This year marks the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 London Bombings, a terrorist mass murder that I investigated for many years. In this episode we review a recent BBC documentary series about the bombings and associated events, showing how the official story has been changed, inverted and retconned once more. I discuss how the documentary actually undermines the suicide bomber narrative while claiming to do the opposite, in keeping with the British intelligence doublethink that has dominated this case.

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On July 7th 2005, four bombs hit three underground trains and a bus in London, killing 52 innocent passengers and, it seems, the four perpetrators – British Muslim suicide bombers. I remember a friend alerting me that something was happening in London and turned on the radio and began flicking through breaking news on the internet.

I was a student at the time so my focus was somewhat elsewhere, but I was engaged with online alternative media, learning about the history of black ops including state terrorism, watching documentaries about 9/11 and Operation Gladio and so on. It wasn’t long before independent investigations challenged the prevailing government narrative of Islamist suicide bombers. The July 7th Truth Campaign and the makers of the documentary Ludicrous Diversion made early inroads by drawing attention to evidence that suggested a very different scenario, and asking questions about many aspects of the government’s story. In particular J7 or the July 7th Truth Campaign filed many FOIA requests, archived many thousands of news stories and other source material, produced articles and timelines, blogs and documents. Without them, I probably never would have gone as deep into this crime as I did.

I got involved a few years into this, getting to know some of the people who are part of J7 and they helped me source a lot of the material I used for my first effort at a youtube documentary – 7/7: Seeds of Deconstruction. Looking back it seems very rough and somewhat amateurish, but the quality of the information and arguments remains strong. Around the time that I released that one, in 2010, it was announced that the government would be holding inquests into the 52 deaths – though inquests into the deaths of the 4 alleged bombers were separated from these proceedings and then cancelled entirely.

Through the inquests J7 maintained a popular blog and I followed a lot of the news coverage, read the transcripts of testimony, downloaded copies of exhibits and so on. This led to me making a followup or sequel documentary, 7/7: Crime and Prejudice, and to my first book, Secrets, Spies and 7/7. The documentary racked up over 200,000 views by people from nearly 200 countries and the book sold as well as a first-time self-published book ever does.

As such, I spent several years of my life looking into this case, often with help from other independent investigators and researchers (mostly from J7 but not entirely). It consumed my life for quite some time, and in many ways led to everything I’ve done since. This is quite personal for me, because I sacrificed a lot of time to the cause of trying to understand these events, and it was difficult to leave it behind me even once I felt I’d done everything I realistically could do.

My basic conclusion is that the four alleged suicide bombers – Shehzad Tanweer, Jermaine Lindsay, Hasib Hussain and supposed ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan are not guilty. I don’t think they did the bombings, and I’m not even sure they could have, given the extent and sophistication of the attacks. The way the British government behaved both before and after the bombings was incriminating as hell, so they (or people within the government) have to be the primary alternate suspects. The police investigation was farcical, having to be rewritten because the initial version was physically impossible, and has been endlessly revised since then.

What do I mean by physically impossible? Veterans of this case will know this already, but from very early on there were calls for an independent inquiry into the bombings but the government, led by Anthony Charles Lynton Blair of Oxford University branded this idea a ‘ludicrous diversion’. Instead, they published an official narrative of events written by anonymous civil servants based on information largely gleaned from the then-ongoing police investigation. It was designed to placate the sceptics and offer a simple story that everyone could get behind.

The problem was that it was wrong. The story goes that early on the morning of July 7th Tanweer, Khan and Hussain got into a Nissan Micra in the northern town of Leeds and drove down the motorway to Luton, a commuter town near London. There, they met up with the fourth bomber, Lindsay, and the four got on a train to Kings Cross in London, split up and bombed three tube trains and a bus. But the time given for the train they took from Luton to London was wrong – 7:40 a.m., a regularly scheduled train that didn’t run that day.

The government’s story couldn’t even get the four to London without putting them on a non-existent train. That’s how lax, how lazy and how propagandistic this narrative was. The sceptics piled on, and quite rightly, leading to the government publishing an amendment that corrected the time of the train. That amendment is no longer available online via government websites, so for anyone who doesn’t know about this they are still reading the original, factually wrong, physically impossible version of events.

