Power cut in London

"As mentioned below, London suffered a power cut yesterday evening that also knocked out the London Underground and rendered parts of Central London pitch black.

The news have this morning covered the fact that one power system failure was inexplicably followed by another which gave us the situation that we eventually had - power cut and blackout. All sounds very believable to some. But to have two separate unconnected systems go down at the same time, not due to a knock-on effect and we're expected to believe that it just `happened'? I don't think so.

Sherman Skolnick appeared on Canadian radio show `Cloak and Dagger' and stated that the Saudis were moving currency out of the UK on Thursday evening. To counter the loss of funds, he alleges that a British gamble on the financial markets was to be tried to regain some of the lost money. Having discovered the plan, the French then assisted in knocking out the power in London, he claimed.

Well why not? It would explain more than the official explanation - two systems going down at the same time in amazing synchronicity.

Tim Green of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Imperial College London told me that the two failures were a strange coincidence.

Cloak and Dagger also discussed the movement of $100 billion from the joint HM the Queen/ George Bush Sr account at Coutts Bank to George's account in the USA, allegedly using Alan Greenspan's own Federal Reserve codes. The documents backing these assertions, and other interesting paperwork are available at C&D's associated site."

- Editor

The inside track - conversations with the media

"In case you are wondering how it is that I have conversations with members of the media, I can explain it by saying that I get around a lot, and I'm not shy about talking to people. At the moment, I am working very close by to the Royal Courts of Justice where the Hutton Inquiry into Dr Kelly's death is being held. I hence have somewhat privileged access to members of the press.

Here is Thursday's encounter.

I saw Robin Oakley outside the Court. Oakley is now the European political editor for CNN. He used to be the BBC's political editor but I suppose CNN made him an offer he couldn't refuse.

Ed: Mr Oakley, you may might like to let CNN's viewers know that for weeks we've had beautiful weather, but the day Mr Blair appears at the Hutton Inquiry, it rains.

RO: You can't blame the government for the weather.

[OAKLEY CROSSES THE ROAD TO THE TRAFFIC ISLAND WITH ALL THE PRESS]

Ed (shouting across the road): Why not? Blair acts like he's God!

[OAKLEY TURNS AROUND AND SMILES WRYLY]

RO: True.

Well, what can I say? CNN's European political editor agreed with me that Blair acts like he's God. So is it any wonder that he thinks he can survive a political storm? The evidence to nail him is there if anyone wants to face the facts. Will the media keep playing this game? Keep checking back.

By the way, the power cut in south London has wreaked havoc on the transport system. Traffic lights were out of order in central London and most Underground lines are completely stuffed up. I had to get a taxi home, and it cost me £47. I'm hoping I can get my company to reimburse me. Otherwise it's more late shifts to pay for that too.

Hopefully the Underground will be back to normal by Friday morning. I find it extraordinary though that we invented undergound trains and yet we can't seem to run them any more. This country is really going downhill. It's not just trains though. Didn't we invent soccer, cricket, tennis, industrial engineering and a host of other things? What are we even passably competent at these days in the UK?

Spin. That's all I can think of. But it's 1am and my brain has dried up. If any readers can tell me what the UK is good at these days, please drop me an email."

- Editor

"A reader drew my attention this morning to a webpage that they had put together, assembling a good deal of emails in chronological order. Those emails were between all the monkeys working on the dossier of intelligence on Iraqi weapons programmes. This reader has obviously had the benefit of time to go through the emails and pluck the pertinent ones out, placing them in a timeline that shows the extent of manipulation behind the scenes. I have to admit that I didn't even know that this information was out there, it had been kept off the radar by the media.

I couldn't believe some of the things which were in the emails. As I previously mentioned, if the press wanted to, they could get Blair any time they wanted with the information and evidence that is already out there. These emails were released as evidence to the Hutton Inquiry.

Take a good long look through these emails, take your time over it and digest just how much they knew and what they were willing to omit to make their specious argument for war.

Click here to see the emails

"Is he going? The press could hang him with his own words if they wanted to.

As usual, they are letting him get away with a technicality.

Blair: "This was an absolutely fundamental charge... this extraordinarily serious allegation which if it were true would mean we had behaved in the most disgraceful way, and I would have to resign as prime minister."

The government have tried to convince us, aided and abetted by a willing press, that the information presented by Andrew Gilligan was a complete fabrication. In fact Gilligan was guilty only of rushing to go to air with the bombshell that Dr Kelly had provided him with. In his haste, he failed to script his report and thus used a few words which were not accurate reflections of what he was told. He revised this in subsequent broadcasts but it has allowed the government to imply that his whole report was baseless.

As such, Blair can then say that he would have resigned but didn't because Gilligan was proved wrong.

Blair's government is banking on the public not thinking. They're hoping that we'll just soak up the spin and the headlines, rather than the nitty gritty, namely that they presented a one-sided argument for war and played on the public's fear in the wake of the September 11th attacks.

