Social Democracy Now

Few readers can be unaware by now that on Monday, September 19, in the southern, British-controlled portion of Iraq, Iraqi police apprehended two men, disguised as Arabs - they were dressed, in fact, as members of Moqtada al Sadr’s militia force, the Mehdi Army. The matter of their identity remains unsettled. Although Brigadier John Lorimer, the Brigade Commander of the 12 Mechanised Brigade, has acknowledged the men to be British soldiers, the head of Basra police has stated otherwise, and a Basra judge, Raghib Hasan, has called for their re-arrest on that basis. There has been conjecture that they were Israeli, which would indicate Mossad involvement, as well as a report that they were carrying Canadian passports. Since Canada is not officially involved in the Iraq misadventure, it would obviously be a great national scandal in that country if the population were to learn that their government had permitted Canadians to assist the Anglo-American occupation forces in an undercover capacity. Alternatively, operatives from Israel (or another country) may be making use of stolen or fraudulently-obtained Canadian passports, which would be a scandal in itself.

It is impossible to determine precisely the circumstances in which the men were apprehended. In one report, they were caught while escaping by car after firing on a Basra police station where a crowd had gathered demanding the release of a senior Sadr official, Sheikh Ahmad Fartusi, who had been arrested the previous day. (SOURCE) However, there are also reports that they were captured after they attracted suspicion while trying to pass through an Iraqi police checkpoint.

BELOW: The would-be terrorists


(Photo from Prisonplanet.com)


(Photo from Aljazeera.net)

There is general agreement that the men resisted arrest, made an escape, only to be pursued and finally captured by Iraqi police. According to an early BBC World Radio report, the men's getaway vehicle - a Toyota Cressida - was 'full of explosives and bomb making equipment,' suggesting that they were on a terrorist mission. One item found inside the car was a remote control detonator. Another was an anti-tank missile - which helps explain where the so-called 'Iraqi insurgents' have been getting their sophisticated weaponry from.

BELOW: Yahoo News showed a grab from footage of the terrorist arsenal confiscated by Iraqi police (the anti-tank missile is the green tube in the centre of the picture):



It has plausibly been conjectured that the men we are now told were British SAS commandoes were in Basra for the purpose of executing a terrorist attack during the Karbala festival, an important religious festival attracting up to three million pilgrims which was due to begin in a few days' time. Basra police say that the men had been planning to explode their booby-trapped car in the city's central market. (However, it is not known how this conclusion was reached - whether the men confessed this much, or whether evidence inviting this conclusion was found on them or in the car.) Regardless of when and where the car was meant to have been detonated, the discovery by Iraqi police that the men were not Mehdi Army, as they gave themselves out to be, proves what many of us in the antiwar movement have suspected all along, i.e., that the terrorist attacks which have rendered life dangerously insecure in many parts of Iraq were fomented by the occupying forces themselves or their proxies (e.g., foreign mercenaries or Mossad agents).

I came to this conclusion fairly early on because it struck me as suspicious that those killed in such attacks were overwhelmingly innocent Iraqis, people who could never have been classed as collaborators. What's more, there has a been a striking lack of victims among the leaders of the occupying forces, a single casualty among whom would make a far more significant victory for any such insurgency than the deaths of five hundred innocent Iraqi nationals. What the arrest of these two men proves only too well is that a portion of the violence which has been attributed to the Iraqi resistance, if not the greater part of it, is actually being carried out by the occupiers. That such violence involves the complicity of British forces as a whole is self-evident from the fact that, when Iraqi authorities declined to release the two men, they were promptly rescued from the prison in which they had been placed by their Iraqi captors before they could be properly interrogated. The raid - which involved no less than ten tanks breaking down the walls of the prison in which the two men had been incarcerated - proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the men are not 'rogue' operators; they are valuable assets of the British army of occupation who were to be recovered at all costs. Whether or not they are actually British is much less important than the fact that the British occupation forces were obviously obliged to do their utmost to protect them, while the complicity of the British government was made apparent when it asked media outlets to protect the men's identities by pixellating or otherwise obscuring the men's faces.

It will be extremely difficult indeed for the British to spin this incident the way other such incidents have been spun in the past. Although we may never know why Italian secret service agent Nicola Calipari was murdered by American troops, most people have proven willing to accept the official verdict that the killing was an accident, no doubt because they find it extremely difficult to believe that governments which talk so much about liberating the world from the spectre of terrorism would themselves perpetrate terrorist acts. Nonetheless, unless you are so gullible that you would accept a rationale for this episode - such as that the two men had been involved in a practice exercise - it seems to me that the lid has been blown once and for all off the pretence of Iraqi insurgent terrorism.