When it came to what is laughably known as British Intelligence we got multiple reports from the Intelligence and Security Committee – an oversight body that depends entirely on MI5 and MI6 to provide witnesses and records so the committee can actually do any overseeing. It’s a paper tiger at best, and so it proved with the 7/7 London Bombings.

Early leaks to the media in the days and weeks following the attacks said that the four were ‘clean skins’, previously unknown to the security services. In the ISC’s first report this story was ditched in favour of admitting that two of the four had appeared on the fringes of a counter-terrorism investigation in the two years prior to the bombings, but weren’t ever identified or considered suspects or targets themselves.

Then, the trial resulting from that investigation revealed this second MI5 story to be bullshit, and information gathered by various journalists that had been withheld lest it prejudice the trial started spilling out into the media. This led to a second ISC investigation and report, which provided more details on the pre-attack intelligence but said it was due to a lack of resources that Tanweer and Khan were not followed up properly. So, it wasn’t that they weren’t identified or considered dangerous (or potentially dangerous), it was a lack of resources. The pair had even been under surveillance to specifically identify who they were, including via covert photography. It was simply because of a lack of money that they were never the subjects of a specific investigation to see if they were up to no good.

That story stood until the inquests, where MI5 provided two different kinds of sources – an anonymised witness who had no personal knowledge of any of the counter-terrorism operations prior to 7/7, and some internal records and documents. They also provided a whole new story – namely, that Khan and Tanweer were not only identified but were actually the subject of specific operations to find out more about them and if they were up to no good. One operation, codenamed DOWNTEMPO (they might as well have called it Operation Don’t Fucking Bother), explicitly targeted them, contrary to everything the ISC had been publishing for the previous four years.

They also blamed a series of bizarre administrative errors for the ‘intelligence failure’, saying that information that should have been shared wasn’t shared, that when checks were done that information that should have turned up in the results did not turn up, that when a surveillance photo of Khan and Tanweer was shared with the FBI it was inexplicably cropped and downgraded, making it all but impossible to identify them. There are so many of these ‘failures’ that it looks like a pattern of deliberate failure, to clear a path for these men.

Then there are the three, or four, or possibly five or six or seven people directly adjacent to the four alleged bombers who all seem to have been working for British and/or American intelligence. Martin McDaid, who ran a supposedly extremist bookshop and training camps in the British Lake District, was a former British special forces guy. Q, or Mohammed Qayyum Khan, was rather obviously working for MI5. Junaid Babar, the jihadi supergrass, was working for US intelligence before he became a law enforcement cooperator. Samantha Lewthwaite, Jermaine Lindsay’s wife, was the daughter of a British Army soldier who worked in Northern Ireland. After the 7/7 attacks she became the White Widow – a white, female jihadi who reportedly turned up everywhere from Syria to South Africa. Then there’s Omar Khyam, the supposed ringleader of the Operation Crevice plot. It was while he was under surveillance that MI5 and Special Branch supposedly stumble across Khan and Tanweer, but at his trial when he brought up the Pakistani ISI’s role in him visiting camps in Pakistan the trial nearly collapsed. Then there’s Rashid Rauf, who some labelled the mastermind behind 7/7, but who is dodgy as a ten cent bottle of soda. Omar Bakri Mohammed, the ‘Londonistan’ figure who has been labelled a mentor of the alleged bombers, was an MI5 and police informant.

As such, our alternate suspect (the UK government, or parts of it or people within it) has repeatedly and demonstrably lied about what they knew and what they were doing in the years prior to the bombings. They have done so in a way that obscures the connections between their culprits – the four supposed suicide bombers – and several people who are almost certainly spies of some kind. They have put out a physically impossible story which itself has been changed, but then they deleted that change from their own websites in the hope people don’t realise they lied.

