Disinfowars 14 – The Ireland – 7/7 Connection

The War on Terror in Ireland never truly ended, it simply evolved into a new, updated and more sophisticated War on Terror. In this episode I look the connections between the black operations being run by the British deep state in Northern Ireland and the 7/7 London bombings of 2005. I offer the view that 7/7 was a ‘pure false flag’ and focus in on two figures – Martin McDaid, a former special forces commando who ran a radical Islamic bookshop, and Samantha Lewthwaite, who was the wife of the one of the alleged suicide bombers. Both of these people were intimately involved in the 7/7 backstory, and both have the profiles and biographies of agents working for MI5. I analyse the ‘intelligence failures’ around McDaid and explore whether his and Lewthwaite’s mission was to manipulate the four men into a position where they could be blamed for an atrocity that they did not commit.

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Transcript

After last weeks highly nerdy and perhaps tediously technical show that doesn’t seem to have drummed up much of a response I thought I’d get back to black operations. So today we’re going to look at a different thread – the connection or connections between what happened in Northern Ireland and the 7/7 London bombings of 2005. As someone who investigated 7/7 to the point of obsession for over 5 years I have a lot of different thoughts about what happened there, and despite making two feature length films and writing a book I do still find myself thinking of new things about it.

To be sure, I see 7/7 as a mini-9/11, as a Gladio operation or at least a Gladio-type operation, and indeed as the logical follow on from what was going on with black operations in Northern Ireland. And back in the days when I was quite vocal and active in the truth movement about 7/7, I got quite a lot of criticism for not saying this explicitly, not least from the fake whistleblower Tony Farrell, but let’s be honest if you watch my films it is pretty clear where I’m coming from. The sorts of people who object because the painfully obvious wasn’t spelled out to them in big bold letters are usually just a bit thick, from my experience.

I will also at this point give you all my standard lecture regarding 7/7 and how the whole ‘it was an exercise gone live’ thing just doesn’t stack up, and never did. It was always pretty tenuous and speculative, but I developed pretty conclusive evidence that the desktop exercise being run by Peter Power that morning had nothing to do with the actual bombings, and was much more likely something set up as a distraction for people like us, for alternative investigators and commentators and others who engage with these questions and this material. The last three chapters of my book deal with this in detail and I am planning to do an episode of this show or maybe of ClandesTime where I explain my position on the question of exercises as part of false flag operations. My thoughts on that are very complicated so now is not the time, but please do at least consider what I’m saying here – that Peter Power and the ‘exercise gone live’ explanation of 7/7 is a gigantic waste of time.

The much more likely and better evidenced explanation for how the four alleged suicide bombers were manipulated into the position where they could be blamed for this terrorist attack, is MI5, or at least a network that would have to include people within MI5. There is no evidence that Peter Power or anyone from his company ever even met the alleged bombers. By contrast, we know, with abundant supporting evidence, that MI5 and other branches of the British security services had information on them going back to even before 9/11. They had photographs, phone numbers, vehicle registration details, addresses, they even bugged conversations and tapped phones belonging to these men. Yet, every time they got some information it either wasn’t shared with MI5 or emails weren’t answered, leads weren’t followed up, databases failed to spit out information that they should have had, photographs were so poorly replicated that informants couldn’t recognise the people in them, all sorts of ludicrous and wonderful intelligence failures.

Just like with 9/11 this didn’t happen once or twice or five times. It happened every single damn time. To the extent that even quite serious mainstream commentators have suggested that Sidique Khan, the supposed ringleader of this gang of supposed suicidal Muslim terrorists, was actually working for MI5. I have suggested this myself. Which does offer the rather Hollywood possibility that he was working for them and betrayed them, but the problem with that is the sheer lack of physical evidence that these men were at the bomb sites when the bombs were going off. And the massive problems with all the evidence presented for that claim, such as the descriptions of the officers who found the bodies (days later) not matching the descriptions of the forensic anthropologist who examined them days later and said they were likely suicide bombers.

