Ian Blair: "I'm not saying there are four bombers"

Credit has to go to Sir Ian Blair for correcting himself when he accidently claimed the existence of "four miserable bombers" when, in fact, nobody knows this to be the case yet.

SIR IAN BLAIR, LONDON METROPOLITAN POLICE COMMISSIONER:

"If London could survive the Blitz, it can survive four miserable bombers like this...."

[brief pause that always comes with an overwhelming sense of realisation]

"I'm not saying there are four bombers.... four miserable events like this."

Oh, and the military grade explosives that were rumoured to have been used on the Underground with sophisticated timers? Well, the timers never turned up and tonight Newsnight reports that the police have only found household chemicals in the Leeds homes that were raided, not military grade explosives.

Channel 4 News tonight showed a CCTV capture of the 'bus bomber' which they claimed "had been cropped from a wider picture of all four bombers". Why was it cropped? Surely seing them all four suspects together would help jog the memories of anyone that might have seen them, especially seeing as an individual photo is also being circulated.

Newsnight also announced that the CCTV camera on the Number 30 bus, conveniently enough, wasn't working. Not that it was affected in the blast, just that it wasn't working.

Also from Newsnight, the Number 30 bus driver had been ordered to re-route the bus on the morning of July 7th for it to end up in Tavistock Square.

The Antagonist has noted that indeed, according to TFL's route maps, Tavistock Square is not on the standard Number 30 bus route as the normal route would take the bus straight along Euston Road into Marylebone Road, rather than turning left into Woburn Place.

Who diverted it? On what basis? Was it diverted into the rehearsal operation approximately an hour and half after the simultaneous tube disasters, something which could account for the significant missing 81 minutes of the 'bus bomber' hitting the papers today? Was it going there anyway, something which, in keeping with the practice of these tactical rehearsal operations, the driver wouldn't be told until the last minute as per the Newsnight story?

How long would it take to investigate what happened on the trains in the deepest part of the Underground if a power surge had affected monitoring systems and lights as MetroNet and survivors reported at the time of the tragedy?


[Update 15/07/05@12:40: The Number 30 bus was going the other way down Euston Road and turned right into Woburn Place (Source: ITV News). This doesn't change the fact it was diverted to here.]

BBC Edits Out The Word Terrorist

Telegraph News - BBC edits out the word terrorist
By Tom Leonard, Filed: 12/07/2005

The BBC has re-edited some of its coverage of the London Underground and bus bombings to avoid labelling the perpetrators as 'terrorists', it was disclosed yesterday.

Early reporting of the attacks on the BBC's website spoke of terrorists but the same coverage was changed to describe the attackers simply as 'bombers'.

The BBC's guidelines state that its credibility is undermined by the 'careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgments'.

Consequently, 'the word 'terrorist' itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding' and its use should be 'avoided', the guidelines say.

Rod Liddle, a former editor of the Today programme, has accused the BBC of 'institutionalised political correctness' in its coverage of British Muslims.

A BBC spokesman said last night: 'The word terrorist is not banned from the BBC.'"

If tonight's six o'clock news is anything to go by, the BBC have certainly relaxed this brief period of self-control rather considerably based on what the authorities still only 'believe' to be true.

London Blasts: Three Trains & A Bus, A Possible Explanation

Update: For detailed and in depth analysis of the events that occurred in London on 7th July 2005, please see the web site of J7: The July 7th Truth Campaign. Please also sign the J7 RELEASE THE EVIDENCE Petition which calls on the British government to release the evidence that will conclusively prove or disprove, beyond reasonable doubt, the official story of what happened on 7/7.

"You could have had a power surge with a quite catastrophic casualty level.
We have always been aware of that on the Underground."

Source: Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone
March 1st 2006 [PDF source]

---

Seven days on from seventh day of the seventh month of 2005 which witnessed the horrific disaster on the London Underground in which at least 48 people were killed and over 700 were injured, it seems most of the world is no closer to understanding quite what happened that could lead to such tragedy.

Now that the two minutes silence across Europe in memory of the victims is over, The Antagonist has watched the media circus roll on for long enough and believes that the general public is owed a credible explanation for the disaster and needless deaths of last week.

The absolute pressing need for this credible explanation is further compounded when one considers that the authorities can offer, at the time of writing, nothing more conclusive than:

"Detectives believe they have now identified the four men who died carrying out the attacks."

To establish what happened on that fateful day we must look at the precious few facts that are available, extricate those facts from the media hysteria surrounding the events of the day, and analyse the facts in context for what they tell us about what might actually have occurred:

Fact 1. On the morning of Thursday July 7, 2005 a major disaster occurred on the Underground which MetroNet, the train operating company in charge of the Underground at the time of the accident, advised millions of passengers in the system, and subsequently the world's media, was due to a power surge.

Fact 2. Peter Power and Visor Consultants were running a thousand man operation in Central London rehearsing anti-terrorist scenarios that involved, amongst other things, multiple bombs going off simultaneously in the stations that were affected by the power surge on the same morning.

Fact 3: A number 30 bus exploded in Tavistock Square at some point during the course of the morning.

As far as the facts go, this is all we know without having to rely on speculation, conjecture and opinion and leaves us with a disaster on the London Underground attributed to a massive power surge, an unrelated anti-terrorist rehearsal operation somewhere in central London as explained by Power during his interview, and an 'exploded' bus in Tavistock Square.

The one outstanding item that needs explaining rather more clearly than has been done so far is the mysterious exploding bus which is being pitched as the missing link that ties the whole notion of a terrorist operation together.

If what happened to the bus can be explained in a way so as to be credible and that explanation avoids the need to assume some huge premeditated conspiracy, so much the better. The time to end the confusion and lack of explanation for the exploding bus has now come.

The Antagonist believes the confusion about the bus arises from trying to establish a link between the exploding bus and the events on the London Underground.

This attempt to establish links between the bus and the Underground disaster is nothing other than misdirection because, in fact, the bus was nothing to do with the power surge on the London Underground and was instead a component part of Peter Power's anti-terrorist rehearsal operation.

Somewhere along the line, and after having had sufficient chance to investigate fully the damage and ridiculous number of deaths caused by a power surge on the London Underground, some enterprising PR soul somewhere decided that the bus would be better linked not with Peter Power's rehearsal operation from whence it came, but with the sheer coincidence of an horrific disaster on the Underground for which many executive heads could potentially roll in very high publicity Corporate Manslaughter cases if the truth were ever revealed.


That the bus was part of Power's rehearsal operation explains why the bus doesn't appear to be charred, and the plastic seats are un-burnt, completely unlike any other pictures of 'real' bus bombs.


It also explains how a number of people can be seen to be walking around on the top deck of the bus immediately after the 'explosion', none of whom are on fire, or showing any signs of visible distress that might arise from being caught up in a 'real' bomb blast.


As the driver of the Number 30 bus that was exploded as part of the rehearsal operation can be heard on TV and radio announcing his distressed thoughts and feelings about the event, we must all remember that, in these rehearsal situations, as is publicly acknowledged:

"All participants are unaware of the 'disaster' until the exercise starts, so they treat it as real as possible."

This means that all bus survivors could then be interviewed by the media as legitimate victims of a 'bomb blast' because they were unaware that they were unwittingly part of a 1,000 person rehearsal scenario.

