London, Bush and Mossad
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/arc...nd_mossad.html
By Jonathan Freedland / Attack on London 09:23am
It’s become a familiar part of the post-tragedy landscape. A shocking outrage happens and instantly people start looking for the secret, hidden explanation - the conspiracy theory that explains all.
The London bombings have conformed to the rule. Within hours of the explosions, email inboxes were filling up with rumours and whispered speculation. Why did the police say the Underground explosions were several minutes apart when in fact they all occurred at the same time? Why were there other evacuations on the tube that morning - before 8.50, when the bombs went off? Did the police know something they did not pass on?
As always, there are simple explanations for all such questions - in the case of the wrong timings, cock-up rather than conspiracy seems to have been at work. As for the evacuations, they happen almost every day somewhere on the vast network. But that has not stopped the rumour mill, which now turns at lightning speed and across the globe - thanks to the internet.
It was no different after 9/11 or the Madrid bombings of 2004. Even the themes are the same. The first points the finger not at al-Qaida, but at al-Qaida’s sworn enemy, the United States. The conspiracy theorists are very exercised by the revelation that the website which carried the first supposed claim of responsibility for the London attacks is hosted by a server in … Houston, Texas. What’s more, the server’s owners, brothers Robert and Roy Marsh, are distantly linked to the Bush family circle – via their friendship with the president’s former sister-in-law, Sharon Bush. To the conspiracy theorists, that counts as proof of a trail that leads all the way to the White House.
The second, wearily familiar theme casts not the US but Israel as the culprit. This time, the hare was set running by an Associated Press story – retracted shortly afterwards - claiming that the Israeli Finance Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, mysteriously cancelled his appearance at a London conference that morning because he had had some kind of warning that attacks were coming. Later it emerged that Netanyahu had indeed chosen to stay in his London hotel room - but only because the explosions had already happened. His security advisers decided it was too risky for him to venture out while bombs were going off.
Once again, that has not stopped the wild-eyed conspiracy theorists. Iranian state radio’s first guess was that Mossad, the Israeli secret service, was behind it all. Perhaps such fantasies are oddly comforting – especially when the emerging truth of what happened on July 7 is so hard to bear.
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