Again, much more likely, if he was working for them, is that they betrayed him and set him and the three others up, murdered them and blamed them for 7/7. But even if he wasn’t working them, the rest still applies. I think the most likely explanation of 7/7 is that it was a Gladio or Gladio-type operation and that these four men were set up.

Now I should make clear – this sort of operation, the pure false flag where the accused wasn’t in any way responsible for what happened, is quite rare. Usually the patsy does actually do part of they are accused of having done. Timothy McVeigh did drive a truck with a bomb and park it outside that building. Exactly why, and who John Doe number 2 was, and who planted the bombs that were inside the building and set them off at the same time as the truck bomb, I don’t know the answers to those question. But I am pretty sure McVeigh did bomb the Federal Building. So that was a disguised operation, a false flag operation, but not a pure false flag as I’m suggesting 7/7 was. I would offer the same broad analysis of WTC93 – Ramzi Yousef and the rest did bomb the World Trade Center, but the reasons why are not the reasons offered by the prosecution, there are a number of unindicted people in that case who were military or intelligence assets, and there may even have been extra bombs in that case too, though the evidence is less conclusive than in Oklahoma where, let’s face it, it’s obvious just from looking at what was left of the building that this wasn’t just a truck bomb.

I should also make clear – this sort of pure false flag was used in Northern Ireland. You remember I talked about the ‘own goal’, where the British military intelligence unit, along with help from militant Loyalists, would plant a bomb in a Republican Catholic pub or bar and try to make it look like the Republicans had accidentally blown themselves up. Slightly different, of course, but the same purity of deception – the people blamed simply did not do it.

And the purity of this deception with 7/7 can be summed up in one phrase – the hallmarks of Al Qaeda. This phrase wasn’t really used before 7/7, but has become something of a buzz phrase or catchphrase since then. The first media reports to use this phrase came from the BBC (no surprise there) attributing it to sources in Saudi intelligence. This was on the morning of 7/7, within hours of the attacks. They used it again in their evening news coverage, as did CNN and some other US news outlets. The hallmarks of Al Qaeda.

The problem is that the attacks didn’t bear the hallmarks of Al Qaeda. Bombings on the London underground network are almost as old as the underground itself. The fenians, the anarchists, the IRA on numerous occasions, including multiple more or less simultaneous bombings, they all had a go.

Likewise, the only previous bombing on a London bus in the city’s history was in 1996, which was blamed on the IRA. The exact scenario is pretty chilling – the bombing was initially blamed on a young Irishman whose was injured in the explosion, but then the police realised that the only person to have died in the blast was also Irish, and so they blamed it on him. So this was an Irish Republican who supposedly set off his bomb by accident and killed himself. Just like the ‘own goal’ bombings in Northern Ireland that were manufactured by British military intelligence. Just under 10 years later another bus blows up, and this time it is blamed on an Islamic terrorist who supposedly did it deliberately.

In any case, anyone who was familiar with the history of terrorism in this country, even the mainstream official version history, such as the BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner, they would have known that this ‘hallmarks of Al Qaeda’ was nonsense and that the attacks, at least what we knew about them in the early hours, bore the hallmarks of the IRA.

Now, I’m not saying the IRA did the bombings. I’m just saying that a completely mainstream analysis would have suggested that in the early hours, rather than the ‘hallmarks of Al Qaeda’ bullshit. From my perspective, blowing up trains and a bus actually has the hallmarks of Gladio – a large number of Gladio operations targeted public transport systems, for psychological reasons as much as anything else.

Likewise, the two similar bombings in Western Europe – the Paris Metro bombings in the mid 1990s and the Madrid bombings in 2004 – were both blamed on Islamic militants and may well have been carried out by them, but these were Islamic militants with curious connections to the security services. If we go a bit broader and include the 1994 hijacking of the Air France flight by Algerian militants who apparently wanted to crash it into the Eiffel Tower, that was the brainchild of Djamel Zitouni, an agent of Algerian intelligence. The history of terrorist attacks on public transport points in two directions – the IRA, and Islamists connected to or working for the intelligence services. Any honest analysis of 7/7, in terms of the target and style of attacks, would admit this from the off.