Perhaps it is merely coincidence that today the news contains reports, under the rather apt headline of Rail Killing Charges Thrown Out, that Corporate Manslaughter charges against Balfour Beatty are being dropped for the equally horrific and pointless Hatfield rail disaster which now sets the precedent that private enterprise is exempt from accountability to their paying customers and the families of those paying customers who suffer tragedy and great loss at the hands of corporate malfeasance.

There you have it. The Antagonist's concise explanation of the events of 7 July, 2005 composed without reliance on the speculation, conjecture and misguided opinion that the media have been filling the airwaves and newspapers with for the past week, just the facts such as they were at the time of the incident, and as they transpired to be after Peter Power's Radio 5 Live interview which revealed the existence of the rehearsal operation from which the exploding bus appeared and created a story that is about something other than Corporate Manslaughter on the London Underground.

The clincher in all of this? That there was no conspiracy to begin with. A disaster occurred on the trains which happened to occur at the same time as a fairly innocuous rehearsal operation was taking place in Central London.

Where anything that vaguely resembles a conspiracy arises, however, is in the considerable attempts to mislead, defraud and deceive the public into mistaken beliefs about who was responsible for the needless deaths that occurred on the London Underground one week ago today.

London Underground Bombing 'Exercises' Took Place at Same Time as Real Attack

Updates:

• London Blasts: Three Trains & A Bus, A Possible Explanation
• In Response to Bridget Dunne
• Visor Consultants, Fortress GB & ICTS (UK) Ltd
• Bus explosion kicker - more evidence of a controlled 7/7 bus explosion

London Bombings 07/07/05 - A Call To Action

Only yesterday The Antagonist brought you news of the BBC story detailing covert emergency service exercises at Tower Hill station which took place a month prior to Thursday 7, July.

In exercises of this type a disaster situation is created where:

"All participants are unaware of the 'disaster' until the exercise starts, so they treat it as real as possible."

Today, The Antagonist brings you news of precisely the same type of covert emergency exercise, this time with over 1,000 people participating in Central London at exactly the same time as the 7/7 disaster.

Yes, you did read that correctly.

Confirmation of these exercises comes in the form of a Radio 5 Live interview with Peter Power, Managing Director of a Crisis Management company called Visor Consultants, the man who was charged with orchestrating the covert inter-agency operation.

The interview answers all the questions about 7/7 that anyone could have but that nobody seems to be asking about the glaring discrepancies between the media's haphazard and disjointed version of events, the government's 'reasonably clear' stance of not telling anyone anything at all, and the rapid proliferation of eye-witness and survivor accounts which discredit entirely almost all media stories.

During the Radio 5 Live interview, aired on the night of London's tragedy, Peter Power announced to listeners how his company had run an exercise earlier that day in Central London involving 1,000 people and which was based on "simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning".

Some coincidence!

By some fluke of chance that no sane bookmaker would give you odds on, this covert exercise occurred not just on the same day, but at exactly the same time, and involving exactly the same underground stations as "the real one", as Power later referred to it.

The full Radio 5 interview transcript with Peter Power is as follows:

POWER: ...at half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing upright.

HOST: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?

POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on.

Click here for a clip of this dialogue. Click here for longer clip with comments in context. Courtesy of Prison Planet.

With the public broadcast and circulation of this interview we now have full and public confirmation of the collusion and complicity of the police, ambulance and fire services, London Underground, London Transport and a handful of other private enterprises, all with full, prior knowledge of the events that were to occur on the morning of 7/7, and all at a ridiculously senior level - remember "all participants are unaware of the 'disaster'" so they "treat it as real as possible."

Furthermore, all of the police officers and ambulance and fire crews on the ground and the transport staff under-ground, were all unwitting participants, completely oblivious to these covert activities and the disaster that was to befall them in Central London that morning, just like the unsuspecting commuters who had the misfortune to ride their daily trains to work in the middle of it all.

In light of this information and before the blame for the ever increasing number of deaths at the hands of this tragedy is misappropriated, The Antagonist urges that the people of the United Kingdom unite in one great spirit of togetherness in their strenuous and steadfast demands to hold politicians and the government to account over exactly what occurred in London on the morning of Thursday 7, July 2005.

They work for you, not the other way around and there are a lot of questions to be asked from here-on in but, initially, you only need one very simple one:

Dear MP

Re: Thursday July 7, 2005

Please explain the apparent coincidence between the covert operations of 1,000 people in Central London, as organised by Mr Peter Power of Visor Consultants, during which, by the admission of Mr Power, exercises were "based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations" in which, as Mr Power's operation was taking place, a number of simultaneous bombs did indeed go off killing and injuring numerous innocent civilians.

Feel free to add the answers of your local MP in the comments to this post, The Antagonist is fairly certain there's bound to be at least a few interesting responses.

Comments

The rather tedious Haloscan commenting system has now been ditched in favour of Blogger comments. Where old Haloscan comments exist, the number of comments will appear as a link next to the email icon in the post footer.

Emergency Exercises on Underground

Conspiracy theory or conspiracy fact? Tucked away on the BBC news web site:

BBC News: Emergency exercise on Underground
Sunday, 12 June, 2005

London's emergency services are being called into action for a training exercise on the underground.

The live emergency exercise will take place at Tower Hill Tube station on the District Line on Sunday.

The station is already closed due to major track replacement work between Whitechapel and Earl's Court.

Roland Murphy, from London Underground, said good safety procedures are in place "but we can always build and improve upon them."

He added: "All participants are unaware of the 'disaster' until the exercise starts, so they treat it as real as possible."

London Underground is legally required to hold an emergency exercise on the network every year.

A police cordon will be erected around the station and Trinity Square, Savage Gardens, Wakefield Gardens and Coopers Row will be closed for most of the day.

Source: BBC News

For those that missed it first time round and for the purposes of clarity:

"All participants are unaware of the 'disaster' until the exercise starts, so they treat it as real as possible."

It all certainly seems 'as real as possible' from where The Antagonist is standing.

BBC: Survivor Blast Discrepancies

Update: For detailed and in depth analysis of the events that occurred in London on 7th July 2005, please see the web site of J7: The July 7th Truth Campaign. Please also sign the J7 RELEASE THE EVIDENCE Petition which calls on the British government to release the evidence that will conclusively prove or disprove, beyond reasonable doubt, the official story of what happened on 7/7.

For a full analysis of the simultaneous anti-terror rehearsal drill referred to in this post, the drill that was being conducted by Peter Power and Visor Consultants on 7/7 please see here.

"there could have been had [sic] a power surge which could have had quite catastrophic casualty levels.
We have always been aware of that on the Underground."

Source: Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone
March 1st 2006 [PDF source]

---

The Antagonist happened upon this survivor account on the BBC web site from which the following excerpt is taken. Comments are given below:

'I thought I was about to die'

R from north London was in the bombed carriage of the tube train travelling from King's Cross to Russell Square on the Piccadilly Line.

"Everything went totally black and clouds of choking smoke filled the tube carriage and I thought I had been blinded.

It was so dark that nobody could see anything.

I thought I was about to die, or was dead. I was choking from the smoke and felt like I was drowning.

Air started to flood in through the smashed glass and the emergency lighting helped us see a bit. We were OK."

Source: 'R', Blast Survivor, BBC News

"Totally black" suggests no remnants of a fire from whatever type of blast occured.

