The Stew of Corruption 481


British democracy has lost its meaning. The political and economic system has come to serve the interests of a tiny elite, vastly wealthier than the run of the population, operating through corporate control. The state itself exists to serve the interests of these corporations, guided by a political class largely devoid of ideological belief and preoccupied with building their own careers and securing their own finances.

A bloated state sector is abused and mikled by a new class of massively overpaid public secotr managers in every area of public provision – university, school and hospital administration, all executive branches of local government, housing associations and other arms length bodies. All provide high six figure salaries to those at the top of a bloated bureaucratic establishment. The “left”, insofar as it exists, represents only these state sector vested interests.

These people decide where the cuts fall, and they will not fall where they should – on them. They will fall largely on the services ordinary people need.

Meanwhile we are not all in this together. The Vodafone saga only lifts the lid for the merest peek at the way the corporate sector avoids paying its share, hiding behind Luxembourg or Cayman tax loopholes and conflicts between international jurisdictions – with which our well provided politicians are very happy. The often excellent Sunny Hundal provides a calm analysis of the Vodafone case here:

http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/11/01/why-are-there-protests-against-vodafone-a-simple-guide/#more-18963

Let me tell you something else about Vodafone. Vodafone took over Ghana Telecom three years ago. They paid an astonishingly low price for it – 1.2 billion dollars, which is less than the value of just the real estate GT owned. The value of the business was much higher than that, and there was a substantively higher opening bid from France Telecom.

The extraordinary thing was the enormous pressure which the British government put on Ghana to sell this valuable asset to Vodafone so cheaply. High Commissioner Nick Westcott and Deputy High Commissioner Menna Rawlings were both actively involved, with FCO minister Lord Malloch Brown pressurising President Kuffour directly, with all the weight of DFID’s substantial annual subvention to Ghana behind him.

What is the point of DFID giving taxpayer money to Ghana if we are costing the country money through participating in the commercial rape of its national assets?

And why exactly was it a major British interest that Vodafone – whose Board meets in Germany and which pays its meagre taxes in Luxembourg – should get Ghana Telecom, as opposed to France Telecom or another company? Was privatisation at this time the best thing for Ghana at all?

This Vodafone episode offers another little glimpse into the way that corporations like Vodafone twist politicians like Mark Malloch Brown around their little fingers. It mioght be interesting to look at his consultancies and commercial interests now he is out of office.

BAE is of course the example of this par excellence. Massive corruption and paying of bribes in Saudi Arabia, Tanzania end elsewhere, but prosecution was halted by Tony Blair “In the National Interest”. BAE of course was funnelling money straight into New Labour bagmen’s pockets, as well as offering positions to senior civil servants through the revolving door. Doubtless they are now doing the same for the Tories – perhaps even some Lib Dems.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/01/jack_straws_cor.html

It is therefore unsurprising the BAE were able to write themselves contracts for aircraft carriers which were impossible to cancel and that their New Labour acolytes were prepared to sign such contracts. It is, nonetheless, disgusting. Just as it is disgusting that there is no attempt whatever by the coaliton to query or remedy the situation. There is no contract in the UK which cannot be cancelled by primary legislation.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23894666-bae-letter-was-gun-to-head-of-ministers-over-aircraft-carriers-deal.do

Meanwhile, bankers’ bonus season is upon us again and these facilitators of trade and manufacture are again set to award themselves tens of billions of pounds to swell the already huge bank accounts of a select few, whose lifestyle and continued employment is being subsidised by every single person in the UK with 8% of their income. This was because the system which rewards those bankers so vastly is fundamentally unsound and largely unnecessary. Money unlinked to trade or manufacture cannot create infinite value; that should have been known since the South Sea Bubble.

Yet even this most extreme example of government being used to serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of everyone else, has not been enough to stir any substantial response from a stupoured, x-factored population, dreaming only of easy routes to personal riches, which they have a chance in a million of achieving.

Conventional politics appears to have become irretrievably part pf the malaise rather than offering any hope for a cure. But political activity outwith the mainstream is stifled by a bought media.

I see no hope.


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481 thoughts on “The Stew of Corruption

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  • Suhayl Saadi

    Yes, I noticed that. It went off-line as I posted my 5:16pm post on 14.11.10 – I had difficulty posting it, it seemed to take forever and never actually seemed to get posted – but I see now that it did in the end. It was off-line still at around 2100 hrs. Was it for routine maintenance, or what? Perhaps the webmaster could let us know.