Does this sound like the behaviour of innocent people? To me it sounds like the behaviour of people who are guilty as fuck. How could MI5 have genuinely believed in late 2005 that they never identified Khan and Tanweer prior to 7/7? Within 11 days of the bombings information about their trips to Pakistan including information from the PISCES immigration and security system in Pakistan were being published in the mainstream media. But officially, Khan and Tanweer were only formally identified a few days prior to this, and it took weeks if not months to get information back from the Pakistanis from their PISCES system. So how did this information get leaked to the media before MI5 even had it? Unless they had it much earlier, in which case they knew who Khan and Tanweer were and just lied to the ISC.

Which, again, makes them look guilty as fuck.

The BBC’s 7/7 London Bombings Propaganda Documentary

For a long time the BBC have been at the heart of the public roll out of information about these events, these people, these stories, and in countering conspiracy theories that contradict or seriously deviate from the government’s own conspiracy theory. They did an episode of The Conspiracy Files which ignored 95% of the serious material and instead focused on debunking speculations that were always vague and poorly-sourced.

They also did an episode of The Conspiracy Roadtrip, where they invited me to be a participant. One of their producers even suggested that Anthony Charles Lynton Blair would be involved, so I’d get to ask questions of him. Needless to say, I wasn’t conned by this lame ass, punk ass, bitch ass, candy ass reality TV producer and I told them that unless they got actual experts rather than generic counter-terrorism twats, and unless I was allowed to run my own camera, I was not interested. They never responded, and instead got UFO enthusiast Tony Topping and part-time witch, nude model and star of the film Cam Girl (in which she is nude a lot) Layla Randle Conde to take part.

The quality of these shows was somewhat lacking, though it did amuse me to watch a supposed counter-terrorism expert try to explain how explosions inside the train carriages forced the metal floors upward, into the carriages, and blew the doors inward. Especially given he didn’t even know which train he was looking at in the pictures he was using to demonstrate this. Obviously, explosions outside of the carriages while they were in tunnels could not have caused by suicide bombers, unless they’d spent a lot of time watching that very schlocky ending to Mission: Impossible.

The BBC’s latest effort is a four-part documentary series called simply 7/7 The London Bombings. I was alerted to this by a friend, James, who has previously been on this podcast a couple of times, and then it flashed up on one of my free TV sites so I quickly downloaded it.

First impressions – by Christ am I familiar with this B-roll. For anyone who doesn’t get that, B-roll is the footage you use in a documentary to fill in the gaps in between custom-built graphics and talking head interviews. In this case it is police, ambulances, the back of the blown-up bus, other footage that I spent many hours looking at both for information and to make my own videos. I wasn’t quite getting flashbacks, after all I wasn’t in London that day (honestly, your honour), but it was a little surreal having not thought about a lot of this for years.

Second impressions – by Christ is this a bunch of bullshit.

As has happened before with the official story – granted by government and distributed by the major media – elements are being revised, flipped inside out and thoroughly retconned. For example, the IDs belonging to two of the supposed bombers being found at the scenes. According to the Home Office a bank card belonging to Khan was found at the Edgeware Road site on July 8th, the day after the bombings, and that it bore the same name as ID found at the Aldgate blast site, and checks later that day confirmed both as Khan’s. According to the ISC Khan’s ID was found on the 8th but the message collating the identification data wasn’t put together until the following day.

Testimony at the inquests from a police detective, Malcolm Wilson, a forensic examiner at the Edgware Road site, said the visa card in the name of S Khan wasn’t found until the 9th, after they’d cleared the bodies of the deceased. He also said an additional card was found on the 13th, which was never mentioned in the earlier reports.

Fastforward to the BBC documentary and we hear from Steve Keogh, another forensic examiner at Edgeware Road. He tells yet a different story, of prising loose part of a body from underneath the train and then finding a visa card in the name of MS Khan – and the show helpfully displays a broken card bearing that name and the exhibit number – MW85. However, according to the inquest testimony MW85 was a card in the name of S Khan, with no M. The exhibit itself was never provided at the inquests, as far as I can find, so where did the BBC get this? Did they simply fabricate it? Also, from the timeline in the documentary Steve found this card on the 8th, so we’re back to the Home Office story and ignoring the ISC’s version and Wilson’s sworn testimony?

