Peter Power

Peter Power     (soldier, policeman, businessman, “terror expert”)
Born	1951 UK
Founder of	Visor Consultants
A former member of the anti-terrorism squad who volunteered the revelation that on 7-7 he was running a drill at "precisely" the same stations at the same time as the attacks took place.

Peter Power is an "anti-terrorism" squad officer turned "crisis management specialist" and "terror expert". Just after the London Bombings of 7-7, he volunteered the information that he had been running a drill at "precisely" the same stations at the same time as the attacks took place. After a couple of years of near silence on the matter, he issued some further details but has never been asked to testify under oath about the events of that day.

Background

Peter Power was born in the UK in 1951. He served in the 10 Battalion Parachute Regiment Territorial Army from 1969-1971 before joining the Metropolitan Police in 1971. His service in that force included the Special Patrol Group and attachments to the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch and other front line units. In 1990 he transferred on promotion to Dorset. He retired on medical grounds, aged 41, from Dorset in 1993 following his suspension "pending completion of inquiries into an internal matter within Dorset Police." The grounds for his suspension remain confidential although it was clarified at the time that "no member of the public is involved."

Terror Expert

In 1995 Power set up his own crisis management company in central London, Visor Consultants.

Power has appeared regularly on television and radio in connection with "terrorism" and security items. Between 2000 and 2007 he was mentioned as a terror expert in 119 articles according to an analysis of "major world newspapers" by David Miller and Tom Mills.

The Terror Exercise Drill of July 2005

On the day of the 7/7 bombings, Power went out of his way to state on the record that he was running an exercise at precisely the same time at precisely the same underground stations. By contrast he refused to supply further information about the event until a statement given in December 2007. Tom Secker, who researched the 7/7 event for several years, believes the exercise was a desktop event only and did not involve the actual bombers. He suggests that this was organised for purposes of mere distraction of researchers, to obscure what happened. Considering that it seems unlikely that the public would know about it, if Peter Power had not volunteered the information, one wonders why he did so. This might be an indication that he was not responsible for organising the bombings, but that terror drills are often used to hide false flag attacks, so considering the remarkable similarlity between his exercise and the real bombings, he may have wished to highlight it, on the public record, as a form of protection against removal by those who organised 7/7.

BBC 5 radio

On the afternoon of 2005-07-07, on the BBC 5 Drive radio program Power went out of his way to introduce the subject of the training exercise (before the police timeline was revised to indicate simultaneous bombings).

“HOST: How do you effectively provide security on an underground system?

POWER: You're quite right. Security at the very best is proportionate, it'll never ever be absolute. The thing that concerns me is that what are we doing for the thousands of men and women actually who are in London working. And I say that because 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 [if] they're listening 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.”
Peter Power (7 July 2005) 

ITV

A short while after his appearance on BBC Radio, at 20:20 on 7/7, Peter Power gave a television interview to ITV news which revealed a little more about the nature of the operation as well as hinting at the sort of organisations for whom the operation might have been organised:

“POWER: Today we were running an exercise for a company - bearing in mind I'm now in the private sector - and we sat everybody down, in the city - 1,000 people involved in the whole organisation - but the crisis team. And the most peculiar thing was, we based our scenario on the simultaneous attacks on an underground and mainline station. So we had to suddenly switch an exercise from 'fictional' to 'real'. And one of the first things is, get that bureau number, when you have a list of people missing, tell them. And it took a long time -

INTERVIEWER: Just to get this right, you were actually working today on an exercise that envisioned virtually this scenario?

POWER: Er, almost precisely. I was up to 2 o'clock this morning, because it's our job, my own company. Visor Consultants, we specialise in helping people to get their crisis management response. How do you jump from 'slow time' thinking to 'quick time' doing? And we chose a scenario - with their assistance - which is based on a terrorist attack because they're very close to, er, a property occupied by Jewish businessmen, they're in the city, and there are more American banks in the city than there are in the whole of New York - a logical thing to do. And it, I've still got the hair....”
Peter Power (7 July 2005) 

CBC News Sunday

Power went to Toronto for the 15th World Conference on Disaster Management. He appeared on a discussion panel for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's news discussion programme CBC News: Sunday, in which the host (Evan Solomon) remarked upon the 'extraordinary' coincidence of Power's rehearsal scenario:

HOST: We've heard something quite extraordinary - could be a coincidence or not - that your firm, on the very day that the bombs went off in London, were running an exercise simulating three bombs going off, in the very same tube stations that they went off. How did this happen? Coincidence, or were you acting on information that you knew?