    The info. about what’s been happening over the decades to some of the Mizrahim (Jewish people from Arab. Iranian, etc. countries) and Ethiopic people in Israel at the hands of the state is shocking – I had no idea about this.

    Azaziah, a Brooklyn MC based in Florida, seems to reference his articles extensively and seems extremely well-informed. I know that this by itself is not necessarily a guarantee of analytical accuracy, but at the very least it throws a healthy dose of skepticism into the mix. At most, it exposes key aspects of the machine. His views on Wikipedia, for example, are very interesting, esp. in the context of the discussion we had on another thread here on CM’s blog.

    In some senses, one is pleasantly surprised that he manages to get away with it, in view of what happened to Lila Rajiva, for example. I did try, however, to access his myspace page, but could not.

  • Vronsky

    “The superlative Scottish poet, Tom Leonard”

    Synchronicity – I’ve just bought ‘Outside the Narrative’. I used occasionally to have a pint with Tom, many years ago, when he was doing pub readings with the late Tom Buchan. For comment on the MSM news, this might never be bettered:

    Six O’Clock News

    this is thi

    six a clock

    news thi

    man said n

    thi reason

    a talk wia

    BBC accent

    iz coz yi

    widny wahnt

    mi ti talk

    aboot thi

    trooth wia

    voice lik

    wanna yoo

    scruff. if

    a toktaboot

    thi trooth

    lik wanna yoo

    scruff yi

    widny thingk

    it wuz troo.

    jist wanna yoo

    scruff tokn.

    thirza right

    way ti spell

    ana right way

    to tok it. this

    is me tokn yir

    right way a

    spellin. this

    is ma trooth.

    yooz doant no

    thi trooth

    yirsellz cawz

    yi canny talk

    right. this is

    the six a clock

    nyooz. belt up.

    http://www.word-power.co.uk/books/outside-the-narrative-I9781901538687/

  • Vronsky

    I’ve just remembered; Tom asked me for a definition of poetry. With ‘Six o’clock news’ in mind, I suggested that it was ‘a piece of writing where the length of the line is determined by some consideration other than the width of the page’. I still think that’s not bad. Tom claimed e e cummings as an influence, which is believable.

  • angrysoba

    I’ll read this site when I have more time but I must admit that any website that calls itself, “Mask Of Zion” is immediately suspicious to me.

    Now Saddam Hussein may have been the best thing for inter-confessional harmony, but he did rule through fear so it is unreasonable to simply assume the occupation of Iraq was an attempt to destroy inter-confessional communities.

    Suhayl has mentioned William Dalrymple before and I have, for a while, been interested in tracking down his book on Christian communities called, iirc, From the Sacred Mountain.

    I have debated before with Muslim friends of mine whether or not Christians are persecuted in Palestine and a good friend of mine considers such a charge to be a lie. I don’t know about that.

    Further, I do absolutely know that some radical Salafist/Wahabists have an enormous prejudice towards those who they consider heretics and many Shias do against their so-called heretics.

    It is not a big stretch of the imagination for me to believe that in the chaos that the US and UK occupation of Iraq wrought that there would be inter-confessional murder. For me, that would be the default position to consider. For many “anti-Zionists” the default position is that anything from a bombing, to a hurricane, to an earthquake is the fault of the “Zionists”. For a website that calls itself, “Mask of Zion” this would be even more so, I would imagine.

    “Prior to the fascist, destructive, genocidal US-UK-Israeli occupation of Iraq, Sunni and Shia, Muslims and Christians, Arabs and Kurds lived together in a harmonious atmosphere of brotherhood and unity that paralleled that of occupied Palestine before the Zionist occupation in 1948. It is egregious. Disgusting. Despicable. Ignorant. Absurd. And erroneous on every factual basis to assert that the aforementioned ethnic and religious groups are now massacring each other, when in reality, they are being massacred by the murderous occupation armies.”

    This is the only part of the article I have read so far. The hyperbole suggests there isn’t much in the way of cool analysis to follow.

    I won’t bother telling you what I think of the rest unless asked.

  • angrysoba

    Here’s an analogous situation:

    When Yugoslavia fell apart people of all different ethnic groups and confessions went about butchering each other as soon as they could and the principle victims were Muslims.