Any sort of explosive device in such a confined space and containing so many people, papers and other flammable items such as clothing would have caused some sort of fire, even if only the smallest amount of explosive had been present.

Furthermore, if it is later claimed that there was any fire, the noticeable and reported effects of that fire would have been dramatically worsened as the "air started to flood in through the smashed glass" and the train would have been far from "totally black".

The sentence, "It was so dark nobody could see anything" also suggests no fire and that all surrounding electrical systems were out, as would occur in the event of a power surge.

No power to the train, or the tunnels, or the service lights that illuminate the entire length of nearly all Underground tunnels, nor any fire from the blast. All of this is entirely in keeping with MetroNet's original statement of a power surge, as reported to passengers across the Underground at the time, and to the world's media until someone, somewhere apparently decided otherwise.

Osama striking from deep within the caves of Afghanistan, or corporate manslaughter at the hands of private enterprise?

We've been duped before and, as the media circus steps up the stakes and perceived threat levels, hot on the heels of a 'credible' but non-existent threat that evacuated Birmingham City Centre last night - a story which has already dropped off the front page of the BBC web site - let us not allow the tragic and needless deaths of an ever growing number of innocent people to be posthumous party to us all being duped again.

Let the words and courage of survivors like 'R' be testimony to us all.

If you're still not convinced, maybe it's time to reveal the story of a telephone conversation that morning between two friends, one of whom was at a station, the other of whom had yet to leave for the station:

"Hi, it's me, listen don't bother coming to the station, son, it's absolute chaos."

Nothing unusual about that, except when you bear in mind that the conversation took place at 8.37am that morning, some ten minutes before the time now reported for the simultaneous train blasts that once took place over the course of an hour.

Maybe its also time to mention the continuous helicopter activity over central London between 2am and 5am for the three nights in the run up to 7/7. It probably has some connection with this story here.

Remember where you read it first and, if you don't read anything else here again, you'll know precisely why.

And on the seventh day, The Antagonist did not rest

In no particular order and in response to the few comments that managed to avoid the hysteria of unconfirmed fantasies which surround the events of London 7/7 and The Antagonist's Live Blog of events:

Comment: Alleagra | 07.08.05 - 9:54 am
Presumably you mean wealthy people like the multimillionaire Bin Laden?

Absolutely! It's exactly the same sort of wealth as that of any International oil barons whose fortunes are built on plundering the planet of its resources and holding the rest of the world to ransom over those resources. Why do you think the Middle East has always been such a hotbed of activity?

The Bush family are all multi-millionaires, probably more-so than Osama, if less well broadcast, and the Bush family have made considerable wealth from oil so the question must be, "What is the difference between Bush family and the Bin Laden family?"

Simple really, look at what's going on in the world around you right now. Bush has all the might and weaponry of the most technogically advanced military superpower in the world, along with the gung-ho support of a disposable youth that has grown up shooting Arabs on Playstations for 8 hours a day, backed by an ever-increasing budget that far exceeds the offense budgets of Russia or China and all of which is dedicated to fighting PNAC's well documented wars without frontiers which they have been pursuing since before the presidency was stolen from the American people in 2000 and landed in the lap of the Bush-family-heir to the throne.

Osama Bin Laden, on the other hand, only blows things up very occasionally and he's the terrorist.

Just because Osama blows up predominantly white people and Bush blows up nothing other than brown people doesn't make either set of victims any less human, nor either atrocity any less horrific.

The other members of the Bin Laden and Bush families get on very well indeed and the Bush family, in the guise of the Carlysle Group, takes very good care of the Bin Laden family's financial interests. Perhaps it was this reason that prompted the U.S. administration to very kindly allow 20+ members of the Bin Laden family to leave America on the only non-military flight in U.S. skies immediately after 9/11 while their errant family member was being held responsible for those attacks.

If readers are still having trouble making the distinction between the single and sporadic acts of mindless violence of a rich oil baron that we are led to believe lives in caves and can mystically evade the global surveillance systems that are probably watching you reading this right now, and the five years of perpetual, mindless violence of an oil baron that has the resources of the military industrial complex at his disposal and whose actions we are all tacitly supporting while villifying the former, then The Antagonist would suggest seizing the moment, right now, and reading something a little less challenging and more likely to support whichever misapprehensions you prefer to labour under.

Comment: Sam | 07.08.05 - 11:13 am
"23:02: Credit to Channel 4 News for interviewing an Iraqi dentist based not far from the site of the bus explosion who reminded us all of the "as many as 100,000 to 200,000 Iraqis" who have died at the hands of real terrorist atrocities."

Its a good point although probably way over exaggerated in terms of numbers (note the 100 000 people margin of error)
...
Secondly, the overall aim of the Islamic extremist groups is to eliminate the west
...
The broad aim of the west is not to eliminate a whole culture but to facilitate the stable and mutually beneficial interactions (trade and cultural) of all people whilst not jeopardizing its own interests. This is a wholly rational and positive end game.

Thank you, and The Antagonist takes on board your observation of the margin of error and counters that in any situtation where there can conceivably exist a margin of error of 100,000 dead people, or indeed any dead people as a result of any form of terrorism, one way or the other, something is desperately wrong.

In addition, nobody with a bit of fertiliser and semtex, in conjunction with a few past-their-sell-by-date pop-guns the West armed them with years ago, is going to eliminate the West. In fact, in case no-one had noticed, we're doing a fine job of that all by ourselves and no conventional terrorism is required. We can all continue to deny this for now but our protestations will be a lot harder to shout from under the water that increasingly more rapidly claims the land from under our feet faster than the likes of the Divine Right of Kings and good old fashioned colonialism managed it in the past.

Finally, "stable and mutually beneficial interactions" will never arise from war, nor from forcibly taking out a country's vital infrastructure components and media and then replacing them with foreign infrastructure and the same limited 'news' and 'entertainment' vision of the world as everywhere else. Sure, Iraqis might have watched low quality television beforehand but at least it was local, cultural low-quality television and not the high-quality global propaganda of corporate America.

Comment: Steve | 07.08.05 - 12:12 pm
Would it be fair to say some of these would be Muslims from within Iraq and other Arab countries who find it necessary to bomb their own people, assault a different tribe (step forward Saddam) or even attack those with a different shade of belief (hello, Iran), rather than engage in any political process?
...
You state, reasonably, you want to avoid emotive language. I can't help feeling you have slipped a few emotional angles in there yourself.

You forget that Muslims and 'their own people' died in the blasts on the Underground. Again, let's not state untruths as if they were facts.

Iran and Iraq are big buddies now and Iran is training Iraq's soldiers. Again, written about elsewhere on this blog.

The Antagonist concedes the point about emotive language citing in defence only that, on occasion, you have to go in and reach people in order to pull them out.

In fairness, this tactic has had the desired effect and has inspired some degree of debate about the underlying factors that are crucial to understanding the events of 7/7, the wider global and historical context into which they fit and, in turn, what we should all learn from all of this.

Open debate about the issues can only be a good thing and, if there's nothing to hide, nobody's got anything to worry about.

If The Antagonist's original LiveBlog entry had screamed the indictment of Muslim extremists like every other blog, newspaper, TV and radio news report, etc., then the comments would largely consist of even more nonsense than they already do for, at the time of writing and three days after the event, nobody has yet fingered the Muslims for the blasts but everyone's talking about Al Qaeda, reprisals against innocent Muslims, and all sorts of other nonsense that has arisen from the original media fabrications.