Two points about this documentary need highlighting before we move forward. First, it is clear that the police and MI5 supported this production, because then MI5 head Eliza Manningham Buller (of Oxford University) is interviewed, numerous former police officers of various ranks and roles are interviewed, and this is about counter-terrorism operations, the sort of thing that has to be vetted and cleared before you go on camera. Second, the documentary uses a lot of graphics of documents that might appear at first glance to be authentic but are not.

In some places this is obvious – you can’t just get people’s NHS records, for example, which they intercut with interviews with victims who were trapped underground after the blasts. Likewise, the Met Police don’t just hand over 20 year old operational records and briefing slides and so on. Also, having read so many of the documents on this case I didn’t even recognise the font they used, so it’s safe to assume that most if not all of these purported documents in this documentary are fake. Well done, BBC. Fake documents. Fake documentary. Fake story.

I mentioned earlier this problem of how homemade TATP bombs could cause such damage, and the specific sorts of damage, that witnesses describe and the photographs show. TATP isn’t a combustible high explosive like C4 or RDX or Semtex, it doesn’t produce flashes, fire, heat, light. Instead, the molecules go from a liquid gel state to a gas state very quickly, creating the explosion wave away from the epicentre. So why did witnesses describe flashes, fire, black smoke, soot filling the carriages?

Likewise, why do the majority of witnesses describe holes blasted in the floors of the carriages, sometimes multiple holes in the same carriage? Some of these holes are far away from where the police say the bombs went off, begging the question of what caused the damage. Some of the photos appeared to show windows bent or broken inwards, by a force from without. Some witnesses talked of falling through holes in the floor, or even ending up in craters of twisted metal, or under the doors, which had somehow been blasted inwards. In the documentary this is also what most of the witnesses describe, to a greater or lesser extent.

Then there’s the so-called bomb factory at Alexandra Grove in Leeds, which was raided on July 12th after a tip-off. However, up until this point exactly how the police were put onto this address wasn’t clear – nothing in the Home Office narrative, the ISC reports, the inquest testimony and exhibits makes clear why the police raided this particular address.

The BBC documentary fills in this blank – it apparently came from Hasib Hussain’s older brother, Imran. A West Yorkshire Police family liaison officer named Cate Booth went to see them after they’d reported him missing either the day of the bombings, or possibly the night before, depending on what you read. Her boss has been tipped off by the investigation in London about Tanweer and Khan, and Hussain lived less than a mile away, so he suspected Hasib was involved. On July 10th she visited the family, with an armed police van nearby, and spoke to them about Hasib, slipping Imran a scrap of paper with her phone number on it. He later called her, told her about the property in Alexandra Grove and that she ‘needed to get round there quick’.

Cate Booth has never been mentioned anywhere that I can find, and I don’t remember hearing this part of the story before watching this documentary. Perhaps I’ve missed something, but her name doesn’t come up at the inquests or on the J7 forum, so it seems this is new. Whether I believe it or not is another matter.

The documentary also contradicts sworn testimony on what, exactly, was found at the bomb factory. According to the official story the bombs were made of a primary charge of TATP and HMTD detonators – both peroxide-based explosives. We have been told before, and are told again in the documentary, that the ‘bomb factory’ was covered in peroxide and TATP and that it is incredibly dangerous to even touch.

And yet, somehow three men were stumbling around this house for weeks making homemade bombs, which they then drove down the motorway, bouncing around in the back of a tiny little hatchback? Also, the bit about the sludge in the bathtub is grossly misleading, since inquest testimony established that chemical analysis proved it was not explosive, wasn’t organic, might have been insecticide, but certainly wasn’t capable of blowing anyone up. Meanwhile, none of the bomb sites contained traces of any explosive, at least officially, so what connects this bathtub sludge and purported bomb factory to the cause of the explosions?

Operation Theseus – the 7/7 London Bombings Investigation

The codename for the hugely expensive police investigation into the 7/7 bombings was Operation Theseus. Leaving aside how multiple officers on the case were later prosecuted for treating the whole thing as a money-making exercise, this codename has always troubled me.