    The “West” was only responsible for the massive loss of life among Muslims in the sense that they didn’t INTERVENE quicker and stop Muslims from being murdered.

    (When we look at Rwanda, Congo and Darfur and very soon Southern Sudan, what do people say about the West? That they don’t give a shit about Africans.)

    Has anyone here read “Bridge on the Drina”? It’s about the faultlines that have always existed in a small Bosnian town called Visegrad. The writer, Ivo Andric, has sometimes been referred to as some kind of Islamophobe or perhaps even an anti-semite, but this book of his is a really wonderful piece of literature that takes pride in the town’s multi-ethnic nature. The only “bad Muslims” I remember are those of the Ottoman Empire who steal a child from Visegrad who nonetheless grows up to become the grand vizier of the Sultan and in honour of his hometown orders the construction of the eponymous bridge.

  • Vronsky

    Huh?

    See those notes they give you, angry – you have to take a little longer to organise them – OK?

  • somebody

    All those voxpop comments we have been hearing, in the wave after wave of propaganda based on the red poppy, that our boys are ‘doing their duty’ and ‘making things better’ is put into question in this BBC report on the dangers of driving a bus especially about the antics of the international forces.

    From medialens

    BBC – Brave Afghan bus drivers’ gauntlet of terror

    Posted by Chris Shaw on November 15, 2010, 12:26 pm

    They are brave though aren’t they? I mean keeping buses on the road shows the occupation is working. So they must be brave, after all they are (albeit indirectly) servbing the interests of Western elites.

    Just look at the dangers they face, these brave drivers.

    ‘Bombs, kidnappings, drive-by shootings, corrupt officials and road-hogging coalition convoys, not to mention hairpin mountain bends and brutal weather – it’s all just another day’s work for Afghan bus drivers, the BBC’s Bilal Sarwary learns’

    phew, as long as the West isn’t responsible for any of the dangers they face. We truly are the good guys, and there is none finer in the land than the BBC

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11606430

  • somebody

    Can you hear the sound of the dominoes falling down?

    (Skye New) The Portugese finance minister is saying that the country is at high risk of needing a bailout. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all have a personal bailout. Meanwhile Osborne is trying to get the bankers to reduce the bonus payments from £7 billion to £4 billion.

  • somebody

    This is a bit weird isn’t it. July and it’s now half way through November. Does Rifkind sit by himself in an empty room?

    6 July 2010 The Prime Minister has today announced the appointment of the Rt. Hon. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, MP as Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee. The remaining eight Members of the Committee will be appointed in due course.

    Posted 16 Jul 2010 05:44 by ISC Admin

    http://isc.independent.gov.uk/

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Vronsky, yes, the six o’clock news is a great poem. Esp, when spoken by the man himself, of course!

    I’ve read ‘From the Scared Mountain’ Wm Dalrymple), it’s a superb book. IN fact, I read as part of my research for the novel, ‘Joseph’s Box’.

    I’ve also read a book by Ariel Sabar, entitled, “My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search For His Jewish Past In Kurdish Iraq” (Algonquin Books), winner of the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. I went to a reading in Washington DC – and was blown away by what he said becasue it went against the propaganda grain. Here is s quote from http://www.jewishtimes.com

    “Q: What do you see as disheartening today between Jews and Muslims?”

    A: “People look at Iraq and read the headlines. There is this assumption that this was always the way, that they hated each other all the time. The story of the Kurdish Jews and the Jews in Iraq was that when the Israelites were exiled, they formed a pretty good pluralistic society. There were problems, but nothing of the scale of what was seen in Europe.”

    Most of the problems b/w Eastern Christians and Muslims have arisen because of the machinations of Western imperialism – and this includes the deliberate building-up of the ‘Saudi’ version of Islam and the consequences thereof. Dalrymple also bemoans all of this in his book.

  • Courtenay Barnett

    @ anon,

    “Courtenay

    I was picking up on Craig’s comment that the political class is non-ideological, merely seeking to secure their own careers. And I wondered whether those in the deep state whom you list were different from normal types of political animals. Are they purposeful and united?

    Has this skid-to-halt emergency stop of the world economy altered the force of gravity or swapped the magnetic poles?

