A massive hunt is under way for four would-be suicide bombers who tried to set off four explosive devices on three London Tube trains and a bus.

Streets were cordoned off, parts of the transport network closed and stations evacuated, but no-one was badly hurt.

Three of the devices are the same size and weight as those used for the 7 July London bombings. The same chemicals also appear to have been used.
(Source: BBC News)

Have a read of the full article, linked above. Those are the facts, as far as we know.

Now, let’s speculate wildly.

Four bombs misfire? The would-be-murderers who carried them are forced to leggit? What are the odds of four devices all being being duds?

When I first heard the confused reports about this attack yesterday, I thought it must be some idiots setting off “comedy” bombs or trying to make some asinine point.

But it looks like it was a genuine attack that went wrong.

How lucky are we today? We could have scores more dead and injured on our hands. Think of all the innocent people walking around now who might otherwise not be here?

Then another thought struck me: perhaps it’s not luck. Perhaps one of the people in whichever terrorist group planned this had second thoughts. Perhaps he or she stopped to think of all the lives they’d be destroying and deliberately sabotaged the devices. If so, thank you, whoever you are.

Or maybe…

Maybe yesterday was the tip of the iceberg. Maybe our security services managed to defuse these devices somewhere along the line but wanted to reel in the people prepared to carry them?

Whatever happened, I feel elated that no lives have been lost. I could have woken up today to the aftermath of another London attack, photos of the dead on telly.

Today could have been very different.

UPDATE:
Just watched an explosives expert on the telly and he said that if the explosives had been made at the same time as the batch used in the 7/7 attacks, it’s very probably that they’ve degraded beyond function now. So, ignore all my conspiracy theories above!

Crazy Blair cartoon by Steve Bell, © 2005

Two-thirds of Britons believe there is a link between Tony Blair’s decision to invade Iraq and the London bombings despite government claims to the contrary, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published today.

The poll makes it clear that voters believe further attacks in Britain by suicide bombers are also inevitable, with 75% of those responding saying there will be more attacks.
(Source: The Guardian)

Despite all New Labour’s spin doctors, despite the toothless mass media, despite a barrage of disinformation, distortion and outright lies from Labour hacks like John Reid, Britons know what’s going on.

We know we’re now paying the price for our support of Bush and the PNAC plan for American global domination.

We know the illegal invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with WMDs or even removing Saddam. It was all about oil and power. If the welfare of ordinary Iraqis had been a priority, wouldn’t the US have counted how many of them it killed for a start? And would Iraq be the hellhole it is today?

We know we’ll probably be attacked again by murderers who share the same insane religious fundamentalism as Bush and Blair.

Whether we’re Britons or Iraqis, we’re just the ordinary people caught in the crossfire between these lunatics.

Supporting the US-led invasion of Iraq put the UK more at risk from terrorist attack, a report has said.

The Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Economic and Social Research Council report also said the invasion boosted al-Qaeda.

The report, coming days after the London Tube and bus bombings, said support of the US-led Iraq war made attacks more likely.

“Riding pillion” with the US as a junior partner in the Iraq invasion had damaged the counter-tourism campaign, the report said.

It had boosted support, training and fund-raising for al-Qaeda.
(Source: BBC News)

Of course, Butcher Blair and his rottweiler John Reid (New Labour’s Norman Tebbit) have already rubbished this report. Their criticism of it consists of them sticking their fingers in their ears and going “la la la I can’t hear you!” That’s to be expected from the architects of the horror in Iraq.

But for the rest of us, people like you and me who aren’t protected by personal bodyguards, people who won’t get whisked off in Jags the moment there’s a hint of a bomb threat, this is bad news.

We’re the ones paying the price for Blair’s total subservience to Bush’s crusade. We’re the ones getting killed by the terrorists that the illegal invasion of Iraq has helped recruit. And we’re the ones who will lose family and loved ones in any future attacks.

Really, what did Blair expect? Did he expect that killing 100,000 non-combatant civilians would have no negative consequences? Did he think the whole Muslim world would go, “Oh – they’ve killed 100,000 innocent Muslims. Hurray for US and UK democracy! We love you Tony!”

This report is another kick in the balls for Butcher Blair.

When will the murderer be arrested? When will he face justice for his crimes?

President George Bush authorised covert intervention in Iraq’s January elections by using behind-the-scenes operatives in an effort to engineer an Iraqi government allied to the US and not dominated by Shia parties, claims an article in The New Yorker today.