And what is happening, in fact, is that the story is not being spun so much as being told highly selectively. British authorities have denied neither that the two men were dressed as Mehdi army or that the car was packed full of explosives. But, as in this BBC report, facts indicating that the two men were engaged in a false flag terrorist operation have been omitted, and the impression is given that nothing more important is at issue than whether an Iraqi civilian (or policeman, according to some reports) was killed (or injured, according to some reports) when the two men opened fire on police during their unsuccessful escape bid. In short, when you can't spin a story, you focus on its least incriminating aspect - in this case, collateral damage - and draw a veil over the rest.

The question is now is what motivates Anglo-American terrorism in Iraq. A popular theory is that the occupiers are hoping to foment a civil war. One member of the Iraqi National Assembly. Fatah al-Sheikh, stated, 'It seems that the American forces are trying to escalate the situation in order to make the Iraqi people suffer…. There is a huge campaign for the agents of the foreign occupation to enter and plant hatred between the sons of the Iraqi people, and spread rumors in order to scare the one from the other. The occupiers are trying to start religious incitement and if it does not happen, then they will try to start an internal Shiite incitement.' (SOURCE)

An alternative explanation is that the ongoing terrorism provides the pretext for the continuing Anglo-American presence. Absent terrorism, and there would be no compelling reason for the foreign invaders not to leave. It is entirely possible that the occupiers have no intention of ever leaving Iraq. The capture of the two British terrorists also explains why so many journalists - foreign and Iraqi - have died during the occupation (the count has now risen to 55). Efforts to suppress growing awareness that the occupying countries are behind the most lethal acts of terrorism may explain why a CBS cameraman, Abdul Amir Younes Hussein, 'has been detained by U.S. forces in Iraq for over five months without a shred of evidence being publicly presented against him.' (SOURCE) Hussein was wounded by U.S. forces while filming the aftermath of a car bombing in Mosul on April 5. Is he being detained, perhaps, because he captured evidence implicating the Americans in the the car bombing?

While the causes of suspicious incidents such as the bombing in Mosul have hitherto remained obscure, with this incident in Basra all doubt has vanished and what might formerly have been dismissed as conspiracy theorizing stands revealed once and for all as objective analysis. I agree wholly with blogger 'Rigorous Intuition' (Jeff Wells) that there can no longer be any excuse for failing to recognize the true underlying cause of the violence that has plagued Iraq since Saddam's regime collapsed. 'We have long had reason to suspect imperial instigation to Iraq's sectarian violence, but here, as clearly as we've ever seen it, is the provocateur state revealed: two British "undercover soldiers" in Arab dress, caught firing upon police from a car laden with explosives. And the British government all but admitting its culpability by breaking them out of prison.' Nor can we disagree with Wells that horror is the true face of the man, Tony Blair, the U.K.'s highest elected official, still on the loose after the murders of Princess Diana, David Kelly and countless Iraqis whose names we will never know. This man is truly a monster.

BELOW: A picture sometimes tells a thousand words (from here)



UPDATE: The British media has once again proven its utter servility to the secret British state this week with its incomplete reporting of the Basra incident. The point of view implicitly taken in all mainstream coverage is that the two men could not possibly have been engaged in terrorist activity: this is simply a 'conspiracy theory' favoured by many Iraqis. (Since 'we' are not Iraqis, we are supposed to assume that such an outrageous proposition would never occur to us.) Over the past week, the media seems to have been buying time, deferring any detailed coverage of the incident until such time as a cover story for the mens' activities has been cobbled together.

You can be sure that in the days after the story broke Ministry of Defence officials were working overtime in a bid to come up with a plausible counternarrative to the story that emerged on the ground. That story has now been assembled in its broad outlines, and appears for the first time here, in The Times Online. According to this report, the men were engaged in a legitimate intelligence mission, stopping bombers making their way into Basra from Iran (!). This laughable story - which asks readers to assume that terrorism in Iraq is actually caused by evildoers supported from Tehran - does nothing to explain why, virtually as soon as a crowd demanding the release of Sheikh Ahmad Fartusi had gathered outside the police station, two non-Iraqis dressed as Mehdi Army appeared in a car packed full of explosives. My conclusion is that the two men are the nucleus of a mobile terror unit whose job was to blow up Sadr's supporters while making it look as if Sadr's own men had committed the crime!