But no, we got ‘the attacks bear the hallmarks of Al Qaeda’. And they do, if by ‘Al Qaeda’ you mean ‘Gladio’. Just quickly before I move on, this phrase was quite frequently used in the years after 7/7, most laughably in the coverage of the ‘print toner cartridge bomb plot’, which amounted to the square root of fuck all. There was no print toner cartridge bomb plot, but that didn’t stop some media commentators saying that the plot bore ‘all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda’. I have to admit, when I saw that all I could do was laugh.

But the real Ireland – 7/7 connections come in the backstory of Sidique Khan and the other alleged suicide bombers. There are two key figures here – Martin McDaid and Samantha Lewthwaite. McDaid was, according to media reports, a former Royal Marine and SBS commando – the SBS is the Special Boat Services, the naval equivalent of the SAS, roughly the equivalent of the US Navy Seals. He was a counter-terrorist operative during the war on terror in Northern Ireland, but in the late 1990s – just as Gladio B was getting going and some years after he left the military – he converted to Islam, grew a big beard and told people to call him Abdullah.

McDaid ran the Iqra bookshop – an Islamic bookshop in Leeds which was also a charitable organisation. The three of the alleged bombers who were from the Leeds area – Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer and Hasib Hussain – all hung out with McDaid and at this bookshop. The charity received thousands of pounds in government grants and among other things McDaid used this to run camping trips, adventure weekends in the countryside, some of which involved military-style training exercises. Now, I’m talking running up and down, doing aerobic drills, that sort of thing. There were no weapons or explosives or anything like that.

Nonetheless, these trips were monitored by the security services from as early as January 2001, before 9/11. They even planted a camera in a barn to film the people there, and among those they caught on tape was Sidique Khan. There is a lot more to it than that and to give you an idea I’m going to play for you a clip from the BBC show Newsnight, who did a number of features about McDaid and the Iqra bookshop. This is from 2011, the day before the Coroners Inquests into the 7/7 deaths published its final report. Watch out for the presenter – Richard Watson – who has a little trick of taking things that the guy being interviewed is saying about McDaid and pretending he’s saying them about McDaid and Sidique Khan. The full clip is a little under 12 minutes so I’ll play it then come back and break down a few relevant details.

I’m sure you get the idea of the story the BBC are trying to sell to you, so I thought it would be fun to take out all of their nonsense and just play the clips the guy being interviewed, because he does say some rather provocative things. So I’ve put that together for you, just to show you the importance of ignoring the framing and focusing on the raw data being presented. And because I think it’s a good illustration of what I think McDaid really was.

That gives you quite a different impression of things than the full BBC clip. Assuming this witness isn’t just a liar, fantasist, or working for Special Branch, his account doesn’t implicate Sidique Khan at all, but suggests that McDaid, the man who has now conveniently disappeared, is the one to focus on.

As I said before, McDaid and the Iqra bookshop were under investigation by the security services for years before 7/7. I have talked about this before, in my documentaries, in my book and especially in a presentation I did at a 9/11 truth event in London which you can find under the name 7/7 Intelligence Failures and Double Agents. But the basic pattern is that every time they got some information, something went wrong. This investigation into McDaid and the group involved with the bookshop never really went anywhere. This was all dressed up after 7/7 as ‘woopsadaisy’ bureaucratic errors, while conveniently providing a backstory implicating the alleged bombers. One might argue that was the point of these investigations – to provide just enough evidence that it helps to sell the official story of the official culprits, while obviously not interrupting the operation McDaid was running. Indeed, that’s exactly what I think was happening.

So, if you want a full run down of all the failures then look up the presentation I mentioned or get a copy of my book Secrets, Spies and 7/7, but there is one example I want to focus in on because it just pisses me off, basically, I just don’t believe it and can’t believe anyone else does.