No slightly tattered passports of Muslims appear to have survived the blasts, no DIY-terrorism manuals have been found and, to the best of The Antagonist's knowledge, no well-thumbed copies of the Koran containing a hand-written note of good luck and best wishes in the afterlife from Osama.

Until then, it is the choice of The Antagonist to hold the opinion that the original statement issued to passengers on the Underground at the time of the incidents was factually correct.

Furthermore, if staff or any of the sophisticated control and communications centres that monitor the Underground had detected even the vaguest suspicion of terrorist activity within the underground system, The Antagonist has the faith to believe that Underground management and staff would have elected to quickly and efficiently evacuate all passengers and staff from all tube stations immediately, rather than issue the usual placatory statements that would keep an Underground full of frustrated, late-for-work commuters hanging around in an environment that was already known, or suspected to be, subject to terrorist activity.

That the original power surge statement was retracted, or that an alternative story was released hours later in order to score more political points than The Antagonist can be bothered to list here takes no great leap of faith. It takes even less of a leap and even less faith in light of the Iraq war, the total absence of Iraq's WMD, or any feasible threat at all, and the unfortunate circumstance of whistleblower David Kelly whose invaluable work did us all a great justice and the man himself no favours at all.

Forgetting ancient history is almost permissable. Forgetting recent history is unforgivable.

Update, 14 July, 2005: London Blasts: Three Trains & A Bus, A Possible Explanation

BBC: 7/7 - New Underground Video Footage

From the link to Amateur Footage on the front page of the BBC News site:

"More mobile phone footage has been released and shows the scene of a train affected by the blast at Edgware Road.

The video shows how passengers escaped and also raises questions about the timing of the attacks."

This timestamped footage, taken by a passenger involved in one of yesterday's three (not seven) underground incidents, was screened by BBC1 on the 6 o'clock news earlier tonight.

At one point during the video, the phone pans to the watch (showing 8:53am) of the phone owner, bringing the actual time of the three underground blasts within minutes of each other ('almost simultaneously' if memory serves regarding the words of the newscaster), not over a period of one hour as reported for the last two days.

Simultaneous blasts would be rather more in keeping with the nature of the power surge originally cited for blasts on the underground.

Newsnight is now questioning how such great discrepancies in timings could arise given the limited information made available by the authorities, and rightly so.

Contrary to minorly popular belief, The Antagonist has not discounted Islamic terrorism, or any other form of terrorism, as the cause of the incidents on the underground, or even on the bus, but is reserving final judgment until such time as there is anything other than the wild speculation of the media from which to draw conclusions that the government and authorities haven't yet drawn for themselves or made publicly available.

To quote Donald Rumsfeld on such issues:

Happenings

"You're going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don't happen.

It doesn't seem to bother people, they don't—
It's printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.

Everyone's so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story's there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven't happened.

All I can tell you is,
It hasn't happened.
It's going to happen."

—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing

Quite.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai Speaks on London Blasts

Today China View reports:

"Afghan President Hamid Karzai Friday strongly condemned the terror bomb explosions happened in London, while Taliban denied relations with the attack.

'This is an attack not against a city, not against a nation, this is an attack against the whole of mankind,' Karzai told journalists in Afghan capital Kabul.

'It's time for us to go to the roots of terrorism here (sic) they are produced and stop them there without exception,' the president said."

Source: Xinhua - English

Bio in Brief: Hamid Karzai is the Afghan president, originally an ardent supporter of the Taliban, who has spent much of his life fighting "foreign influences" in Afghanistan and then, more recently, came to power as a direct result of the violent intervention of those foreign influences.

Karzai also happens to be an ethnic Pashtun and member of the powerful Populzai tribe which has supplied Afghanistan's kings since 1747 so, whatever way you look at it, it was only a matter of time before the presidency was delivered to its 'rightful' Populzai successor.

Clarke: ID Cards Will Not Prevent Terrorism

Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, and the contradictions of considerable confusion:

ID cards 'wouldn't stop attacks'

"I don't think any of us want to live a life where we have to go through security checks every moment of our lives."

Charles Clarke, Home secretary

Consideration would need to be given to checks on people boarding tube trains, ID cards and data exchange, he says.

He also suggested that in future civil liberties may have to be curtailed.

Asked by BBC Radio 4's Today programme if ID cards could have prevented Thursday's atrocity, Mr Clarke said: "I doubt it would have made a difference.

"I've never argued ... that ID cards would prevent any particular act."

And the story ends with:

Meanwhile, Qinetiq, the privatised former Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, and London Underground have rejected claims made in the Times that body scanners are to be used on the tube.

The two organisations say the report is "inaccurate" and there are no plans to use the scanners.

Qinetiq is providing some equipment but cannot discuss it.

What technology is it that Qinetiq, the corporate arm of the government security services (hello guys!), could be offering to London Underground that would have to be kept from the knowledge of the same public that travels the underground system?

Accountable? Who? Us?

Update: Oh, so that's what it is, just like in Total Recall. Hmmm.

Romanian Government Resigns

Given the African perspective on Live8, aid and poverty, it's nice to know some governments understand the message of the people:

"(CNN) -- Romania's prime minister on Thursday announced the resignation of his government and called for early elections, a move that came after a court failed to OK laws needed for entry into the European Union."

...

"Under these circumstances, there is only one way out: to return to the voters by tendering the government's resignation and wait for the people's decision," the prime minister is quoted as saying.

Source: CNN.com - Jul 7, 2005

Charles Clarke on Radio 4

Charles Clarke on the Today programme, salient points:

• No attribution of the events of yesterday to anyone, Muslim or otherwise. A few other possibles were mentioned including a description which included just about anyone.
  

• No question of whether explosives were involved in the underground incidents so until pictures or footage emerge, or eye-witness reports that state other than electrical-related causes for the carnage on the trains, The Antagonist isn't buying the public story change from the initial reports of electrical problems. Those initial reports would have been issued by those in the train operating control centres at the time of the incidents, long before any american management figures were in a position to state otherwise at a press conference held much later in the day. Also, what respectable operating company, aside from Jarvis, Tubelines, et al, would want 40+ people dead at the hands of electrical failures on a tube system that is known to be poorly maintained in the interests of profit?
  
  Out on a limb? Maybe. Wrong? Maybe.

• Finding the culprits is not about any one issue. It's not about Iraq, or 9/11. Quite how 9/11 or Iraq figures in yesterday's events is a little baffling given that both of those events, and yesterday, are entirely unconnected, save for the one common link throughout all of these things - the U.S. administration. Finding the culprits is about hunting down those who oppose our culture, our media, and our institutions, apparently.
  

The Antagonist is waiting for the media update to the Today website to grab the full quote about the coming war on anyone that doesn't embody the values of our media, our culture, and our institutions

Bear in mind that this list by now includes anyone involved in Live8, Make Poverty History, any form of charitable organisation that seeks to right the ills of the world, dissenting and vocal bloggers, more than half the UK population that couldn't be bothered to show any form of support for the electoral process in May of this year, and just about anyone else you care to add to that list.

More soon...

Closing Thoughts

Before The Antagonist sets about resting a very weary head, it just remains to offer heart-felt condolences to those who have suffered as a result of events in London on Thursday.