Meanwhile, a story in The Independent violates the truth by altering the sequence of events. According to all other reports, the initial protest outside the prison had been entirely peaceful. It was only later, when the tanks, armoured cars and helicopters arrived to liberate the two 'British' terrorists from prison that violence flared, as was captured in a widely-published photo showing a British solider emerging from a tank with his back on fire. In this story, however, history is rewritten and the claim is made that the initial protest had been marred by violence: 'Claims that the crowd was small and the violence minor were quickly belied by photographs of a soldier leaping from the turret of his Warrior armoured vehicle, his uniform burning from a petrol bomb.' The suggestion that the violence occurred first is somehow meant to furnish a rationale for the presence of the two 'British' terrorists at the scene. In fact, of course, the violence was triggered by the subsequent rescue operation. Iraqis were deservedly angry when British forces turned out to rescue men who, whether or not they were actually British, were clearly implicated in terrorist activity of some kind.

NB: The latest radio programme by experts on false flag terrorism, Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone, will be of interest to anyone seeking detailed independent commentary on the Basra affair. See "Caught in the Act: Staged Terror in Iraq" here.

Also of interest is this webpage here. Even if you don't buy the claim that the two men were Israeli agents, the page provides links to most of the major news reports concerning the incident.

A body of evidence has already accumulated that invites only one conclusion: the US government has deliberately and systematically hindered the relief effort in New Orleans, has taken measures to exacerbate the humanitarian crisis, and is doing everything possible to prevent outside observers entering the city, presumably for fear that they would find out that no relief operations are going on there, just operations intended to force people out of the city. The evidence for this is already abundant, and can be found on many websites critical of the Bush administration, such as Prison Planet and the Online Journal.

But far worse is evidence suggesting that the Bush administration actually caused the crisis itself. Like Dick Cheney, I've been around the block a few times and I began to suspect that in August-September 2005 there would be an 'event.' This period looked ripe for a major catastrophe not least because of Bush's plunging popularity, the attention garnered by Cindy Sheehan's antiwar vigil at Crawford, the growing unpopularity of the Iraq war itself, and the ongoing investigation of the Valerie Plame affair, which seemed to be honing in at last on the guilty parties. The Republican strategy seems to be to change the subject when issues unfavourable to the administration begin to penetrate the mainstream.

By August this year, circumstances were clearly propitious for the deployment of a weapon of mass distraction. The first indication of an impending event was that all military leave had been cancelled from August 17. Then there was a report from Seymour Hersh forecasting a terrorist attack that would trigger war with Iran starting sometime in September.

During August two strange events occurred in more or less the same part of Utah: 1) a massive amount of explosives detonated when a truck overturned on the highway and 2) a rave party was broken up by the military for no apparent reason and with excessive force. While I pondered whether the two events could have been connected and whether the planned 'event' had gone awry (presumably, the explosives had been intended to detonate somewhere else), the focus shifted to New Orleans, where a major force hurricane was due. Here is a shortlist of suspicious factors which would support the conclusion that the flooding of New Orleans was the 'event' I had been anticipating:

First, the White House declaration of impending emergency which was posted on the White House website on August 27, inexplicably omitted reference to the New Orleans parishes which were at greatest risk from Hurricane Katrina. 'The President’s action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives, protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in the parishes of Allen, Avoyelles, Beauregard, Bienville, Bossier, Caddo, Caldwell, Claiborne, Catahoula, Concordia, De Soto, East Baton Rouge, East Carroll, East Feliciana, Evangeline, Franklin, Grant, Jackson, LaSalle, Lincoln, Livingston, Madison, Morehouse, Natchitoches, Pointe Coupee, Ouachita, Rapides, Red River, Richland, Sabine, St. Helena, St. Landry, Tensas, Union, Vernon, Webster, West Carroll, West Feliciana, and Winn.' What about Orleans, St. Bernards, St. Tammany, Palquemines, St. Charles, Jefferson, and others? How can it be that the parishes most likely to be affected were not covered by the declaration of emergency? (See map here)

Second, the cause of the disaster currently afflicting the city of New Orleans was not the hurricane itself, which wreaked the greatest damage on the state of Mississippi, but overflow from Lake Pontchartrain which began about a day after the hurricane had passed. This overflow seems to have been a human-made event. It is impossible not to be struck by the fact that the levees broke in the exact same sections that had undergone reconstruction recently. Dr. Shea Penland of the Pontchartrain Institute states that the 17th Street break occurred 'along a section that was just upgraded. It did not have an earthen levee, it had a vertical concrete wall several feet thick.' So was the work performed in recent months 'reconstruction' - or was it sabotage? Were, as one researcher speculates, 'shaped explosive charges hidden inside of sealed, waterproof compartments during the "construction" on the 17th Street and Industrial Canal levees and conveniently detonated in the aftermath of Katrina'?

