Peter Power on Newsnight Blog

[Prole]

[THETRUTHWILLSETU3]

Alex Jones actually got an actuary to work out the chances of the drills happening by coincidence at same stations, same day and same time.

The number was so large it exceeded the number of grains of sand on planet earth

Therefore chance of being coincidence = nil conspiracy = 100%

[Skeptic]

^ I thought that calculation was laughable

what was their input data?

the number of stations in the UK?

the number of tube stations?

the number of days in a year? the number of days drills have occured?

if he wants people to listen then why not just explain how many factors were involved and say it would have been an incredible coincidence/ miracle?

[scubadiver]

I also think that calculation was a bit daft as well. I think the bloke just included all the underground stations, but doesn't the likelihood of a particular station being bombed increase dramatically as you move into the centre of London. However, even if you include the stations within (and including) the circle line, it is still quite small I think.

[conspiracy analyst]

Was there a drill in the Madrid train bombings as well?

If 2 out of 3 major terror attacks had a drill going on the chances/probability they weren't an inside job become minimal.

Terror 'drill' may come to mean live practice.

[Leiff]

I don't think that we are the ones with 'inhibited vision' - I think we see all too clearly!

[Mark Gobell]

My comment on the Newsnight blog:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2006/08/which_side_are_you_on.htm l#c142643

The question posed by the BBC is devisive by design. You paraphrase the global village idiot when he tells the world that we are either with him or the terorists.

Do you really expect anyone, other than fanatics to support terrorism ?

Equally, do you really expect anyone, other than idiots to support illegal wars ?

What evidence do you have for Islamic terror in the UK ?

London 7/7 per chance ?

Maybe Peter Power could enlighten us all.

You insult the memory of the dead, the maimed and their families.

All you have to rely on is a government narrative.

Liquid Bombs on planes - even the dumbed down journos at the BBC cannot really believe that.

Is that your evidence ?

Would you accept a government narrative if your family was wiped out by a bomb ?

Until Bliar and the rest of the war criminals who voted for these illegal 9/11 Wars consent to a full investigation of the events of 7/7 your question remains a non sequitur.

I am old enough to remember the IRA bombing campaign in England. Did the BBC attempt to divide us with such "questions" then ?

Were we asked to align ourselves with the Catholics or against them ?

Did we bomb Belfast or Dublin in retaliation ?

More to the point did we bomb Boston or New York to punish those who helped fund the IRA ?

The BBC is little more than Bliar's state propaganda machine these days.

You should all hang your heads in shame.

[foliagecop]

Brilliant, Mark! I've mentioned the IRA comparison myself to friends in the past, and they've suddenly started to see things in a different light.

It's a devastating argument, and pretty much indefensible from the government's point of view, in my opinion.

[Rabbie McM]

My tuppence hapenny worth on this:



Peter Power wrote:

* At 09:25 AM on 17 Sep 2006,
* Peter Power wrote:

My name repeatedly comes up whenever armchair / conspiratorial thinkers consider the terrorist exercise my company ran in London at exactly the same time as 7/7. This is only the second time I have formally reacted to these numerous statements. I’ve also appeared many times on BBC News / Newsnight to explain post 9/11 & 7/7 concepts such as ‘new normal’ etc. I think anyone familiar with likely terrorist targets will release our exercise scenario was coincidence rather than conspiracy, but it does start to raise some interesting points on a wider scale.

Several features now exist to create a much more generic and all-hazards approach to numerous risks and threats that are uniquely starting to appear on the global / corporate radar screen irrespective of country, culture, geography or sector. Some of these are already occurring such as a new form of terrorism that has no ‘political’ objective, the effect of high volume and unrestricted information on the internet, spread of disease / mass travel (230m people passed through UK airports last year / all major air hubs are less than 72 hours apart), ineffective world leaders & UN, the consequences of accelerating global warming, the positioning of key essential / physiological supplies (Critical National Infrastructure – CNI - UK) in the private sector (e.g. electricity, water etc.) and an associated failure to understand how vital the private sector is not only in terms of employment, economy and wealth generation, but to maintain almost the entire CNI in most if it not all countries.

In several cases these threats and risks combine to create a series of problems that we are presently unable to deal with as a result of silo based attitudes, incompetence, proprietorial behaviour or just complacency.