Of course Blair couldn't help but have Dr Kelly appear before the Foreign Affairs Select Committe (FASC) - they wanted him to deny that he was the BBC's source. Then they could successfully kill Gilligan's story. It was only when the BBC confirmed that he was the source after he'd been found dead that the war was on again. Kelly's death would have put the allegation of Downing Street manipulation to bed; the BBC messed up the government's plan by owning up to the contact with Kelly. Blair revealed that he had a telephone conversation with Gavyn Davies, Chairman of the BBC to see how the sitution could be `calmed down'.

One question you can guarantee will not be asked at the inquiry is why did Dr Kelly lie before the FASC and deny that he was the BBC's source? The reason that it will not be asked is that it would shed light on the intimidation and pressure on the late Dr Kelly to kill the story.

Blair was Bush's diplomatic figleaf. It was only the UK's stated enthusiasm to deal with Saddam illegally that assuaged the concerns of the American people. Many there had doubts that Bush was not being 100% honest but they were pursuaded by their belief in Tony Blair's conviction that he was an honest guy and that Saddam presented a credible threat.

If Blair goes, the move to dump Bush will get a big boost since the mainstream US press could not ignore what would be the biggest scandal since the arms-to Iraq affair, but a chapter in this long caper.

All we are waiting for is the mainstream press to stop playing the spin game and allowing Blair, Campbell and all the other back-room boys to set the news agenda. The Times is using Hoon's evidence today to show the trail to 10 Downing Street.

Some think that the press in the UK is more independent than what passes for news coverage in the USA. How wrong they can be sometimes. If our press were free they would have called Blair on his lying years ago.

Blair should resign. Bush should never have been in office in the first place. The problem would then be that we'd end up with the same old crap, just with a new name."

- Editor

Gordon Thomas: Microbiologists With Link to Race-Based Weapon Turning Up Dead

University lecturer branded `racist' for weblink

by Simon Aronowitz

The two leading Jewish newspapers in the UK last weekend kicked off a potential firestorm over the views held by university academics.

Dr Nat Queen, lecturer in mathematics and statistics at the University of Birmingham, has been lambasted for a link on his homepage to a website which accuses the US government of being satanic, criticises Israeli policy and questions what involvement Israel may have had in the September 11th attacks in the US.

Read the full story

and Dr Queen's response

Wednesday 27th August 2003

"Yesterday I didn't think that the Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr Kelly would be anything more than a literally made-for-television script. (To the American readers, TV cameras are not allowed into the courtroom, so the various news programmes and channels have been dramatically recreating the day's events from the transcripts).

Today - early I might add, I need to go to bed - I'm not so sure. According to Murdoch's Times, John Scarlett, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee ramped up the threat that Iraq posed in his testimony on Tuesday. Scarlett " disclosed secret raw intelligence claiming that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction in an average of 20 minutes — less than half the time finally published by the Government before the war."

The Independent however points this out in its story headlined

`Spy chief undermines key plank of case for war'

"John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which was in charge of compiling the Iraq weapons dossier, revealed that the alleged threat related not to long-range missiles, which could hit the West, but "battlefield mortar shells or small-calibre weaponry" that did not threaten Britain or even Iraq's neighbours."

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the smoking gun, if we pay attention to it and don't get distracted by the other stuff they wave in your face. Such a damning admission would not normally be made unless they wanted to open a way for our Dear Leader Tony Blair to depart with his saving his reputation in some way.

There have been rumours that the descision to dump Blair and Bush was made at the Bilderberg meeting in Versailles in July of this year. Sometimes rumours turn out to be true.

The inside track from the BBC

I bumped into Mark Mardell from BBC Newsnight yesterday, and he told me that he was covering the Hutton Inquiry. Let me relate the conversation to you as best as I remember it:

Ed: It's all bogus, isn't it?

MM: What?

Ed: The official story. I mean, last Tuesday Andrew Marr let slip on the Ten O'Clock News that `Dr Kelly was killed,' the BBC keep referring to the `apparent' suicide and surely with all the contact the BBC had with Kelly, you guys have the inside track on the story.

MM: That's a conspiracy theory. Are you seriously suggesting that if the BBC had knowledge that the British government murdered Dr Kelly we'd just sit on it?

Ed: Yes.

Mardell also informed me that Newsnight's Susan Watts will probably be going to Channel 4 News. To me it didn't look like she'd be working for the BBC after her testimony to the inquiry.

So Mardell calls it a `conspiracy theory'. You may recall that the same term was used for speculation of what happened to Roberto Calvi, also known as `God's Banker', when he was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London in what appeared to many to clearly be a masonic murder. I'm sure that when Calvi's body was found there were elements of the UK mainstream press who knew what really happened, but in just the same way that the FBI manages to drown out any alternative information on 9/11 as the only `credible' source, this happens in the UK too.

It took 21 years for the truth about Calvi to come out. Hopefully we won't have to wait this long for the real story about the strange and unexpected death of Dr Kelly."

- Editor

Sorry it's short again today folks, and apologies for the lack of updates - I have some paid work, so my time is a little limited. I'd love to do this full time, but I have to pay my bills, student loan, tax demand, hosting etc.

Your supporting this website is very much appreciated.

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