There are too many reports of explosions immediately prior to the breach for the possibility to be dismissed lightly. 'Total Information Analysis has reported a claim by intelligence expert Tom Heneghen that 25 earwitnesses cited explosions immediately before the levee breach.' (SOURCE) Prisonplanet.com identifies a number of sources for these allegations. What's more, a report has surfaced according to which Army Corps of Engineers divers found burn marks on underwater debris chunks from the broken levee wall. Allegedly, a chunk was tested, revealing 'traces of boron-enhanced fluoronitramino explosives as well as PBXN-111.'

Third, US government agencies engaged in suspicious operations that suggest an operation to exacerbate the problem of the breached levee. According to former New Orleans resident Andrea Garland, 'part of the reason our house flooded is they dynamited part of the levee after the first section broke - they did this to prevent Uptown (the rich part of town) from being flooded. Apparently they used too much dynamite, thus flooding part of the Bywater. So now I know who is responsible for flooding my house - not Katrina, but our government.' (SOURCE) According to Steve Watson, this allegation is entirely plausible. It is, in fact, precisely what happened in 1927! 'In 1927, the Mississippi River broke its banks in 145 places, depositing water at depths of up to 30ft over 27,000 square miles of land. ... New Orleans’ (mainly white) business class pressurized the state to dynamite a levee upstream, releasing water into (mainly black) areas of the delta. ... Two parishes, St. Bernard and Plaquemines, which had a combined population of 10,000, were destroyed.' Clearly, things just happen on a much larger scale these days!

Fourth, the US government ensured that the levee breach was not promptly repaired, on the pretext that all available resources were needed for relief efforts elsewhere in the city. This argument sounds reasonable enough - except that the prompt repair of the levee would have minimized the extent of the catastrophe, meaning that there would be many fewer citizens in need of relief. 'In an interview by WWL TV, [New Orleans] Mayor [Ray] Nagin complained vociferously that Louisiana National Guard Blackhawk helicopters were being stopped from dropping sandbags to plug the levee soon after it breached.' (SOURCE) The government was apparently even prepared to kill to prevent the breach from being repaired. What else is one to make of the fact that police fired on eight contractors who had been sent to repair the breach in the 17th Canal levee, killing five? 'A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said the victims [of the police shooting] were contractors on their way to repair a canal.' (SOURCE) Who wanted the levee to go unrepaired? NB: The contractors were apparently from Boh Brothers, a construction company based in Baton Rouge. (Boh Brothers have not yet replied to an email in which I asked them to expressly confirm or disconfirm that the men killed had been Boh Brothers employees.)

The more information that becomes available about the disaster in New Orleans, the more reasonable it becomes to suspect not the hand of God but that of man behind it. As I suggested in my previous post, it is not difficult to establish a motive. At the very least, we are looking now at a real estate bonanza for individuals closely associated with the Bush administration itself. As Naomi Klein observes, 'With the poor gone, developers are planning to gentrify the city.' There is no doubt that this has been the game plan for some time and that the government has been on the side of those favouring gentrification over the maintenance of public housing. In 2001, for example, Michael Kelly, who headed the Housing Authority of New Orleans from 1995 to 2000, was the subject of a lawsuit filed 'by current and former residents of the Desire public housing complex in New Orleans [which] alleges that Kelly and other officials illegally developed a plan that "intentionally forces ... residents to abandon the community that they have lived in since birth and relocate to other rundown neighborhoods and houses in an effort to create an affluent neighborhood to attract middle-class African-Americans and Whites."' (SOURCE) A network of interests has therefore existed for some time in New Orleans which found itself pitted against what could be termed the welfare sector. The latter's ability to defend its interest through conventional legal channels would have encouraged the fermentation among corrupt real estate magnates of a conspiracy for the purpose of exploiting a future hurricane as a means of largely eliminating public housing from the city.

BELOW: Apparently, God disapproves of public housing. From Waynemadsenreport.com:
 

UPDATE: I have looked around the Web to find photos of New Orleans public housing to see how desperately it is in need of being 'cleaned up.' But, to my surprise, even the photos at a website expressly devoted to 'urban decay,' show housing that looks pretty good, at least by comparison to its equivalent in the U.K. and some other parts of the U.S. What's more, some new projects were in advanced stages of completion. One wonders what fate will befall, for example, this quite respectable example of contemporary public housing:

Like the terrorist scenario played out in New York on September 11, the disaster in New Orleans was something that virtually everyone knew could happen; in both instances there was also plenty of time to take appropriate measures to ensure that the anticipated tragedy did not happen.