Among the various surveillance operations on McDaid was one called Honeysuckle, run in April 2003. West Yorkshire Special Branch followed him round for a couple of days and saw him get a lift in a blue BMW. They got the registration number, checked up on it, found that the car belonged to Sidique Khan. They never told MI5 about this, and when asked at the 2011 inquests about this they simply said that the information had nothing to do with the purpose of operation Honeysuckle. But the only conceivable purpose for this additional surveillance was to find out more about McDaid’s circle of associates, who was going on these camping trips and so on. So the information must have been relevant. So why wasn’t it passed on? The question has never been answered in a remotely adequate way.

There’s also the question of whether it had to be passed on, since Honeysuckle is described as a joint operation with MI5. Presumably MI5 officers were present for most of this if not all of this, so did they need to explicitly be told about this car and the person it was registered to?

In any case, they are pretending that West Yorkshire Special Branch didn’t tell them about it at the time. That does not explain what happened next. When Khan’s turned up in a separate security service operation codenamed Crevice in early 2004 he became a person who MI5 were explicitly interested in finding out more about. In mid 2004, when they were following up on Operation Crevice, they sent an email to the NERIC, a police intelligence unit in the north east of England. They asked about Sidique Khan, whose basic police record was correctly identified and details were sent back to MI5.

But for some reason the response to MI5 from the NERIC says that there was no record of Khan on West Yorkshire Special Branch systems. Why was there no record of him? They had him on file as the owner of the blue BMW that gave a lift to McDaid a little over a year earlier. Again, they were asked about this at the inquests and their only answer was that they could find no reason why the information did not come up. They said that they reconstructed the database as it was at the time of the searches in 2004, and the information about the BMW came up with they put in Khan’s name. So basically their answer was ‘we don’t know what was wrong but it is ok because it’s working again now’.

Well, Mr Assistant Chief Constable John Parkinson of the West Yorkshire Police, I can think of a reason why it didn’t work. Either someone deliberately didn’t spell the name right or didn’t do the search right, or alternatively someone got into the database and temporarily deleted the information, i.e. you were hacked. And the only people who would have the means, motive and opportunity to do that, would be working for MI5 or another branch of the British security services. Of course, no such possibility has been raised in any official investigation or media coverage.

Looked at another way, were these intelligence failures the result of more sophisticated versions of the ‘out of bounds’ broadcast I discussed a couple of episodes ago? In Belfast the security services were told to clear out of a certain area of town, thus enabling a black operation to take place. Are these ‘failures’ of information in the run up to 7/7 just the digital equivalent of the same techniques? I would not be at all surprised.

The legacy of McDaid is that he was last seen at the Sohar College in Oman, teaching English. There is a website set up, ostensibly with the aim of finding him for being an Islamic radical preacher, and the guestbook is quite amazing to read. It is full of people who apparently knew him when he taught at this college, where it doesn’t seem he was very popular. One comment is a confession from someone who attacked McDaid with a briefcase and how McDaid ran away and hid in the Dean’s office, trembling and crying.

The same commenter later wrote, ‘Martin, I’ll sorry that I crashed my brief-case down hard on your fucked up, smirking islamist head that day in Sohar College. By all accounts and unanimous verdict by everyone in the College, including the Indian janitors, you deserved it mate. However, I would like to apologise nonetheless, but only on one condition: that you stop running and return to your family in the UK. It’s time to put an end to all this Muslim bull-shit. Realise your mistake and become an apostate – revert back to Catholicism and back to western values again. Don’t be a loser all your life!!!! I had hoped that my donging you on the head may have put back those few loose screws. It was my hope.’

So what the hell this website is, who set it up and whether anything on it is true are not questions I can answer for you. But it’s worth a look, if only as a piece of the bizarre web. You can find it at Martin-Abdullah-McDaid.webs.com, and let me know if you can make any sense of it because I really don’t know what to think about that one. Suffice to say, McDaid himself is not going to appear in a courtroom anytime soon.

Now, there are two other likely secret agents of the British and American security services who were involved in the background of the 7/7 alleged bombers, Mohammed Junaid Babar and Mohammed Quayyum Khan. I have spoken about these two at some length in many interviews and frankly this episode is already longer than I anticipated and neither of those two has anything to do with Northern Ireland.