There is I suggest, a need to start building a new approach based on conceptualising and hopefully influencing others since we are presently lacking a truly forward thinking and pan global collective body of influential advisors, practitioners and academics that transcends the otherwise valuable but discrete institutions in many countries and their individual agendas. It might just inform many others as to what terrorism is all about and get them to think twice before alleging my own company was some how implicated in 7/7. My aim is to help stimulate, collaborate and disseminate effective and non partisan advice without the handicap of parochial restrictions, silo constraints or inhibited vision.

[quote]

Mr Power seems quite a clever fellow. His rant above seems to be following quite well the old "problem reaction solution model" we hear about.
Particularly, his suggestion about a global approach to avert the "terrorist threat."

When he was on Radio 5 talking about the bombings just after the event when he said he was "running drills" for a "company" and indicating that they had to switch from their very similar "fictional scenario" to "real time" (I paraphrase) - my retort as an interviewer would have been "That's highly suspicious." But I guess thats why I never got a job in journalism.

[ian neal]

[kbo234]

The 'number' mentioned might not be greater than the number of grains of sand on the planet but it would be a very large number indeed.

Actually the bombers could have hit any station in London (The IRA hit all kinds of obscure places, Guildford , Warrington etc.), overground or underground....but let us assume there were only 30 possible targets in central London (say).

If there are 200 (minimum) working days in a year then it is 1/200 that Powell would have hit on the correct day in that year. To hit the exact three stations out of thirty gives odds of 1 in (30 x 29 x 28 ) or about
1/24 000. So far that is odds of 1/4 800 000 or approximately 5 million to one against. For the exercises to be synchronous with the explosions reduces this figure further. If you then multiply by the odds of selecting the right number of explosions underground (3, when it was most likely to be one, less for 2 less again for 3..and so on.....) would reduce these odds again.

There may be further improbabilities to be included in the calculation but if one estimated odds using ALL the possible targets then the figure would indeed become astronomical.

Whichever way you look at it I think it is pretty clearly an impossible coincidence.

In addition, we can bear in mind that similar coincidences occurred on 9/11 and elsewhere, then there is only one sensible conclusion.

The people who employed Powell had foreknowledge of the events.

Case closed.

[Bushwacker]

1. Peter Power's company trains companies in crisis management. For a London based company, an exercise would need to be London based. The bombers presumably wished to hit the nation's capital for symbolic reasons, and travelled to London to do so.
2. The odds of it being the same day are not 1 in 200, unless Power only does one training session every year. As this is his company's business, he must do many more or they would not be in business for long. And of course each training session has a number of scenarios, not just the one.
3. In the only detail he has given of his exercise, Power said they used one mainline and one Underground station, not three Underground stations, so as he said, the scenario was similar but not identical.
4. It is not altogether surprising that a man of Power's experience, thinking of a likely terrorist scenario, should get quite close. A previous TV programme also did, the Underground is an obvious target.
5. If either of them had foreknowledge of the events, what conceivable motive would either Power or his clients have for putting on this training exercise, and then shouting the odds about it?
6. Coincidences do occur, like the three D-day codewords turning up as clues in the Telegraph crossword shortly before the event.
7. Unless something else emerges, this has to be classified as simply a bizarre coincidence.

[suspecta]

I don't think it was a coincidence at all, but I don't think Alex Jones' calculation made sense either. There was a tube terror exercise a few weeks before 7/7 as well, yet the government claimed not to have had any warning that the attacks were going to take place - suspicious enough in itself, so I think we can take it as read that the 'terror attacks' were some kind of inside job.

However, Alex Jones should redo his calculation and only include the time since Britain joined the US in its 'war on terror', and only use central London tube stations, and weekday rush hours. Then you might get a more accurate idea of how much of a coincidence it was/wasn't.

Suspecta

[suspecta]

[kbo234]

[Skeptic]

^ yes I think the possibility that Power released the information to protect himself is a good explanation, but who knows

regarding his statement that he was working for a company that he wouldn't name but 'they know who they are' - it has been mentioned that Giuliani was in London on the morning of 7/7 and that he runs an emergency/ terror response company - perhaps the message was for him? (speculation, obviously)

[Bushwacker]

[Bushwacker]