Since the disaster in New Orleans nevertheless did happen, a great many questions need to be asked as to whether someone let it happen. We all know now that Bush cut the funding for the renovation of the levees to help finance his war in Iraq. We also know that the response seems deliberately to have been held off for a few days:

'Even military resources in the right place weren't ordered into action. "On Wednesday," said an editorial in The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., "reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics. Playing basketball and performing calisthenics!"' (SOURCE)

What's more, radio communications in the New Orleans area were apparently being jammed by a pirate radio station in the Caribbean, presumably as a means of hampering the relief effort. (SOURCE)

But today emerged intriguing allegations that more than 25 eyewitnesses are aware of FEMA operatives somehow sabotaging the levee that precipitated the disaster. These witnesses may be referring to an episode in which a section of the levee was deliberately destroyed in order to divert flooding away from wealthier parts of the city. According to New Orleans resident Andrea Garland, 'part of the reason our house flooded is they [presumably FEMA] dynamited part of the levee after the first section broke - they did this to prevent Uptown (the rich part of town) from being flooded. Apparently they used too much dynamite, thus flooding part of the Bywater. So now I know who is responsible for flooding my house - not Katrina, but our government.' (SOURCE)

So it looks like part of the reason that relief effort has been so woeful is because the real priority has been minimizing the extent of destruction in richer areas. In this respect, this webpage is extremely interesting. It shows that the rich and powerful are interested not in relieving the afflicted but with profiting from the disaster that has befallen them:

'This afternoon, I was having lunch at the Cosmos Club out on Massachusetts Avenue [in Washington]. A good friend is a member of the posh club (that once was the elegant town home of Sumner Welles), and while at lunch, I was privy to a very vocal conversation at one of the big round center tables in the club dining room.

BELOW: The Cosmos Club



One man was giving an overview of the situation to a group of his friends. The speaker was an undersecretary of an important department, well-liked by Bush and often in the White House to consult. The others ranged from an academic economist whose writings can be seen in a right wing paper and a number of Washington-based businessmen, all of whom are active and heavy contributors to the Bush White House.

The loud one had obviously had a few drinks at the bar and this is probably why he was not more discreet. The gist of his comments was horrible to contemplate and it sounded like a top Nazi discussing Jews. It is well known here that the Bush family and many of the top advisers at the White House are racists but instead of detesting Jews, in this case, they all detest blacks. Their rationale, aside from their view of racial superiority, is that blacks are all “welfare queens, unwed mothers and drug dealers.” It was the very firmly stated view of the host that it was better for everyone that New Orleans was under water for the time being.

In that way, we were told (and I was not the only person in the dining room who heard all this), this served to “chase out the niggers” and permit Bush-supporting businessmen from buying up the soon-to-be condemned sodden houses for five cents on the dollar from friendly insurance companies (which one of them was a CEO of) and put up an enlarged and very profitable combination of industrial park and office building section. The money for this would, naturally, come from government grants which a terrified Congress (Mid Term elections are coming) had just voted for and the contracts to demolish the wrecked low-income slums would go, as a no-bid contract, to another stellar Bush supporter.

As for the refugees, our table of proto-fascists all commented on the fact that most of them were on welfare and probably all voted Democratic so they could all be shipped to California or Chicago at the public expense and allowed to occupy less valuable public housing there.

This conversation went on in a similar vein for some time and it was difficult for both myself and my host to refrain from making nasty comments or, for that matter, to enjoy our meal. These people are greedy and purely evil and I am positive from the overall conversations that Bush is conversant with this attitude and has no intentions of interfering with it.'

With Bush's popularity ratings at record lows, opposition to the Iraq war becoming more outspoken every day, and Bush's chief advisor, Karl Rove, in serious trouble, it really wouldn't surprise me if this was less a natural disaster than a pretext for the implementation of the next phase of the Bush White House agenda.

AFTERNOTE ON THE RED CROSS: Whatever you do, please don't give money intended for disaster relief to the Red Cross. As Ken Adachi points out, the RC is just a 'disaster racket' which pockets the bulk of the money donated by a gullible public. 'The history is clear, the Red Cross and other large so-called charities are in actual fact front group collection agencies for the military industrial complex.' According to this webpage, the Salvation Army is virtually the only real charity in the U.S. today.