    The human chain that delivers mobiles or food on the shelves of our supermarkets etc is bigger and more organised than them. I always thought under the last dose of Tory rule that normality continued in spite of government and not because of them.”

    Reply: One can make a broad comparison with the US and note as follows:-

    The US two party system is a “corptocracy”. The corporations pay and the politicians pay back. Obama is an interesting case study. He is an accomplished orator and a highly persuasive politician. He actually convinced a significant number of persons within and outside the US that change was coming, once he was elected. He did build up euphoria.

    Remember a guy called, Tony Blair. Far more sensible than his US counterpart at the time, GWB ( but so too was a significant number of human beings on planet earth). Not to detract from Blair and his UK political pitch. He too was coming with change with the third path.

    Back to the US. “The mendacity of hope” is a book just published on the Obama years. One can discern a few things from the US:-

    i) The labour movement there does not have the clout it used to ?” so the shortage of finance means the decline of influence on the Democratic party.

    ii) What then do the Democrats to? They get corporate sponsorship, just as the Republicans used to and then once elected it becomes pay back time.The lines between the two parties do not operarte as a genuine right/left divide.

    Consider George Soros’ “Move on .org” funding as truly corporate stuff. Obama has paid back for the money received. Look at how he has addressed the financial crisis and think then that he did it just to remain within the camp, serving the purposes for which his campaign was funded.

    That is the reality we are facing.

    Back to the UK.

    The funder of the Conservatives is a guy called Lord Ashcroft.

    He and the Conservative hierarchy seem to be on bad terms now. Maybe for public consumption ?” maybe genuinely so, now that the Conservatives are elected. My point here is that someone is funding the political process and there are paybacks which come with the arrangement.

    There were times in the past when genuine right/left issues represented heartfelt and actual divides. Looking at politics these days I am not convinced that such divisions exist in any depth across the board. At political core what is actually operative is corporatism. It is more business school, political spin, smart taking Tony Blair types and the like ?” right and left. Maintain the system as it is; cut social services more than military budgets; repay the financial thieves who brought economic wreck, hardship and ruin; screw the students and the poor. Viewed in this way ?” much of a much ?” both sides of the Atlantic when it comes to the fundamentals of political and economic life.

    So all of that to say this:-

    “The human chain that delivers mobiles or food on the shelves of our supermarkets etc is bigger and more organised than them.”

    And here correctly you state a political process that would have to do a number of things:-

    i) Organise a movement nationally

    ii) Finance the movement to put a national credible challenge to the established two parties.

    iii) Take state power.

    Short of that all I see in the political arena is “Blair today ?” Hague tomorrow” and the cycle with different faces working the same machine will continue until either it implodes or i) and ii) and iii) above come into play as a credible alternative.

    At least ?” that’s how I see it.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Here’s a link to that interview:

    http://www.kurdistannetwork.com/kurdotv/news.php?do=shownews&id=75

    It is clear that there has been recent pressure on/ oppression of some Christian communities living in majority Muslim countries. This is shameful. One remembers the Young Turks’ genocide of the Armenians and the continuing official denial in Turkey of that horrific event.

    That people doing the oppressing must take responsibility for it, as indeed they must, does not preclude analysing the (especially recent) role of the West in shaping such dynamics, either deliberately or as an indirect result of applied policies.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Sorry, a typo of mine: the title of Dalrymple’s book is of course ‘From the Sacred Mountain’, not ‘From the Scared Mountain’ – Freudian slip?

  • Suhayl Saadi

    It’s also clear that the West (specifically, the USA, UK and Germany) for many years actively worked for the break-up of Yugoslavia. Milosevic, of course, was partly a product of that process, as was Izetbegivic et al and were the nearly Fascist Tudgeman and. So yet again, we see a problem partly caused by the West necessitating intervention by Western armies and a prolonged occupation. The West did not intervene in the former Yugoslavia because they (meaning the elites) cared about anyone, they intervened because partition by then had been accomplished and they wanted to codify and formalise partition.

    I am not into blaming ‘the West’ for all the ills of the world – that’s a simplistic cop-out, in my view. There are many levels to all this.

    As I’ve said many times, in terms of inter-communal violence, whether we’re talking South Asia, the Middle East, Africa or the Balkans, in the end, at the most basic level, it comes down to neighbour pulling the machete off the wall and killing neighbour. But the strategic framework which sets the stage for and facilitates the manifestation of such inter-communal bloodshed – that which harnesses the very worst aspects of humanity – is often built very deliberately through imperial policy.