Theseus was the Greek hero who killed the Minotaur, a fearsome creature that lived in a labyrinth on the isle of Crete. To navigate the labyrinth and be able to find his way back out after killing the beast, Theseus laid down a trail of wool that he could then follow. He laid down a trail for himself to follow. This is the image the Met Police evoked in choosing this codename.

Perhaps the best example of this happening in the investigation is what went on with the CCTV. Despite three different CCTV systems all failing that morning, the police managed to reconstruct much of the journey of the four alleged bombers. At least enough to convince the public that a handful of shoddy still images and then, years later, some shoddy clips somehow proved something. What we’ve never seen is any footage of any of the four on the bombed vehicles – the trains or the bus – or getting on any of the bombed vehicles prior to the explosions, or even going anywhere near the bombed vehicles at all.

That leaves what we have seen – a couple of clips of the four arriving at King’s Cross Thameslink, the overground station, and moving towards the underground. Some earlier footage of them in the car park outside Luton Station and then going inside and getting on a train to London. Some footage of a Nissan Micra travelling down the motorway. A bit of Tanweer stopping for snacks at a petrol station, wearing the wrong colour trousers and arguing with the cashier about getting the wrong change. That’s pretty much it, and some bits of Hasib Hussain wandering around a WH Smiths at King’s Cross after the first three explosions, and then meandering around central London for nearly half an hour.

Which to my mind isn’t half as incriminating as lying about what happened, repeatedly, for years, constantly changing their story and concealing the role of people working for the British secret state. But what would I know?

So, how did the police collect this footage? And more importantly, when? According to the Home Office narrative it was on July 12th that they first noticed the four men with backpacks walking through King’s Cross, and identified Tanweer from a DVLA photograph. After identifying the four they then traced them back up the Thameslink line to Luton, and got the footage from that station also on the 12th.

However, at the inquests a detective inspector said it was on the 11th that the four were first noticed on the King’s Cross footage, and then the following day that they recovered the Luton Station video. This was then challenged by a lawyer for the bereaved families, who cited a CCTV viewing log from Luton showing a detective had first viewed the footage on the 10th, two days before the Home Office said the four men had even been found on the King’s Cross video and a day before the detective inspector said that happened. J7 did try to get a copy of this log via a FOIA request but it has apparently been lost, the police never got it back from the inquest proceedings.

According to the BBC documentary we’re back to the original timeline, of the men not even being identified on the King’s Cross CCTV until the 12th. CCTV specialist lady tells us she picked up the phone and heard from the viewing team that they’d spotted four guys with backpacks walking ‘two by two’ almost in military fashion. He also claimed they weren’t talking to each other, which you can’t tell from silent, low framerate footage like this anyway. Also, I don’t know if this police officer from London has ever walked through a busy train station in London but it’s quite difficult to do four abreast.

At any rate, according to the BBC the Home Office is right, the evidence and sworn testimony is wrong. Somehow, within a few hours of spotting the four on the King’s Cross video the police had traced them at least seven stops up the line to Luton Station, and identified them on footage from there. Even though they’d been there two days earlier for no apparent reason.

The guy who ran Operation Theseus was the chief counter-terrorism officer for the Met, Andy Hayman. He was also interviewed for this documentary, but for some reason they never asked him about his statement on July 9th that the bombers were ‘not masked’, i.e. not wearing masks. This suggests that the police had already identified the four men by that point. It may be instructive when considering Andy’s credibility that this is a man who resigned in 2007 over issues concerning expenses fiddling and his conduct with two female officers, one a member of the IOPC – the office that is meant to provide police oversight.

He was also in charge of the initial inquiry into phone hacking by the News of the World, the News International/News Corp Murdoch-owned newspaper. The initial inquiry that found nothing wrong with former special branch officers working as private detectives hacking the phones of anyone deemed newsworthy. After he left the police he became a columnist for News International and downplayed the scandal. Among the victims of phone hacking were – you’ve guessed it – bereaved family and friends of people who died in the 7/7 London bombings.