Would you believe that one of the alleged London bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan, can now be seen in a video with alleged al-Qaeda mastermind al-Zarwahri?

Holy ben trovato, Batman!

Well, hold on to your horses because, believe it or not, the two  make an appearance in the 'same' video - one released yesterday by Al-Jazeera in which Khan (pictured below in a frame from the video) doesn't go so far as to claim responsibility for the 7-7 bombings, but nonetheless spouts with apparent sincerity righteous anger over the way Muslims are being treated during the 'war on terror' and depicts himself as an avenging angel.



This video of Khan provides the strongest support yet for the government story of 7-7. This is, no doubt, why it was fabricated. Although I see no reason at this stage to doubt that the man in the video is actually Khan (although he does not look like the man said to be Khan in the Luton CCTV image), nothing whatsoever is known about the circumstances in which the video was made or in which it was interspliced with footage of al-Zarwahri. That Khan does not make any references to the 7-7 bombings suggests the possibility that the video was made for reasons which have nothing to do with the bombings. We really have no way of knowing - and the fact that it was inserted inside a video of al-Zarwahri does seem to suggest that someone thought it necessary to put the two men together in one video to help shore up the case that the bombings were connected to al-Qaeda. This implies that the Khan footage did not make the link sufficiently clear for someone's liking.

We are apparently looking at a psy-op which is designed to reinforce the official story of the bombings. People with critical minds will not jump to conclusions, however. For one thing, the possibility remains that Khan, who is 'believed to have selected and indoctrinated his fellow bombers' (SOURCE), did so because he was an agent provocateur. If so, it would have been part of his mission to make videos like this in order to bolster his image as an angry Muslim.

However, a more likely scenario can be deduced from this article published in the Guardian on September 4, 2005:

'British intelligence officers planned a "black propaganda" campaign against Islamic extremists, infiltrating their groups through the internet, documents leaked to The Observer reveal.... [on April 23, 2004] the Foreign Office's top intelligence official, William Ehrman ... proposed that spies should infiltrate extremist websites posing as radicals and dissuade extremists from taking up arms.'

BELOW: William Ehrman, a Blair appointee who played a role in the infamous affair over the dodgy dossier, as well as the cover up of the murder of David Kelly. Blair's all-purpose fix-it man?



From what we know about Khan, he was an extremely caring individual. It would not be inconsistent with what we know about him that he would have participated willingly in a mission ostensibly aimed at dissuading extremists from 'taking up arms.' If Khan was one of Ehrman's spies, it would therefore have been part of his mission to make videos like the one released by al-Jazeera in order to enhance his image as an angry Muslim. However, this mission could easily have manipulated by top level intelligence operatives like Ehrman to set up a group of patsies to be blamed for the London bombings. Khan could therefore have participated willingly in the making of this video but without the slightest awareness of its true purpose. The video would have been reserved for use in the eventuality that the operation was a success.

Whatever the story behind the making of the video, Khan cannot have been involved in the London bombings themselves. For those who still take the official story of the bombings seriously, allow we to reiterate my previous complaints about the official story. How come only one image of the four alleged bombers has ever been released? How come it is an image that shows abundant evidence of fakery? How come there is no plausible explanation for how, if the four men really did arrive at Luton station at 7.22 on the morning of July 7, they travelled from Luton to London? How come the CCTV footage of the men at Kings Cross station has never been released? How come there is no CCTV footage of the four men anywhere else on the Underground network? How come all four CCTV cameras just happened not to be working aboard the Stagecoach bus? How come no witnesses have come forward claiming to have seen any of the men either in the Tube or on the bus? How come there was no Muslim - nor, indeed, anyone at all - standing at the location where the bomb went off, according to survivor Bruce Lait? How come we haven't seen any of the footage supposedly taken of alleged bus bomber Habib Hussain at a London McDonald's shortly after the first three bombs went off? In short, how come the official story is thick on claims but thin on proof?

This footage of Khan looks to me like an attempt to shore up the official story by indirect means because the grand total of pieces of evidence available to the public that directly supports it is precisely zero. I am surprised that Al-Jazeera continues to be a party to the diffusion of these ridiculous videos.

AFTERNOTE: The hypocrisy of the U.K. government continues to amaze me. According to the Telegraph, 'David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said the nation would be sickened by the [Khan] tape. "Nothing can justify the murder of innocent people," he said.' But wouldn't that include the invasion of Iraq?