Lone gunmen are so passe

I was having a moderately heated debate with a family member a little while ago. He’s been a London paramedic for donkeys’ years and he still retains a faith in the leadership of our security forces and their motivations that I lost long ago.

He’s not stupid

And he simply cannot understand why I harbour doubts about the whos, whys and hows of the bombings in London last year.

We argue about this stuff a lot

And, very reasonably in his worldview, no matter what inconsistencies in the official accounts of that day I point to he simply discounts them as being the result of human error, bureaucracy or some other human failings.

Nothing malign.

And, must frustratingly of all, the task of trying to critically discuss 7/7 with him, or anyone else, is terminally hobbled by the fact that the single biggest cause to have doubts about 7/7 is the absence of evidence from that day.

You can have a fair stab at debating the significance of a piece of evidence everyone has seen but simply citing a long list of evidence you haven’t seen isn’t very productive or interesting; particularly if the person you are debating with has faith in the System.

As far as they are concerned, everything will all come out in the end, once the inherently slow, but essentially benevolent, machinery of state has done its thing.

That’s why it has taken almost five years for 9/11 scepticism to start breaking into the mainstream in the US and that is why it will probably take a similar amount of time for doubts about 7/7, if they haven’t been resolved, to gain widespread currency.

A 7/7 related trial would help speed the process up a fair bit; relying as it would on quaint concepts such as evidence, witnesses, a defence, a jury.

Bizarre I know but I’m old fashioned like that…

However, it seems pretty clear that there’s absolutely no way on Christ’s Earth our government is going to permit anything like that to happen

To my knowledge, nobody has been charged with anything to do with the 7/7 bombings. The supposed bombers are dead and no accomplices have been arrested.

Ergo no trial

Ditto for 9/11 and the Madrid bombings

Which is pretty astonishing when you think about it, particularly when you consider how many people have been arrested and charged in relation to other terror 'plots' – 44 in connection with the 21/7 powder puff bombs, a couple of dozen as part of the War on Lucozade in our airports last August. Fuck it, the police even managed to collar a dozen terror suspects at what used to be my local Chinese takeway...

not that any of those guys are anywhere near their day in court either

Personally, if a decent body of critically scrutinised evidence was released to the public domain that proved the four guys accused of carrying out 7/7 did do it I’m open to accept that and move on. On the other hand, in the absence of such evidence and copious examples of our government and security forces acting like weasels well… what’s a boy supposed to think?

Hypothetically speaking, if you were in the dead patsy production business, and of course nobody is, suicide bombers offer significant improvements over more traditional lone gunmen in a couple of key ways

• suicide patsies are capable of killing loads more people and are therefore much scarier

• you don’t need to employ a Jack Ruby figure to stop your patsies making it to trial
  

Anyway, I mention all this because Bridget Dunne, one of the handful of people who has managed to coax anything that approximates to progress on ‘7/7 Truth’ (John Reid being obliged to fess up and publicly admit that the official account of 7/7 contained at least one ‘error' warmed the cockles of my heart, it did), was interviewed by Fintan (no relation) Dunne the other day and the mp3 can be found here.

That doesn’t qualify as an unqualified endorsement of Fintan's site BTW. He does come up with interesting stuff but he also seems to labour under the impression that he is more infallible than the Pope and that anybody who disagrees with him is probably under CIA Control; including, once in the past, me.

That's not to say that the Internet isn't riddled with spooks, or cooks, or weirdos, but sometimes people do just disagree with each other.

Besides, I think I would know if I were under CIA control

\checks bacofoil helmet

Nope, the signals definitely aren’t getting through

\adds another sheet of shiny protection just to be on the safe side