  • Courtenay Barnett

    @ Suhayl,

    “As I’ve said many times, in terms of inter-communal violence, whether we’re talking South Asia, the Middle East, Africa or the Balkans, in the end, at the most basic level, it comes down to neighbour pulling the machete off the wall and killing neighbour. But the strategic framework which sets the stage for and facilitates the manifestation of such inter-communal bloodshed – that which harnesses the very worst aspects of humanity – is often built very deliberately through imperial policy.”

    Well said. I agree. Think also that when there are war criminals like Henry Kissinger, Blair and Bush on the loose, but it is only the likes of Charles Taylor and Milosovic who are pursued by international criminal tribunals, then we can safely conclude that the West has its own insulation against its crimes and corruption.

  • Mark Golding - Children of Iraq

    Courtenay,

    I agree with your points and I think we can bring some ‘hope’ by a revival of the ‘People’s Charter’ with the distinct difference that such a Charter would be woven with consistent policy.

    The points of the Charter could be formulated here and would constitute a new political system. Each point would then be expanded to a logical conclusion and presented at a convention where each point is legally sanctioned.

    A Charter association is formed to discuss the launch and public awareness of the Charter. This would be followed by a number of rallies across Britain as a prelude to a petition which would attempt to gather millions of signatures intended to force a debate in Parliament.

    The debate in Parliament of course is just to garner more publicity, we would not be proposing changes to the existing system we would indeed go much further than change (a dead word) and establish new.

    The trick then is to ready for State power by transforming the Charter Association into a political force with guaranteed public backing and funding.

    Points for a new political system are needed (an interesting exercise) and I leave that to others more qualified.

  • Lucretius

    Penetrating comment on John Sawyers’ recent public statement by Prof. John Kozy here.

    http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26817.htm

    “Recently, Sir John Sawers, the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, devoted much of a 30-minute address to the central role of secrecy in maintaining security. “Secrecy”, he said, “is not a dirty word. Secrecy is not there as a cover-up. Secrecy plays a crucial part in keeping Britain safe and secure. If our operations and methods become public, they won’t work.”

    “Alas, Sir John is obviously not a master of the King’s English. Secrecy is by definition a cover-up. But Sir John doesn’t mean cover-up in the simple sense of hidden; he wants to claim that nothing unseemly or objectionable is being covered up. Unfortunately, that claim is impossible to verify and, if accepted, must be accepted on trust. If someone claims s/he did nothing wrong, the what and how of it must be revealed. How else could it be shown? Yet Sir John claims that the what and how of it must be kept secret.

    “Consider the claim that the universe contains absolutely undetectable attributes. The sentence appears to make perfectly good sense, but it doesn’t. How could the claim ever be given a truth value? All one can really do upon hearing or reading it is shrug one’s shoulders. The sentence has no content. The claim that secrets are not cover-ups is similar. To know that what is secret is not a cover-up, the secret must be revealed, but by definition alone, a secret cannot be revealed and be a secret. Such claims are entirely meaningless.

    “So why should anyone trust the pronouncements of governments and their agents anyhow? That they lie has been demonstrated over and over again in history. In reality, all that the secrecy actually does is arouse suspicion; secrecy leads people to distrust their governments. It also leads nations to distrust each other, and a world in which nations distrust each other is unstable, dangerous, and primed for disaster.

    “Governmental secrecy also annuls any trappings of democracy that a nation may exhibit. Even a perfectly rational citizenry would be unable to make rational judgments on matters of policy that are kept from it by secrecy. How can anyone be expected to make a rational judgment about something s/he is unaware of? Rational thinking requires premises that are factual. Without that knowledge, the electoral process is a mere formal, meaningless exercise. The people may be told that they are sovereign, but they do not even play a meaningful role in the process. The trappings of democracy do not make a nation democratic. Only transparently revealed truth and honesty do. …

  • Sean

    “It’s also clear that the West (specifically, the USA, UK and Germany) for many years actively worked for the break-up of Yugoslavia. Milosevic, of course, was partly a product of that process, as was Izetbegivic et al and were the nearly Fascist Tudgeman and. So yet again, we see a problem partly caused by the West necessitating intervention by Western armies and a prolonged occupation. The West did not intervene in the former Yugoslavia because they (meaning the elites) cared about anyone, they intervened because partition by then had been accomplished and they wanted to codify and formalise partition.”