But a young lady who definitely does have that connection is Samantha Lewthwaite, the wife of the fourth alleged bomber, Germaine Lindsay. While Khan and the others were involved at the Iqra bookshop and other things, none of this really involved Lindsay. He didn’t live near Leeds, he never went to the bookshop, as far as we know, he never went on any of the camping trips, he doesn’t turn up in the surveillance videos and photographs, his phone wasn’t tapped, he isn’t on any of the bugged conversations.

So how did he get mixed up in all this? From what I can tell, Lindsay was some sort of petty criminal, likely a low level drug dealer. He was stopped by the police on numerous occasions in the months before 7/7, suggesting he too was under some kind of police surveillance, but he was never arrested. His car was apparently used in an armed robbery only days before 7/7, which makes no sense. If you were on a secret suicide mission, only days away from committing a terrorist atrocity, you would not draw attention to yourself by lending your car to some idiot to go and carry out an armed robbery.

He was married to a woman a little older than he was, called Samantha Lewthwaite. They both converted to Islam as teenagers, and apparently met via an internet chatroom. Sam Lewthwaite’s father served in the British military in Northern Ireland – indeed she was born there.

After 7/7, it is telling that while most of the relatives of the alleged bombers kept a very low profile, with the exception of Hasib Hussain’s father who denied that his son did it, Sam Lewthwaite did the opposite. She sold a story to a major tabloid newspaper for tens of thousands of pounds where she became the only relative of any of the alleged bombers to say that they were guilty, that they did it. This helped sell that idea to the public.

She then went into hiding, before taking off for South Africa in 2007, I think. Since then she has become possibly the world’s most wanted women, supposedly getting involved with Al Shabaab and other Al Qaeda type groups, travelling all over the South and East of Africa, even reportedly turning up in Syria training ISIS suicide bombers. She was blamed for masterminding the 2013 Kenyan Shopping Mall Massacre, before escaping through a tunnel network and then across the desert on the back of a camel. She also supposedly knew Michael Adebolajo, the guy who tried to behead a soldier in Woolwich a couple of years ago.

And she supposedly managed this despite being a white women with several mixed race children, moving in areas where someone like that would stick out like a sort thumb and be easy to track. An awful lot of the men she either has children with or gets married to seem to end up dead or in prison, and it seems the security services can’t get near her.

Then, in 2014 it was reported that she’d been shot dead in Ukraine by a Russian sniper. The Western media went quiet on her for about 6 months, before in April/May of this year they started up again, talking about how she has been behind the murders of hundreds of people, she is apparently now working for Al Shabaab’s intelligence unit and has an army of 200 female jihadis who she has trained to infiltrate governments and carry out suicide attacks.

Of course, most if not all of this is nonsense. Where is the money coming from? How is all this travel facilitated? How are the British security services not able to find this woman? There’s no way this story is true. Indeed, as much as I hate the crisis actor conspiracy theory, this is one instance where I very much do think that this woman’s face and identity have been sold and are being used to sell a story that she has nothing to do with. Either that or she’s an extremely high-functioning MI6 operative and she is actually doing most of this stuff.

That would explain why the Russian media started reporting that she’s been shot dead in Ukraine. Obviously she wasn’t, but that is a story that sends a signal to the West, they aren’t saying ‘Samantha Lewthwaite is dead’, they are saying ‘the operation that your media calls Samantha Lewthwaite is dead’. The fact that the Western media, i.e. the intelligence services, waited 6 months before responding by having an anonymous anti-terrorism expert push a new round of stories about her suggests that the signal was at the least heard and considered. But then probably ignored, because I don’t think NATO is going to stop, hence the fresh round of stories about her. And it would be neglectful of me if I didn’t mention the film White Widow: The Samantha Lewthwaite Conspiracy by Jon Ryman which is a very provocative and entertaining piece all about this woman.

So, that is how I think the alleged 7/7 bombers were set up and what it has to do with the war on terror in Northern Ireland. In terms of both personnel and techniques the connections are there. One War on Terror evolved into another, and is evolving into another as I speak.