Seymour Hersh, the American investigative journalist, said the White House secretly tried to influence the elections by undertaking operations “off the books”. This was after the President had been frustrated in his support for a CIA operation to fund political candidates anywhere in the world who were seeking to spread democracy.
(Source: The Independent)

For “democracy” read “anyone who will do what the US wants.” And remember that Saddam Hussein was funded and supported by the US for many years while he was doing their bidding. He only became a problem when he stopped listening to his masters.

And now we have the glittering jewel of “Iraqi democracy,” as trumpeted by all the apologists for the US and UK’s illegal invasion of Iraq. It’s a shame that jewel turns out to be nothing more than a bit of tarnished glass, grubbied by the hands of US imperialism.

Seymour Hersh has been exposing US government corruption and murder for decades. If only there were more reporters like him and fewer of the Fox News apparatchiks.

Mr Allawi clearly had money to spend during the election and it was assumed, though without any proof in Iraq, that this ultimately came from the US.
(Source: The Independent)

I think someone needs to inform President Bush of the difference between plutocracy and democracy. He seems a mite confused.

On Thursday, I took part in the two minute silence for the murdered innocents of the 7/7 London bombings.

It was sunny here and it felt quite horrible that outside the weather looked so gorgeous, so full of buzzing insects and bursting with life and yet the 54 people we were honouring will never see this summer. Think of their families, the hell they must be going through. Why are these people dead? Because of the evil of religious fundamentalism. Because of people believing that human life is worthless, that blowing up civilians can be a legitimate act of war.

It never is.

As I’ve said before, I’m not a pacifist. I’ve been in fights and defended myself. If my family or I were attacked, I’d certainly respond. If this country was invaded, even though I’m physically unfit, I’d do my best to fight the invaders and protect my home.

If someone attacks you I don’t believe it’s morally wrong to fight back.

But tell me – who had these innocent Londoners attacked? They were from all classes, all walks of life, all religions. They weren’t a military force, they weren’t generals or politicians, they had nothing to do with any of the carnage in Iraq.

And then I thought – 2 minutes of national silence for 54 murdered civilians. What if we applied that to the civilians we killed in Iraq? I don’t mean Saddam’s troops or “insurgents,” I mean ordinary people, cowering in terror in their houses as the US and UK bombs fell on them. I mean the ordinary people of Fallujah, caught in the crossfire between “insurgents” and “liberators.”

In Iraq, we didn’t kill 5 or 10 or even 100 times as many people as were killed in London. We killed 1,852 times more people. Therefore, if we honour those innocents in the same manner, we should have a national silence that lasts 3,704 minutes.

We would have to stand in silence for 62 hours.

But somehow, I can’t see Blair leading that silence, can you?

Sir Jeremy Greenstock

A controversial fly-on-the wall account of the Iraq war by one of Britain’s most senior former diplomats has been blocked by Downing Street and the Foreign Office.

Publication of The Costs of War by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK ambassador to the UN during the build-up to the 2003 war and the Prime Minister’s special envoy to Iraq in its aftermath, has been halted. In an extract seen by The Observer, Greenstock describes the American decision to go to war as ‘politically illegitimate’ and says that UN negotiations ‘never rose over the level of awkward diversion for the US administration’. Although he admits that ‘honourable decisions’ were made to remove the threat of Saddam, the opportunities of the post-conflict period were ‘dissipated in poor policy analysis and narrow-minded execution’.
(Source: The Guardian)

So, one of the British government’s most senior diplomats thinks that Bush and Blair’s bloodletting in Iraq was “politically illegitimate,” eh?

Blair and his cohort of fellow war criminals are doing their best to sit on the truth. But it keeps struggling free. How is Blair going to hide the pile of 100,000 dead Iraqis he helped to create? How is he going to keep the daily carnage in Iraq now taking place off the news?

Everyday in Iraq now is like the 7/7 London terrorist attacks. The country reels from one atrocity to another. When the invasion took place, securing Iraq was not a priority. Securing the oilfields was. And you see the result of the US and UK’s decisions in the blood on Iraq’s streets today.

Butcher Blair can keep on trying to keep his lies to Parliament hidden but there are millions of us who know the truth. 45 minutes from attack? Massive stockpiles of WMDs? Serious threat to Britain?

The person who has most hurt Britain’s security in the last two years is Tony Blair. He has singlehandedly put us on the terrorist map.