It's been a long day of much pain, anguish and anxiety for a lot of innocent people and the resilience of Londoners and everyone involved has been amazing.

Before parting, and lest we forget that any changes we desire in the world are down to each-and-every one of us, not Just8, a little inspirational change in vibe for the day ahead....

Oxygen, by Willy Mason

"I wanna be better than oxygen
So you can breathe when you're drowning and weak in the knees
I wanna speak louder than Ritalin
For all the children who think that they've got a disease
I wanna be cooler than T.V.
For all the kids that are wondering what they are going to be

We can be stronger than bombs
If you're singing along and you know that you really believe
We can be richer than industry
As long as we know that there's things that we don't really need
We can speak louder than ignorance
Cause we speak in silence every time our eyes meet.

On and on, and on it goes
The world it just keeps spinning
Until i'm dizzy, time to breathe
So close my eyes and start again anew.

I wanna see through all the lies of society
To the reality, happiness is at stake
I wanna hold up my head with dignity
Proud of a life where to give means more than to take
I want to live beyond the modern mentality
Where paper is all that you're really taught to create

Do you remember the forgotten America?
Justice, equality, freedom to every race
Just need to get past all the lies and hypocrisy
Make up and hair to the truth behind every face
That look around to all the people you see,
How many of them are happy and free?

I know it sounds like a dream
But it's the only thing that can get me to sleep at night
I know it's hard to believe
But it's easy to see that something here isn't right
I know the future looks dark
But it's there that the kids of today must carry the light.

On and on, and on it goes
The world it just keeps spinning
Until i'm dizzy, time to breathe
So close my eyes and start again anew.

If I'm afraid to catch a dream
I weave you baskets and I float them down the river stream
Each one I weave with words I speak,
To carry love to your relief."

Baskets to you all, dear readers.

Iranians to train Iraq's military

Former enemies Iran and Iraq say they will launch broad military co-operation including training Iraqi armed forces.

News which will, of course, immediately up Iran's ranking in the axis-of-evil stakes quite nicely for those that seek the merest hint of justification for invading.

All we need is a suggested link to today's events in London and Iran's fate will be sealed in much the same way as Afghanistan and Iraq before it.

No doubt other axis-of-evil countries will inevitably follow if the war of corporate America continues in the same manner as the last four years.

22:30 George Galloway Interview Live on Channel 4

No doubt bound to upset some...

PNAC, Bush & the Corporatisation of War

Superb three-minute animation by Simon Robinson that explains pretty much all you need to know about the real driving force behind the ongoing Bush presidency and it's unrelenting, British-supported war-mongering.

Billed as, "An uncompromising examination and criticism of US foreign policy, according to Barry from down the pub".

"Not all Fascism looks like Adolf Hitler."

Spend three minutes wisely.

The Day Before it All Happened

Very interesting comment worthy of a post and following up from the eye witness accounts on the BBC News web site which refers to armed police activities going on yesterday on the route of the number 30 bus, the route of the bus that happened to be involved in today's events:

Yesterday late afternoon, my partner and I drove back through London after a mini-break to Brighton rather than face the M25. Hackney seemed to be crawling with police cars and I even saw an armed officer patrolling the streets, which seems ironic considering the bus involved in the blast at Tavistock Place has been reported as the number 30 Hackney to Marble Arch service.
Kelly, London

Source: BBC News - London Explosions Your Accounts

What was all this armed police activity on the number 30 bus route the day before a number 30 bus appears to have exploded in a 'coordinated terror attack' on London?

Fox News Praises London Blasts

Update, 14 July, 2005: London Blasts: Three Trains & A Bus, A Possible Explanation

Fox News' Brian Kilmeade: London terror attack near G8 summit "works to ... Western world's advantage, for people to experience something like this together."

Full story:

The following exchange between Fox News host Brian Kilmeade and Fox News business contributor and substitute host Stuart Varney occurred during breaking news coverage of the attacks on London subways and buses on the July 7 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends:

KILMEADE: And he [British Prime Minister Tony Blair] made the statement, clearly shaken, but clearly determined. This is his second address in the last hour. First to the people of London, and now at the G8 summit, where their topic Number 1 --believe it or not-- was global warming, the second was African aid. And that was the first time since 9-11 when they should know, and they do know now, that terrorism should be Number 1. But it's important for them all to be together. I think that works to our advantage, in the Western world's advantage, for people to experience something like this together, just 500 miles from where the attacks have happened.

VARNEY: It puts the Number 1 issue right back on the front burner right at the point where all these world leaders are meeting. It takes global warming off the front burner. It takes African aid off the front burner. It sticks terrorism and the fight on the war on terror, right up front all over again.

KILMEADE: Yeah.

Source: Media Matters

Which is precisely the point, irrespective of quite how the events of today transpire to unfold.

In one fell swoop the recent efforts of all those involved with Live8 and other consciousness raising initiatives have all but been destroyed.

Watch clip: Quicktime | Windows Media

Update: Addiitional information here and here:

LiveBlog: London Blast Coverage

Update, 14 July, 2005: London Blasts: Three Trains & A Bus, A Possible Explanation

Other updates to this LiveBlog are here and here.
Responses to intelligent comments on this LiveBlog are here.

--

News links: BBC | Guardian | Channel 4 | Wikipedia |
Liveblogs: Europhobia | Perfect | Tim Worstall |
Photos: BigDaddyMerk | Globe & Mail |
Accounts: Guardian | BBC | Reuters |

12:37: Blair repeatedly uses the words 'reasonably clear' that events in London are some sort of terrorist act. Lots of open ends there. Reasonably clear is not proof.

Charles Clarke to launch the biggest ID Card sales pitch yet from the commons at 12:50pm.

12:39: Channel 4 new announces an Islamic group claiming responsibility but this claim, at the time of announcement was unverified. Obviously, it must serve some purpose for the media to bandy about these unsubstantiated claims.

12:43: BBC - Blasts at a Glance.

12:45: Brian Paddick announces on Channel 4 that there have been a total of 3 incidents on the underground and one on a bus and that forensic evidence of explosives has not been found. The bus does look a bit of a state.

Paddick confirms no warnings have been given and that there have been no noted increases in presumed levels of terror in the run up to G8.

12:52: Paddick doing the rounds on ITV now... "not sure exactly of the cause of explosions". "Well planned, well rehearsed operation" - surely someone would have noticed Al Qaeda practicing and rehearsing such an operation in London?

12:54: Kennedy hits the screens reading a nice pre-written speech for the occasion, rather than the sort of bullet points and anecdotal evidence police chiefs and reporters have been providing thus far and that one might expect in a state of heightened alert. Clarke confirms Paddick's four explosions. The Antagonist agrees with Paddick, it's all very well practiced and rehearsed.

13:01: Terrorism is now the buzzword of the 1 o'clock news reports. Remember the police have yet to confirm forensic evidence of explosives as the well practiced and reheased London Emergency Plan kicks in.

13:08 BBC confirms deaths at Edgeware Road, no confirmation of number.

13:11: BBC Talking Point with public comments on events. All comments from tube travellers hint that any explosions were electrical explosions

13:14: Blair announces that terrorists have no respect for human lives. Ironically, he says this as he stands in front of the handful of men responsible for the biggest acts of terrorism our planet has ever seen. Terrorism is not a tool of the weak and poor, only the wealthy and powerful can conduct sustained campaigns of terrorism over numbers of years with any degree of success.