There is another dimension to the CCTV that bugs the hell out of me. King’s Cross was undergoing renovations at the time and a temporary CCTV system of only 76 cameras was in place. That system glitched during the exact time that the four were passing through the overground Thameslink part of the station and towards the underground tube part of the station. It apparently only recorded on one camera – the camera that shows the four walking two by two carrying rucksacks. This is why the other key moments cited in the government narrative weren’t captured on camera, such as them splitting up and heading off to catch trains headed in different directions.

But if there was only one camera in that part of the station working in that period, how did it take the police viewing team five days to spot these four men with their scary backpacks? Even if they weren’t monitoring all of this live, which they may have been, it shouldn’t take that long, especially when this is a high priority, well funded investigation.

Another element of the BBC documentary that bothered me is that many of the police interviewees including Andy Hayman made out that there was a rushed scramble to identify the perpetrators in case they were still out there and were preparing a second attack.

The problem is that the bus bombing took place in Tavistock Square, conveniently outside the British Medical Association building, so the scene was readily accessible. The alleged bomber of the bus, Hasib Hussain, apparently landed next to the bus, about 10 or 15 feet from the centre of the explosion. Exactly how a homemade explosive that can hurl people significant distances and blast holes in the floor of heavy metal underground trains cannot blow a hole in the much lighter floor of a double decker bus is beyond my understanding.

But the point is that his body was found more or less straightaway, with reports saying it was decapitated and hence led the police to believe that the bus bombing, at the least, was a suicide bombing. TV news reported that evening, just hours after the attacks, that the police suspected a suicide bomber in the bus blast. Now, the reason why some suicide bombers are decapitated is because they wear bomb vests, so the blast is directed partly upwards. This isn’t the case with a bomb in a rucksack that was, presumably, in between the bomber’s legs as he sat on the bus.

Why did the BBC documentary make out like the police had no idea whether these were or weren’t suicide bombings when that suspicion was there within a few hours? Are they trying to suggest that these weren’t suicide bombings and the real perpetrators escaped and got away with it? Surely not, but this sort of doublethink is endemic in this documentary series. At the same time as they try to support the official narrative and version of events they undermine it with about half of what they put on the screen.

One final thing before we move on to events that happened in the weeks following 7/7 – according to the BBC it was on the night of the bombings that they first found property belonging to Sidique Khan at one of the bomb sites. Or possibly more than one. The name was then run through the police databases and his name pops up as someone who had emerged on the periphery of the Crevice investigation. We even see someone typing his name in on screen, on a legacy police computer system and this information is right there.

The BBC also played a segment from the bugged conversations between Sidique Khan and Omar Khyam, the ISI-affiliated leader of the Crevice plot, inasmuch as there was a plot. This audio was provided to media outlets years ago, and some actually published it before taking it down. Evidently, the BBC now have permission to use it, further emphasising how involved the government were in this production.

So now we’re being told that the police knew on the night of the bombings that Khan was previously known to British intelligence – indeed, this is what the second ISC report implies in its timeline. So why did the ISC, in its first report nearly a year after the bombings, claim that Khan and Tanweer were never identified prior to the attacks? The police knew this was a lie. MI5 knew this was a lie.

However, the documentary series devotes very little of its four hours to this question, and simply gives us Eliza Manningham Buller admitting that when they checked they found that they did know some of the bombers prior to 7/7. The reality is quite, quite different.

Without getting into all the details, the pattern is that every time these men did something that would later be used as proof of their radicalisation and criminal intent, they did so in connection with someone who bears all the hallmarks of being a spy. Khan and Tanweer were involved in the Iqra bookshop, a supposed local hub for extremists, and went on training camp trips to the Lake District. This is where Khan was first captured on film using hidden cameras, in early 2001. But these camps and to some extent the bookshop were being run by Martin McDaid, who was never arrested or, it seems, even questioned by police in connection with running radicalisation activities.

Khan and Tanweer did meet up with Omar Khyam and others under surveillance as part of Operation Crevice. But they were connected to Khyam through this guy known as Q, an alleged Al Qaeda facilitator who was never arrested, never put on trial, simply got away with being intimately connected to the biggest foiled terrorist plot and the biggest terrorist attack in the country at that time.

