A statement, apparently from Mr Power, has appeared
in the comments section of a recent
blog posting regarding comments Power made on the
BBC last week.
As we
highlighted, the “crisis management expert”
revealed that some companies used the shut down of the city
of London on Wednesday, during the G20 protests, as a dress
rehearsal for an influenza pandemic.
In response to an explanation of who Peter Power
is, which was added by the Uncensored Magazine blog, Mr Power
himself posted a lengthy statement in which he reveals that
the company he was working with on 7/7 was London based information
giant Reed
Elsevier.
The company is most notable for its ownership
of the Lexis/Nexis legal database, as well as many other information
sources. As Elsevier, it runs a vast number of science journals,
including some of the biggest and most reputable ones. Reed
is also known as a host of large exhibitions. The company part
owns the ExCel Centre in London's Docklands area, where the
G20 summit was held this past weekend.
Here is Peter Power's statement in full:
There has been much nonsense written about why
my company ran an exercise on 7 July 2005 that had very close
parallels to the real thing that day. Since then I have made
several attempts to add my own comments to numerous sites
that seem to get increasingly excited about their own conspiracy
theories and in the process exclude any rational debate. It
seems those who occupy the world of finding conspiracy theories
to replace just about any coincidence, do not want to have
any dialogue with those offering a different view, but I have
not yet given up hope. I am therefore hoping, perhaps naively,
that someone might like to read an honest and factual account
about a particular exercise my company ran in London three
years ago.
Unfortunately, the BBC had postponed in 2008 a programme
in their ‘conspiracy files’ series that would
have done this. Our client three years ago agreed to be named
in the BBC programme since the attitude of the producer and
his team was very balanced (several conspiracy theorists were
also invited to take part). We even allowed our complete exercise
material to be made available to the BBC. Regrettably broadcasting
in 2008 might have jeopardised an ongoing court case, so they
had little choice about postponing it to 2009.
Early in 2005 Reed Elsevier, an organisation specialising
in information and publishing that employs 1,000 people in
and around London, asked us to help them prepare an effective
crisis management plan and rehearse it before sign-off. Several
draft scenarios were drawn up and the crisis team themselves
set the exercise date and time: 9.00am on 7 July.
The test was planned as a table-top walk through for about
six people (the CM team) in a lecture room with all injects
simulated. Everything was on MS PowerPoint. The location of
their Central London office near to Chancery Lane was chosen
as one test site. With many staff travelling to work via the
London underground system, the chosen exercise simulated incendiary
devices on three trains, very similar to a real IRA attack
in 1992, as well as other events.
As there had been eighteen terrorist bomb attacks on tube
trains prior to 2005, choosing the London Underground was
logical rather than just prescient. With this in mind it was
hardly surprising that Deutsche Bank had run a similar exercise
a few days before and, prior to that, a multi-agency (and
much publicised) exercise code-named Osiris II had simulated
a terrorist attack at Bank tube station. Moreover, I had also
taken part in a BBC Panorama programme in 2004 as a panellist
alongside Michael Portillo MP et al, in an unscripted debate
(we had no idea at all what the scenario was to be?) on how
London might once again, deal with terrorist attacks, only
this time it was fictional (created entirely by the BBC).
In short, some of the research for our exercise had already
been done. The scenario developed for our client even started
by using fictitious news items from the Panorama programme
then, as with any walk through exercise, events unfolded solely
on a screen as dictated by the facilitator without any external
injects or actions beyond the exercise room. Also factored
into the scenario was to be an above ground fictitious bomb
exploding not far from the head office of the protected Jewish
Chronicle magazine where for exercise purposes, our imagined
terrorists would have been aware that commuters would now
be walking to work (past a building already considered a target)
as some tube stations would have been closed.
Of just eight nearby tube stations that fell within possible
exercise scope, three were chosen that, by coincidence, were
involved in the awful drama that actually took place on 7
July 2005. A level of scenario validation that on this occasion,
we could have done without.
An exercise that turns into the real thing is not that unusual.
For example, in January 2003, thirty people were injured when
a tube train derailed and hit a wall at speed. At the same
time, the City of London Police were running an exercise for
their central casualty bureau where the team quickly abandoned
their plans and swung into action to cope with the real thing.
For a surprising number of people such coincidents cannot
be accepted as such. There just has to be a conspiracy behind
them, despite the obvious point that painstaking research
will always identify probable above possible scenarios. By
the way, the only reason I was asked to speak on TV news that
day, when there was still much confusion about the real tragedies,
was to encourage more organisations to thoroughly plan their
own exercises knowing the threat of terrorism is and remains,
very real. One tragic consequence being Islam, a great Abrahamic,
monotheistic faith (along with Judaism and Christianity),
has undeservedly become vilified by some people.
Peter Power
Visor Consultants
(Article continues below)
To re-cap the situation, on
the afternoon of July 7th, 2005, Power told a BBC radio interviewerthat his company was running an exercise for an unnamed
group that revolved around three bombs going off at precisely
the same tube stations and precisely the same time as those
that were hit that morning.
The transcript is as follows.
PETER 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 up
right now.
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.
The odds of such a coincidence are absolutely staggering, which
led some to charge that Power’s drill was set up ahead
of time, or used by people with insider foreknowledge of 7/7.
Just as happened on 9/11, when exercises involving hijacked
aircraft overlapped with the real attacks, some charge that
the drill was a cover for the real attack in case any of its
perpetrators were caught.
Power alluded to the nature of the simulations in the days
after 7/7, in an effort to downplay the significance of the
mock-versus-real events.
Less than one week after the bombings, as Power and his company
Visor consultants received correspondence and questions, mostly
stemming from our articles on the drills, a
short statement was issued, concluding with the
following comments:
"Beyond this no further comment will be made and based
on the extraordinary number of messages from ill informed
people, no replies will henceforth be given to anyone unable
to demonstrate a bona fide reason for asking (e.g. accredited
journalist / academic)."
Power's culpability is seemingly minimal - after all why would
he announce the drill on national radio hours after the attack?
- but his reaction to questions regarding the drills highlighted
that he was not comfortable discussing the subject further.
Indeed, in December 2007, when Power was approached politiely
by members of the We Are Change group, who explained
who they were and what they were doing, he refused to answer
any of their questions on camera, saying he would not tolerate
the approach.
In addition we at Infowars and prisonplanet have sought to
contact Mr Power over the years to engage in discussion and
to invite Mr Power to be interviewed on Alex Jones' nationally
syndicated radio show. This invitation remains open, but as
yet unanswered.
It must therefore be asserted that Mr Power's latest contention
that we "do not want to have any dialogue" is not
an accurate statement. In fact, it is Mr Power who has declared
that he does not want to engage in dialogue on the matter.
Peter
Power, the former Scotland Yard official Anti-Terrorist Branch
official, who oversaw 