13:18: Ignoring for a minute the media hype, it seems what we have here is a power surge on the tube and a bus that has somehow exploded.

13:19: Tony Blair jumps in a Jag on his way to London and Jack Straw is left in charge of proceedings at G8 as the organ grinder flies south.

13:28 News reports are still saying 'terrorism' and 'al qaeda'. As yet no official confirmation of either of these things has been forthcoming. So the assumption now is that the power surges reported by a train operating company - the people who would know such things - are now terrorist attacks.

13:29: George Bush - the planet's chief bombdropper and terrorist extraordinaire - announces, "here we have people killing people". Yes, George, that's what your campaign of terror in the middle east is all about that has murdered hundreds of thousands. The first victim of terrorism is people, not the perpetrators.

13:34: Two confirmed dead at Aldgate.

13:46: BBC pundit - everyone's a pundit these days - says no official confirmation of terrorist activity. News headlines are reporting nothing other than terrorism.

13:49: BBC reporter confirms that COBRA operations have been well rehearsed over the last few weeks, in preparation for just such an incident.

Live8, G8/Just8, Olympic announcement and a power surge on the tube and a bus that goes bang, which none of the media reports seem to focusing on.

14:01: The Queen is 'deeply shocked'. Mobile phone networks still down.

14:08: BBC - Student Claims London Attacks

In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate, may peace be upon the cheerful one and undaunted fighter, Prophet Muhammad, God's peace be upon him.

Nation of Islam and Arab nation: Rejoice for it is time to take revenge against the British Zionist Crusader government in retaliation for the massacres Britain is committing in Iraq and Afghanistan. The heroic mujahideen have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern, and western quarters.

We have repeatedly warned the British Government and people. We have fulfilled our promise and carried out our blessed military raid in Britain after our mujahideen exerted strenuous efforts over a long period of time to ensure the success of the raid.

We continue to warn the governments of Denmark and Italy and all the Crusader governments that they will be punished in the same way if they do not withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. He who warns is excused.

God says: "You who believe: If ye will aid (the cause of) Allah, He will aid you, and plant your feet firmly."

Source: BBC News

Since when did Islamic extremists start replacing the word 'Allah' with 'God' in the opening line of their notes? And, Brian Paddick said there were no warnings so writing "He who warns is excused" makes no sense either.

14:13: Never one to miss an opportunity, Michael Howard makes an appearance on ITV to say nothing of any relevance because now the media is just grabbing soundbites rather than doing anything that might be considered responsible or investigative journalism.

News of controlled explosions keeps surfacing. ITV news has just screened an officer saying that no confirmation of controlled explosions can be given either. ITV then follow this up with a female journalist who says, "Police will be conducting controlled explosions on the underground".

Do we actually know anything more than a power surge on the trains and a bus that went bang?

14:24: ITV pundits talking about going back to the training camps of Afghanistan to understand the issues of today. Of course, we all know which leading superpower armed, funded and ran those training camps in the battle against the perceived Soviet threat of that era and as the leader of that country rattles around in Gleneagles, maybe we should take him to task about this sort of thing.

14:28: ITV. 10 confirmed dead at Kings Cross. BBC Eyewitness reports.

14:50: [sarcasm] News just in... The Antagonist has received an email from the French Olympic Committee claiming full responsibility for tampering with a fusebox at a London underground depot [/sarcasm]

15:12: Blair has arrived back at Downing Street.

15:24: Live Police conference. No claims of responsibility from any groups. Police Casualties Information Line: 0870 1566344.

15:27: Reports of bomb scares and bomb threats. 21 confirmed killed at Kings Cross.

15:30 Total of 31 confirmed dead.

The BBC screwed up and forgot to introduce their live broadcast delay until after the briefing had started. Who noticed?

15:47 Someone's got to Paddick, he's distinctly changed his tune about the type of incident that has occurred without being able to offer any further information than that which he did when interviewed by various TV channels earlier today.

Londoners have been advised that there will be no need to take the day off work tomorrow and that they should continue to try and lead a normal life in the world of terrorism their leaders have created around them.

16:00 The press conference has deteriorated into the fairy world of mythical terrorist activities so get your orders in now for Chemical and Biological Warfare suits, while stocks last.

Nobody much seems to be talking about the bus which is so far the only thing that has been shown to look like it blew up.

16:03 Any useful BBC web cameras are offline with the usual 'technical difficulties" (Hat-tip: The Gambler). No doubt the state's surveillance infrastructure is free from such technical difficulties and watching the rest of us in our panic as we are entirely unable to watch them via either traditional media or public web cameras.

16:30 Paddick seems to have become the face of "we have planned and rehearsed this sort of scenario for months and months and months" and is at it again on BBC1 outside the QE2 Centre. Exploding a bus in the middle of such a rehearsal to create something slightly more dramatic wouldn't take a whole lot of ingenuity.

16:40: Eye witness on Channel 4 reports a crowd of people running towards the site of the bus explosion that occurred near her earlier today, somewhat to her surprise.

16:47: No Fire Without Smoke


16:50: BBC News 24 - Still no confirmed claims of responsibility. Lots of media claims alleging otherwise.

16:53: BBC News 24 presenter asks, "I suppose the other question we should ask is who else has the sort of organisational capabilities to carry out such an attack?" A very pertinent question indeed.

18:10 BBC News. 33 total dead. Blair has spoken and said not very much but the implication is that Islamic terrorism is to blame. Still no confirmation of any 'bomb' details yet, or footage or photos of underground bomb damage. Interestingly, footage from Madrid was used in one news report, just to make the point.

Anyone have links to footage or photos of underground bomb damage?

18:41: BBC - In Pictures. Oh, and now's the time to invest in stocks and shares, folks. No, really! (via Bloggerheads).

18:47: Another eye-witness account of the Edgware Road incident citing electrical malfunction as the source of the explosions (via Nosemonkey):

The train left the tracks and started to rumble down the tunnel. It was incapable of stopping and just rolled on. A series of explosions followed as if tube electric motor after motor was exploding. Each explosion shook the train in the air and seems to make it land at a lower point.

I fell to the ground like most people, scrunched up in a ball in minimize injury. At this point I wondered if the train would ever stop, I thought "please make it stop", but it kept going. In the end I just wished that it didn't hit something and crush. It didn't.

When the train came to a standstill people were screaming, but mainly due to panic as the carriage was rapidly filling with smoke and the smell of burning motors was giving clear clues of fire.

21:00 Minor updates will continue here with anything major being posted back on the front page.

Might as well start things off with a bang.

21:55: 38 confirmed dead. Jack Straw points East.

23:02: Credit to Channel 4 News for interviewing an Iraqi dentist based not far from the site of the bus explosion who reminded us all of the "as many as 100,000 to 200,000 Iraqis" who have died at the hands of real terrorist atrocities.

23:57: Portillo on This Week making the point that London got off lightly compared to New York and Twin Tower events of 2001. Diane Abbott appears even further removed from the plot than usual after having become accustomed to life without bombs raining down on her head on a daily basis.

An American (Jamie Rubin?) is suggesting that Muslims are killing everyone which is a distinct case of the pot calling the kettle black given that, with regard to today and Iraq, the figures are stacked at somewhere in the region of 100,000 to 38 in favour of the Americans.