Khan and Tanweer also went off to Pakistan and attended a training camp in Malakand that was run by Mohammed Junaid Babar, who became an FBI cooperator almost immediately after returning to America. He was a star witness in the trial of the Crevice plotters and in various other terrorism cases on both sides of the Atlantic. While he spent a period on house arrest and cooped up in hotels talking to FBI agents he never did any hard time, despite running the training camp that people were convicted and imprisoned for attending.

I could go on, but the pattern is quite clear to me. Every time any of these four guys, especially Khan and Tanweer, did something that fits the profile of a potential suicide bomber they did so via one of these men. And every time there are mysterious intelligence failures – checks not being done, information not being located or shared, photographs being badly cropped so informers couldn’t identify people, on and on. These failures not only had the effect of not stopping the four alleged bombers, but also of obscuring their relationships with these three men at the heart of whatever it was they were really doing.

And then, after the bombings when MI5 started revealing all this information that they’d had, some of it for years, this only reinforced the impression that the four men were guilty. In appearing to be taking accountability for their inaction they were actually propping up a bullshit story. Again, the doublethink at the heart of the British secret state.

Whereas to my mind this all makes MI5 look guilty as hell, and makes supposed ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan look like he was working for them. Why else was he linking up with other MI5 informants and spies and double agents and getting involved with people who either then got arrested and accused of being terrorists or disappeared without anyone ever troubling them? No one in his personal life was able to believe he was the leader of a gang of suicide bombers, at least not initially. But he had previously worked with the local police in Leeds to help with getting kids out of gangs, and did leave his teaching assistant job to travel to Pakistan for no apparent reason.

All of which sounds more like the behaviour of a spy than a man preparing to kill himself.

And then there’s Jermaine Lindsay, the only one of the men not from the Leeds area (though he had talked about moving there). He was married to Samantha Lewthwaite, who waited a full six days after the bombing to report him missing. She then gave an interview saying she couldn’t believe her husband had done it, before disappearing for a couple of months into police protective custody. She then sold her story to The Sun newspaper for £30,000, condemning the attacks, saying Jermaine had done it but painting him as a recent convert to Islam who’d been tricked by extremists.

Since then she became one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, with media reports saying she became a member of Al Shabaab, the East African terrorist group. She has been connected to a bombing in Mombasa, the attack on the shopping centre in Nairobi in 2013, other reports have her in Syria with ISIS, some say she was killed by a Russian sniper in Ukraine – it’s truly bizarre. Many of the men around her have been killed or arrested, but she always skates away without a hitch, apparently crossing borders in Africa with multiple mixed-race children without anyone noticing. Frankly, her life story sounds more like that of an MI6 agent than a terrorist.

The fact that all of this was left out of the BBC’s documentary is a clear sign that they did not want people going down this road. They don’t want us thinking about who these people really are, or were, and whether their actions were provoked, engineered or ordered by secret agents.

21/7 and Charles de Menezes

Instead of discussing all this, the second two episodes of 7/7: The London Bombings covers what happened in the three weeks after the attacks. They devote far more time to these events than to what the hell MI5 were up to before the attacks.

Two weeks after 7/7 we got the 21/7 incident, which the documentary portrays as a second cell attacking London. A group of men set off devices that made loud noises but did not explode – instead producing a bubbly yellow sludge or dough. This is because their devices weren’t capable of exploding – they were peroxide mixed with chapati flour, a unique recipe in the history of bomb making. Tests done by explosives experts confirmed the substance wasn’t an explosive and wasn’t capable of exploding.

However, the BBC avoided that significant problem with this story and painted the men as somehow part of the same overall plot as the real 7/7 bombings, and recounted the manhunt for the men after all this went down. This includes one of the men sneaking off to the Midlands dressed in a burka, a quite imaginative disguise. One of the others buggered off to Italy but was caught not long after, the other two were rounded up too.