    I think that’s a fairly broad set of brush-strokes there, is it not?

    The partition spoken of was well codified by individual ethnic and national ideologies long, long before western state intervention in those territories, and was arguably brought on to the horizon of eventual formalisation by successive wars (formalisation of boundaries being the only definite conclusion of intra-state war).

    I don’t think you can claim the kind of imperial intervention as it’s normally defined (as per above) for alot of the earlier decisive points in the Yugoslavian situation; the complexity of having five different states gripped in various stages of social, political and economic flux renders that idea a bit over-simplistic, surely?

    I know it’s often theorised by credible people, and alot of the background of western intervention in the balkans is correctly perceived – but I’m afraid I can’t get to the same conclusions from those beginnings.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Sean, I did not say that that was the ONLY factor. Imperial intervention does not begin and end with the parachuting-in of troops. There are also many types of imperial intervention. But in my view, in the case of Yugoslavia, was a decisive one.

  • angrysoba

    “Can you hear the sound of the dominoes falling down?”

    I’ll bet anyone on here one million pounds that the world will not end within the next five years. In fact, I’ll be generous. Not within the next ten years!

  • angrysoba

    Suhayl,

    “‘From the Holy Mountain’, even!”

    Thanks, the confusion was my fault. I haven’t read it, as I said but I’m interested in doing so.

  • angrysoba

    “As I’ve said many times, in terms of inter-communal violence, whether we’re talking South Asia, the Middle East, Africa or the Balkans, in the end, at the most basic level, it comes down to neighbour pulling the machete off the wall and killing neighbour. But the strategic framework which sets the stage for and facilitates the manifestation of such inter-communal bloodshed – that which harnesses the very worst aspects of humanity – is often built very deliberately through imperial policy.”

    I agree with the first part, but my original comments were in part a response to the idea that the “Zionists” are going round blowing things up in Iraq. It seems that the conspiracy theorists read articles with a similar anylsis to yours about how imperial policy is designed to set neighbours at the throats of their neightbours except they cut out the middle man and assume it is always the “Zionists” themselves who take the machete off the wall.

  • Mark Golding - Children of Iraq

    7/7 – A cacophony of Lies

    Disturbing facts from apparently but not fully authenticated forensic scientist.

    “We do, of course, have a piece of evidence at our disposal that was not presented at today’s (Monday) session and almost certainly will not appear at all ?” unless someone realises its value. I am referring to the photograph of the Edgware Road train, which was leaked to ABC News and subsequently found its way into the British media for one day only. It can be found on the July 7 site, almost at the end of:

    http://www.julyseventh.co.uk/7-7-edgware-road-paddington.html

    For comparison purposes, a picture of an undamaged Refurbished C Stock carriage can be found here in Figure 2:

    http://www.trainweb.org/tubeprune/C%20Stock%20refurb%20photos.htm#Fig%202

    Search for Exhibit INQ10282-8.pdf for the plan view graphic of the carriage where the explosion took place, and look at Exhibit INQ10282-9.pdf, which shows the position of some of the deceased after the explosion. Look at the point marked X where the explosion is said to have occurred.

    The damage photograph appears to have been taken through double door D3, looking towards double door D4. Passing vertically through the ‘U’ of the word EXCLUSIVE is the edge of the right hand side of the door aperture for D4. That can be confirmed by comparing the floor pattern with that in the photo of the undamaged carriage. Note that the pattern is across the carriage between door sets and along the carriage between the seats. We can now see where Danny Biddle said he was standing when the explosion occurred.

    DB said, in his inquest testimony, that he saw the young Asian man reach to the small rucksack on his lap, at which point the explosion occurred. The man was sitting in Seat 28, making it impossible for the detonation point to be where the X has been placed on the floor plans. INQ10282-9.pdf shows that Kahn is alleged to have ended up in the door area, on the other side of Point X. That is going to take some explaining, no doubt with some pretty fancy physics.

