. Or Jane, convinced she is David Bowie’s girlfriend, conducting a rather menacing telephone campaign against journalists who suggest the musician enjoys other romantic liaisons.

Then there’s the two bags of post delivered every morning: the long missives detailing Tony Blair’s personal attacks on allotment owners in Wales; how MI5 killed hill-walker Robin Cook to choke his leadership ambitions; how the Duke of Edinburgh masterminded the murder of Diana. According to one of our mail boys, the next deluge of letters written in lilac can be predicted using a complicated formula that factors in the anniversaries of major atrocities alongside lunar movements.

In the past year, conspiracy theorists across the land have busied themselves with a new project: questioning the official version of events on 7 July 2005. They search for order among the conflicting witness statements, media stories and official reports, querying the inconsistencies over the exact timings of the blasts, initially described as ‘power surges’; why the Met said on 8 July that there was ‘no evidence to suggest that the attacks were the result of suicide bombings’; and how investigators so quickly recovered the bombers’ ID cards from the mangled bus and train wrecks, when they took longer to identify other corpses.

The result is the ‘July 7 Truth Campaign’ (link below). It is not the most speculatively insane website of its type, there are many more bizarre chatrooms and blogs, but the ‘Alternate Hypotheses’ section illuminates this grotesque fantasia. The authors initially run through the familiar explanations involving four lads from Leeds and Aylesbury, and whether or not they were recruited as suicide bombers by an Al-Qaeda mastermind or were an autonomous ‘homegrown’ unit. However, they then enter Wonderland, suggesting the plot ‘could have been monitored by one or more secret ‘service’ (MI5, MI6, CIA, Mossad) but they let it happen on purpose in order to exploit the subsequent situation’. One blogger, Fintan Dunne, proposes the men never even went to Luton to catch the train to London that morning, instead, unspecified authorities faked the CCTV image of them there. This echoes the 9/11 conspiracy dreamers who insist the Twin Towers were destroyed by the Bush Government to restrict civil liberties, foment Islamophobia and further its Middle Eastern war agenda.

The fears borne of 7 July have been beneficial for the British Government, helping it to advance unpopular restrictions on civil liberties which have choked protest over Iraq, and hunting. Thoughtful human beings want to make sense of confusing events, and suspicion of Government motives is healthy. But the conspiracy theorists challenge everything, including events established beyond any reasonable doubt. They look at changing financial markets, grainy camera footage, erroneous accounts from shocked eyewitnesses and unreliable train timetables (have any of them traveled by rail in the last 30 years?) and see the hands of unseen power brokers (be they bankers, spies or presidential advisors).

Conspiracy theories are mentally lazy, seeking to scapegoat the powerful for events and problems beyond our control and full understanding. We may never comprehend exactly why Mohammad Sidique Khan, Shahzad Tanweer, Hasib Hussain and Germaine Lindsay came to London to kill and maim one year ago. But if no official ‘fact’ or ‘record’ can be trusted then we begin to erode our understanding of the world around us, and our power to change it.

That is why Blair should establish an independent public inquiry, to iron out the inconsistencies. An inquiry would be embarrassing for the Government, intelligence agencies and emergency services, and lead to political mudslinging. It would be painful for families of the dead and for survivors, and probably not answer all of the questions. But it would suffocate some of the more outlandish theories.

A minority of Muslims sympathise with the suicide bombers’ objectives, and a handful may act to further them. Confusion fuels the jihadist agenda. Time spent chasing conspiratorial shadows down those tube tunnels, instead of considering the obvious anger of young Muslims, whether or not that rage is justified, brings us closer to further tragedy.

http://www.julyseventh.co.uk/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/
0,,1806794,00.html

Survivors? more measured diaries of the last 12 months:
http://rachelnorthlondon.blogspot.com/
http://hollyfinch.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   
Anyone for another conspiracy?