00:00: New BBC Mobile phone footage confirms blasts occurring 'almost simultaneously'.

Update: The Antagonist issued a response to the comments on this post (refers to the original Haloscan comments which magically disappeared for no apparent reason not long ago and about which Haloscan have yet to advise quite how this happened), entitled, "And on the seventh day, The Antagonist did not rest...."

London Photo Link

Nosemonkey reports Sky News being prevented from covering events in Russell Square so here's a link to some photos and TV captures courtesy of BigDaddyMerk.

London Fracas

Bit of a fracas going on in London at the moment, none of which has been explained beyond an earlier report from a train operating company that a power surge on the tube system caused things to go a bit awry at some underground stations.

The BBC has just announced some notion of an Al Qaeda link before The Antagonist had the chance to write that this is what would be forthcoming. Nobody has yet explained what has happened in London other than a tube power surge and already Al Qaeda is responsible. Oh, and George Bush fell off his bicycle yesterday too.

Mobile phone networks are either overloaded, or shut down - probably the latter - and news and web servers seem to be going the same way.

Perhaps Tony could ask George up in Edinburgh, coincidentally some 400 miles away from events in London, what his CIA and their Al Qaeda buddies have organised for unsuspecting Londoners.

Still, seems like a good way to gee-up support for the ID cards no-one wants.

Live8/G8/Just8 - An African Perspective

Joined-up thinking that bites direct from Thinker's Room in Kenya, Africa, which espouses the same notion of 'people power' as John Pilger and, er, The Antagonist.

Live Aid? Please!

Personally I find it laughable watching a knighted man with a good dinner in his belly and the remnants of the said dinner at his elbow addressing the press from a plush, six star hotel in his passionate and very genuine belief that he can strike the blow that will end world poverty.

...

No, I am not holding my breath. The solution will not come from Live Aid or from G8. It will come from Africans who will finally refuse to accept the nonsense they are subjected to by their asinine leadership and throw the lot of the useless cretins out.

Source: Thinker's Room

Thinker's follow-up, Get Real: Global Politics 101 & Live 8, makes for interesting reading too.

And, as the solution for Africans will come from refusing to accept their asinine leadership, so too will the solutions for the rest of the world come when we refuse to accept the asinine leaderships of Just8, and their ilk, and their twisted dedication to infinite 'profit' and 'growth' at any expense.

Problems of Perception

Niall Ferguson writes in today's Telegraph (via Chrenkoff):

"It may come as a surprise to Live 8 fans, but the top three reasons why most African countries are economic basket cases are not lack of aid, excessive debt service payments and protectionism by developed countries. They are in fact chronic misgovernment, recurrent civil war and the high incidence of diseases such as malaria and Aids."

Source: The Telegraph

This news certainly comes as no surprise to The Antagonist and, while superhuman efforts can be made to try and address the devastating effects of malaria and AIDS, there is only way one to deal with the chronic misgovernment and the recurrent wars that arise from that chronic misgovernment:

The Historical Context of the Iraq War in Perspective

The Antagonist has been meaning to post this for a while so, without further ado, here it is:

Once again, history reaches into the present to fashion the future. Is the war on terrorism a clash of civilizations? Yes, it is.

More specifically, there are three wars:

• The West, (and the rest of the World’s) need to keep the oil pumping
• The 1,344-year-old Sunni-Shi’a conflict over the truth of Islam. Nothing evidences this more than the willingness of each sect to kill the other in Iraq
• al-Qaida’s war of terror against foreign influence in Arab Countries and foreigners in Saudi Arabia.

There are two truths about Iraq, the truth of perception and the truth of history. More often than not, these two truths do not coincide.

Source: Bethlam Chronicles

One page, the blog-bite of 5,000 years of history.

Scott Ritter at Menwith Hill Independence Day Protest

Former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, accepted an invite to speak at the annual protest outside the Menwith Hill American spybase outside Harrogate. The action is expected to anger his United States countrymen by criticising President George Bush on Independence Day.

Oh dear, and what better day to do so than Independence day?

Especially as it's the same day as Bush declares his government's independence from the rest of the world through the rejection of any Kyoto-style deal on climate change at the G8 summit, and a couple of days after the British government announces personal carbon allowances for its unwitting citizens, controlled and monitored via national Identity cards that nobody wants for this and countless other covert intended uses for the technology.

And you might think the annual protest outside the American Spybase that inhibits (sic) the North Yorkshire countryside might be newsworthy. Apparently, it's not sufficiently newsworthy for the BBC to make much of an effort. Google News doesn't turn up much. Limited reporting also from the local rag, Yorkshire Today. Even IndyMedia doesn't have the protest listed on their calendar of events.

What is going on?

July 4th : Independence Through Decentralisation

Hollywood Wants BitTorrent Dead

Hollywood movie studios launched new legal action against operators of sites that help connect people ... In the United States and the United Kingdom, the Motion Picture Association of America, the main lobbying arm of U.S. film studios, filed civil lawsuits against more than 100 operators of BitTorrent "tracker" servers.

MPAA anti-piracy chief John Malcolm said the trade organization's actions were not aimed at criminalizing P2P technology itself, citing "legal torrent" services that specialize in public-domain material as examples of the technology's non-infringing potential.

Source: Wired News, 14 December, 2004.

Then came this, and this, and this, and this, and all of these which sort of indicated that the above statement was a little misleading.

Then came this development a few weeks ago. From the BitTorrent Trackerless information page:

As part of our ongoing efforts to make publishing files on the Web painless and disruptively cheap, BitTorrent has released a 'trackerless' version of BitTorrent in a new release.

Suppose you bought a television station, you could broadcast your progamming to everyone in a 50 mile radius. Now suppose the population of your town tripled. How much more does it cost you to broadcast to 3 times as many people? Nothing. The same is not true of the Web. If you own a website and you publish your latest video on it, as popularity increases, so does your bandwidth bill! Sometimes by a lot!

Now it's new, improved BitTorrent Trackerless - with added Trackerless Support - which turns the 100 IP addresses targeted in December's round of the global media's "Which impoverished individual can we sue to keep ourselves rich" into a multiplicity of anywhere up to 4,294,967,296 IP addresses. And this isn't even up and running properly yet with its 3,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible moving-target-trackers.

The Antagonist hates to say, "I told you so", but in light of this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this, what next?

And so it all comes together

As the inter-dependence day of Live8 2005 draws to a close with a characteristically uplifiting performance by the timeless Stevie Wonder, already the peer-to-peer networks are filling with video footage of artists performances from each of the Live8 concerts around the world.

No doubt Stevie's efforts will be digitised and along shortly and, as he proclaims "superstition ain't the way" to an estimated audience of 5 billion people, each and every one of those people can come away from the Live8 global gathering knowing that the information revolution has already happened, global consciousness has taken a bigger leap forward than ever before, and a lot of fun has been had by all.

LiveAid was just a warm up. Live8 was the start of the real thing.

Now begins in earnest the work of the 5 billion to institute the values that five-sixths of the world's population joined together to agree upon.

These values are bigger than Live8, bigger than helping Africa reach a point of sustainable development, and bigger than Just8 will be comfortable with for they signal fundamental changes in the balance of power on local and global levels. Necessarily, Just8 will articulate some degree of support for these values for fear of starting a revolution as they simultaneously seek to prevent those changes through stealthy national and international machinations.