    There is a wealth of information in the photograph that shows that the explosion did not occur at Point X, but just forward of the wheels on the trailing end of the front bogie ?” the train was moving to the right. You can see a wheel through the hole in the floor, and the axle joining it to its companion on the opposite side of the bogie. Passing in front of the wheel in the picture, and over the axle appears to be one of the main floor bearers that runs along the length of the carriage. It is bent upwards and metal has been torn away from the top. It is clearly bent upwards, as can be verified by holding a straight edge (paper or ruler) along the bottom edge of the main floor support.

    Continued

    November 9, 2010 12:20 AM

    Anonymous said…

    Protruding through the damaged floor, at the point where the right hand side of the D3 aperture meets the floor, is a large piece of what looks suspiciously like ‘U’ channel, which has a torn end facing the tunnel wall. Taking the position of the photographer into account, there is no doubt that the bent-horizontal part of the channel is above floor level. Moving back to where the channel begins to bend downwards, there is a piece of torn metal pointing vertically upwards, looking as though it has been peeled back from the severed end of the channel.

    In the right foreground can be seen the seat framing on the non-tunnel-wall side of the train. The seat framing on the damaged side is not where it should be but seems to have been moved to the right. It has also rotated upward, as can be seen from the piece of flooring still attached to the bottom of the frame. That flat piece of metal, visible a foot or so above normal floor level, is, in fact, a view of the underside of part of the floor. Note that the left hand end of that piece of metal is torn and bent upwards.

    I think I’ll stop there, although there is more that could be said – and even more if the photo had been of higher resolution. What we are seeing are the results of an underfloor explosion, not the result of an explosion occurring inside the carriage, even if the device had been on the floor. The high forces necessary to form metal, in the way that can be seen, have to be very close, almost in contact – not sourced from a small bag balanced a couple of feet above the floor on someone’s lap.

    Think about it: the explosion was inferred by Danny Biddle to have been originated by the young man sitting in Seat 28, not more that three feet away from where he was standing. The explosion was powerful enough to cause a large part of the floor to be removed and shred his lower legs; yet, his upper body did not sustain similar damage, even though his only protection had been the Perspex draft screen adjacent to Seat 27. The explosion cannot have taken place on the lap of the young Asian man. If it had, Danny Biddle would not have been present at the Inquest and many more people would have died. The young Asian man, if he was there, seems to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    It would seem that the Edgware Road photograph, leaked to ABC, is sufficient to cast doubt on the entire direction of the Inquest.

    November 9, 2010 12:22 AM

    Anonymous said…

    Have all the train carriages involved in the bombings been destroyed?

    November 9, 2010 1:22 AM

    Bridget said…

    ^ Yes according to the response from TfL to this FOI request they were all scrapped:

    FOI request TFL

    November 9, 2010 1:46 AM

    Anonymous said…

    A question I already knew the answer to I suppose. Ok, the response to your FOI request was 2 years after the event. Did you ever find out exactly when they were scrapped and on whose authority? I would be very interested to know how rushed it was and who gave the order, but for a bird that has already flown you might consider this a waste of time.

    November 9, 2010 2:03 AM

    Bridget said…

    ^^^ As for the bomb damage what do you think caused the explosions? Could it be electrical?

    Further evidence may be adduced when these issues are examined:

    Forensic issues regarding the bombs and the bodies of MSK, Tanweer, Hussain and Lindsay

    7. The likely components, manner of construction and mode of operation of the explosive devices.

    8. The likely involvement of MSK, Tanweer, Hussain and Lindsay in the development and assembly of the explosive devices.

    9. The presence at the scenes of MSK, Tanweer, Hussain and Lindsay, and their proximity to the explosions.

    November 9, 2010 2:17 AM

    Anonymous said…

    Relatives of Tube bomber want another post mortem

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1501741/Relatives-of-Tube-bomber-want-another-post-mortem.html

    Rumours have it that Tanweers body was pretty much intact when returned to family.

    November 9, 2010 3:49 PM

    Anonymous said…

    In my view, it is extremely peculiar that Shehzad Tanweer’s head was apparently not found. Heads tend to survive blasts relatively intact, as do hands and feet.

    Other things being equal, the blast energy required to strip a torso to a 3ft chunk of spine, greatly exceeds the energy necessary to separate the head from the neck, and turn it into a ballistic missile.

    As with the other inconsistent / controversial evidence regarding the 4 blast sites, a full (or perhaps even partial) release of the SOCO photographic record would prove the story one way or the other.”

    November 12, 2010 12:25 AM

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