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08 August 2005

London blasts - Blair Rejected Inquiry

Three days after 7/7, Tony Blair promised the most 'vigourous and intensive' police manhunts to catch those behind the deaths on the Underground. Around the same time, the following story appeared in a few places before going off the boil:
Blair rejects calls for probe into bombings
By James Blitz, Political Editor, and Jimmy Burns
Published: July 10 2005 20:55 | Last updated: July 10 2005 20:55

Tony Blair will on Monday reject Conservative demands for a government inquiry into last week's London bomb attacks, insisting such a move would distract from the task of catching the perpetrators.

As police and security services on Sunday continued searching for the bombers - thought to be Islamist terrorists - Downing Street said the prime minister believed an inquiry now into the outrage which killed at least 49 people would be a 'ludicrous diversion.'

What does Blair suggest a government inquiry would be a diversion from? Certainly not from helping us all establish what happened that day - unless of course it's another hatchet Hutton-job - so it must be a diversion from something else, maybe the truth.

If Blair doesn't want an inquiry there are opposition parties whose job it is to oppose. If they're not opposing the government on something that is in direct conflict with the best interests of the public then opposition parties have become even more transparent and redundant than ever before.

Perhaps Blair should be made to justify his reluctance to hold an inquiry to the grief-stricken families of the 7/7 victims and see if they concur, or whether they would rather know the truth behind how their loved ones died needlessly.

According to Associated Press:
Addressing the House of Commons, Blair was expected to say he has full confidence in Britain's security forces and that such a probe would distract them from the important task of catching the perpetrators.

'Full confidence' in what exactly? The ability of the security services to undertake only one simple task at a time?

Surely any form of inquiry would be a useful part of understanding what happened that morning before proceeding with the 'important task of catching the perpetrators'? Factor in also that we're all meant to believe that the Underground was riddled with suicide bombers on 7 July which, if it were true, would mean that there are no perpetrators left alive to catch for 7/7, thereby freeing up considerable governmental and security resources to conduct an inquiry.

Now that police authorities and intelligence services have been reborn as the omnipresent and omnipotent Serious Organised Crime Agency introduced with the SOCrAP Act, information sharing should now be easier than ever before, thereby making Blair's rejection of a government inquiry even less excusable and even more curious than it might otherwise have been given the severity of the alleged terrorist attack on London.

Blair doesn't want anyone to look into what happened on the Underground that morning and the world's media is happy filling more column inches and dead air than it dreamt possible with science-fiction rumours dressed up as science-fact 'news'. The irony is that the resultant 'news' renders the vast majority of the information in those column inches as void as the blank sheets of paper on which they were printed and the airwaves as dead as they were before the media circus rolled into town.

With this in mind, it's easy to see why there has been such extensive media coverage of the alleged bombers on 21 July, the day when there was no visible evidence at all of any bomb activity, unlike the evidence from two weeks earlier of the overground 'explosion' of a bus some 60 minutes after three simultaneous incidents on the London Underground.

That Blair doesn't want an inquiry to be held should be sufficient reason for all of us to insist one occurs. That there also exists substantial evidence which dramatically contradicts the media and public perception of events should be all that's required to tip the balance.

The question remains: Why did Tony Blair deny the government inquiry owed to the families of the victims of 7/7, and the British public, just days after the horrific deaths of 56 people?

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