We’ll come back to this in a moment, but the day after the 21/7 failed bombing or stunt or mock bombing or whatever it was, the police shot a man in Stockwell tube Station, the location of one of the incidents the day before. They claim they believed he was one of the men they were looking for, despite him not resembling the man in any meaningful way. As soon as the media got onto the story, supposed eyewitnesses (all of which look like retired squaddies) started talking about the man wearing a very bulky jacket, unusual in the summer weather, that there were wires trailing out of his jacket, that he ran into the station, jumped over the ticket barriers, ran down the stairs and tripped as he ran onto the train.

That man’s name was Jean Charles de Menezes, he was a Brazilian electrician and this entire account was proven to be bullshit. Even after police pulled the CCTV that shows Jean walking calmly into the station, picking up a free newspaper, using his Oyster card to go through the ticket machine, walking at a moderate pace the whole time, not wearing a bulky jacket of any kind, the media continued to repeat these stories. The police themselves put out statements claiming he ran, he refused to surrender, and so on. They lied, repeatedly, and the media initially portrayed this as the successful killing of a potential suicide bomber.

Even the BBC included some material showing these lies and that the police killed an innocent man, but they presented this in the context of a panic to stop four men who’d tried to blow themselves up (with hair bleach and chapati flour). It’s only because we were facing an unprecedented threat, blah blah, and so it’s forgiveable that they murdered this man and then lied about in such a way as to make them look as guilty as could possibly be.

So it’s a limited hangout, of a sort – focus on the one accidental killing of an innocent man and not the years of hyped-up threats, intelligence operations, wars, unaccountable police and even less accountable spies that led up to this point.

And I know what you’re wondering – was anyone within the 21/7 fake bomber or failed bomber gang working for British intelligence? We can’t be sure, but one of them certainly fits the bill, and the BBC documentary never even mentions him. Muktar Said Ibrahim, Yassin Omar, Ramzi Mohammed and Hussein Osman were the four main suspects but a fifth man, Manfo Asiedu, was also arrested and put on trial.

He was from Ghana, and it isn’t clear what his real name and identity is. The passport he used to enter the UK in 2003, the media reports and the prosecutors at the trial all give him different names. Upon arriving in the UK he tried to join the British Army, but was rejected for being an illegal immigrant. They didn’t report him to anyone, just didn’t let him into the Army. He then gets involved with Osman, Ibrahim and the others, apparently in a stunt or protest where they would play the role of suicide bombers but not use real bombs.

Manfo claims that shortly before the event he found out they had been tricked and the bombs were real, so he dumped his backpack in a park and scarpered, only to be picked up later by the police. At the trial he undermined this hoax or stunt defence and said it was a real attack and that he’d been fooled into becoming part of it. As a result, four of the defendants were found guilty and the jury couldn’t make up their minds about Manfo. Shortly before his retrial he plead guilty to a lesser charge.

But rather than explore any of this the BBC opted to give front and centre to a witness from one of the carriages – the one mock-bombed by Hussein Osman. He claimed the whole carriage filled up with white smoke, but the CCTV from the day shows a relatively clear carriage, maybe a little hazier than it was before Osman set off the device. Whether this is exceptionally lazy documentary making, or a dumb mistake by the editors, or the BBC rubbing our faces in their abject lies, I cannot say.

What I do know is that nothing in this four-part series made me rethink my existing opinions on these events. If anything, all the revisionism and retroactive continuity just amplified my feeling that they are still lying, and know they’re still lying. 7/7: The London Bombings attempted at hard reset, ignoring the ISC reports and the Inquests and how much the story changed throughout those years, and reiterating the original narrative that has been proven to be not only wrong, but physically impossible. At the same time they add new pieces that contradict the old pieces, and includes numerous witnesses whose accounts do not fit with the suicide bomber, homemade backpack bomb explanation. Their effort to reassert the original government narrative deconstructs and undermines itself at almost every turn – a clear sign that the people who made this don’t care about truth or honesty.

This documentary left me believing everything I already believed – these four men did not do the bombings, MI5 and the police are lying, the investigation was an expensive sham and none of the actually guilty people have faced meaningful consequences. They really should have called this documentary 7/7: How We Got Away With It.