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

On a BBC Radio 5 interview that aired on the evening of the 7th, the host interviewed Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, which bills itself as a 'crisis management' advice company, better known to you and I as a PR firm.

Peter Power was a former Scotland Yard official, working at one time with the Anti Terrorist Branch.

Power told the host that at the exact same time that the London bombings were taking place, his company was running a 1,000 person strong exercise which drilled the London Underground being bombed at the exact same locations, at the exact same times, as happened in real life.

The transcript 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 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.

Click here for a clip of this dialogue. Click here for a longer clip where the comments can be heard in their full context.

The fact that the exercise mirrored the exact locations and times of the bombings is light years beyond a coincidence. Power said the drill focused around 'simultaneous bombings'. At first the bombings were thought to have been spread over an hour, but the BBC reports just today that the bombings were in fact simultaneous. (more at link)

That's pretty bizarre.
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