Indeed even in the bastion of 'freedom' and 'democracy' that is the UK, rights to peaceful protest are being removed as laws of restriction are being tightened, and an ever greater watch is being kept on everyone via CCTV, ANPR and the convergence of all personal data in the form of ID Cards which, if we allow them to happen, will be the final nail in the coffin of what liberty is left outside the watchful eye of the authorities in the UK.

5 billion and counting Vs Just8 whose local and global power is no greater than that which we, the people of the world, allow them to have.

Pilger on G8

Hot on the heels of an earlier post in response to the Channel 4 News question, "Does the G8 Summit Matter?", The Antagonist stumbled, via LG Domain, on this fine article by John Pilger which supports the notion of people action irrespective of whatever happens at the G8 summit.

3.5 Billion people, probably more, involved and watching today's Live8 event Versus Just8.

Suddenly, people action doesn't seem like such an unrealistic prospect.

BitTorrent - Liberation of the Pepsi Generation

The Senate/Grokster-ruling fallout continues with most of the world hung up on the concepts of victory, loss, and how to defend copy 'rights' which depend on being able to strictly control and regulate the distribution of the goods and services to which those 'rights' apply.

In the age of the Internet, digital media and peer-to-peer, this paradigm of control of distribution to create artificial product scarcity, and therefore value, at the discretion of suppliers is no longer an option.

As everyone wonders against whom the next legal action should be issued while trying to understand how to reinstate 'rights' which depend on a market environment that does not exist any more, news hits the streets of a meme penned by the creator of the BitTorrent protocol Bram Cohen which outlines the fundamental ethos that underlies the cooperative nature of the Internet and the peer-to-peer networks which have grown on it, both of which have rapidly become the anathema of content owners, big business and government.

Cohen's words are reproduced here in full to avoid any hysteria that may arise from quoting selective sections. Comments are given below:

A technological activist's agenda:

"I am a technological activist. I have a political agenda. I am in favor of basic human rights: to free speech, to use any information and technology, to purchase and use recreational drugs, to enjoy and purchase so-called 'vices', to be free of intruders, and to privacy.

I further my goals with technology. I build systems to disseminate information, commit digital piracy, synthesize drugs, maintain untrusted contacts, purchase anonymously, and secure machines and homes. I release my code and writings freely, and publish all of my ideas early to make them unpatentable.

Technology is not a panacea. I refuse to work on technology to track users, analyze usage patterns, watermark information, censor, detect drug use, or eavesdrop. I am not naive enough to think any of those technologies could enable a 'compromise'.

Despite my emphasis on technology, I do not view laws as inherently evil. My goals are political ones, even if my techniques are not. The only way to fundamentally succeed is by changing existing laws. If I rejected all help from the political arena I would inevitably fail."

-Bram Cohen

Before getting upset and losing sight of the fundamental tenets on which this statement was based, ask yourself if the basic concepts of human rights, free speech, privacy, freedom of choice, or the right to use information and technology are fundamentally wrong?

If these basic beliefs are not wrong then no technology that evolves from them or which facilitates them can be fundamentally 'wrong' either. In fact, technology is always neutral and BitTorrent serves as a timely example of how this is the case, flying in the face of the Senate decision that the technology makers can be held liable for the uses of their technology.

On one hand are the stated intentions of a lone-programmer who seeks freedom of speech, information and privacy for all, and on the other are the corporate giants like Microsoft and the international media companies who recognise, finally, that they are missing out on something and are scrambling to adopt the protocol as the basis for their own attempts to catch up with the peer-to-peer revolution that they have, for the most part, missed.

As big business adopts the BitTorrent protocol which grew from the tenets of human rights, freedom and liberty, the question necessarily becomes, "What is the difference between the version of the BitTorrent protocol offered by Cohen and the one offered by Microsoft?"

The answer is, "Nothing." In both cases the technology is the same and can be used for either 'good' or 'evil' so the value judgement which then needs to be made is whether the private interests of a few corporate entities are greater than those of the interests of the public that includes every single one of us.

In the case of Bram Cohen, the BitTorrent protocol, and the fundamental essences of the Internet and peer-to-peer networks, the driving forces behind development are those of human rights, freedom of speech, privacy, freedom of choice, and the right to use and share information and technology for all.

In the case of Microsoft and their implentation of the BitTorrent protocol, the driving forces behind development are those of private profit and growth, and neither private profit nor private growth results from facilitating free speech, privacy, freedom of choice, or cultivating any rights to use and share information and technology. Instead, private profit and growth result from the restriction of free speech, choice, privacy and any freedoms to use technology and information without the application and enforcement of significant costs and a long list of conditions and caveats that require submission of almost all rights to anything.

Bram Cohen had the right idea.

Does the G8 Summit matter?

The living legend that is Sir Bob Geldof says 3.5 billion people around the world are actively taking part in and watching the Live8 event.

As Live8 happens, bringing together 3.5 billion people in its unique, impromptu, global gathering of consciousness, a meeting is getting underway in Edinburgh at which eight men- Just8 - who represent the culimination of the indidividual histories of each and every one of us - are deciding whether all our histories, and the present-presence of every single one of us, has any sort of involvement in how the planet on which we live is run.

Does the G8 Summit matter?

3.5 billion people say G8 matters but only because it has brought us all together in one united voice of solidarity and protest against everything that G8 - Just8 - represents.

3.5 Billion Vs Just8 says, "Yes, G8 matters because of us, not in spite of us."

3.5 Billion Vs Just8 says, "We will make poverty history, with or without you."

3.5 Billion Vs Just8 says, "We will make poverty history, with or without you, and all the state sponsored forces of terror, supression and propaganda in the world cannot stop us now."

Copyright & Law - Rip. Mix. Burn

A surprising burst of rationality from the Economist following the Senate/Grokster ruling:

"In America, the length of copyright protection has increased enormously over the past century, from around 28 years to as much as 95 years. The same trend can be seen in other countries. In June Britain signalled that it may extend its copyright term from 50 years to around 90 years.

This makes no sense.

Copyright was originally intended to encourage publication by granting publishers a temporary monopoly on works so they could earn a return on their investment. But the internet and new digital technologies have made the publication and distribution of works much easier and cheaper.

Publishers should therefore need fewer, not more, property rights to protect their investment.

Technology has tipped the balance in favour of the public domain."

Source: The Economist

This organic tipping-of-balance that technology has lent itself to, especially since the advent of high-speed digital media, is no bad thing when you remember that 'the public domain' is the domain in which all of us live.

The 'public domain', dear reader, is your public domain. It is the public domain of you, your family, your friends and your colleagues.

The Antagonist suggests that it would be wise for us all to remember our part, and the part of everyone we know and love, in the public domain as we read stories of billion-dollar, international industries issuing legal threats against relatively impoverished individuals in the 'public domain'.

While we're on the subject of considering rational approaches to the issue of copyright, below are a few other articles which explain more about the rights of everyone that are lost to copyrights when such 'rights' are used against the public interest they were designed to protect:

Misinterpreting Copyright by Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Softare Federation.

Time To Give Up On Copyright Law? by Ed Quillen.

Copyright Creators, Proprietors & Users from the Journal of Arts Management, Law & Society.

RIAA's Statistics Don't Add Up to Piracy by George Ziemann.

More demystification soon...