POWER: I don't think you could say that we had some special insight into the terrorist network, otherwise I would be under arrest myself. The truth of it is -
HOST: But it is a coincidence.
POWER: It's a coincidence, and it's a spooky coincidence. Our scenario was very similar - it wasn't totally identical, but it was based on bombs going off, to the time, the locations, all this sort of stuff. But it wasn't an accident, in the sense that London has a history of bombs, and the reason why our emergency services did so well, and prepared probably better than any other city in the world, sadly they have to be. So it wasn't exactly rocket science or totally out of the pale to come up with that scenario unusual though it be to stop the exercise and go into real time, and it worked very well, although there was a few seconds when the audience didn't realize whether it was real or not.

Further Statements

On 15 December 2007, after a video recording made by We Are Change UK, Power stated:

I rarely respond to allegations that there was a direct connection between an exercise my company was running on 7 July 2005 and the real events that happened that day, but having just seen on You Tube a highly misleading video following a childish stunt against me on 12/12/07 I feel I have little choice but to make three important points:

First, I chose to meet 2 people that day who requested an interview with me while I was attending a conference in a London hotel. Having shaken their hands and asked where they were from I noticed I was being covertly filmed by one of them who denied it, although it was obvious. As it is not possible to have a civilised conversation when deceit from one side was apparent from the outset, I apologised that I could not help in such circumstances and suggested another time perhaps? I then walked back to the conference – suddenly pursued by 2 or 3 shouting people trying to make it appear I was fleeing?

Second, it’s worth reminding some people that the London underground system has so far been the subject of terrorist bombings on 21 occasions, going back to 1885. Also, on the same day as our exercise, a major law firm in the City of London was running an exercise that involved bombs on the underground. A few days before so did a major German bank in London and even the Metropolitan Police. We were not alone.

Third, our table top exercise was to involve a very small group of crisis managers under test, from a company employing c1000 people. No one was on the streets at all. Just one part of the scenario was similar to IRA incendiary bombs planted on the underground in 1992 to start fires on three underground trains, albeit the locations were by sheer coincidence, more 2005 that 1992. That’s not so surprising when we had a limited number of underground lines to choose from, given the location of our client in the centre of London.

There will be no convincing some very odd people who think actors were on the bus that was actually bombed and the UK Government staged the whole thing on 7/7, the World Trade Centre was pre-wired with explosives on 9/11 and even that tragedy was a US Government setup.

At a time when this country is under a sustained terrorist threat it makes sense to base any exercise scenario on realism and historical events and in so doing hopefully increase our overall resilience to this threat. Had the odd people I met on 12.12.07 bothered to have a proper conversation with me I would have explained all this to them but fantasists will, no matter what I say, always prefer sensationalism to sense and conspiracy to coincidence.

Further details

On April 6, 2009, in response to an explanation on the Uncensored Magazine blog, Power posted a lengthy statement in which he reveals that the company he was working with on 7/7 was London based information giant Reed Elsevier. The full text is as follows:

“There has been much nonsense written about why my company ran an exercise on 7 July 2005 that had very close parallels to the real thing that day. Since then I have made several attempts to add my own comments to numerous sites that seem to get increasingly excited about their own conspiracy theories and in the process exclude any rational debate. It seems those who occupy the world of finding conspiracy theories to replace just about any coincidence, do not want to have any dialogue with those offering a different view, but I have not yet given up hope. I am therefore hoping, perhaps naively, that someone might like to read an honest and factual account about a particular exercise my company ran in London three years ago.

Unfortunately, the BBC had postponed in 2008 a programme in their ‘conspiracy files’ series that would have done this. Our client three years ago agreed to be named in the BBC programme since the attitude of the producer and his team was very balanced (several conspiracy theorists were also invited to take part). We even allowed our complete exercise material to be made available to the BBC. Regrettably broadcasting in 2008 might have jeopardised an ongoing court case, so they had little choice about postponing it to 2009.

Early in 2005 Reed Elsevier, an organisation specialising in information and publishing that employs 1,000 people in and around London, asked us to help them prepare an effective crisis management plan and rehearse it before sign-off. Several draft scenarios were drawn up and the crisis team themselves set the exercise date and time: 9.00am on 7 July.

The test was planned as a table-top walk through for about six people (the CM team) in a lecture room with all injects simulated. Everything was on MS PowerPoint. The location of their Central London office near to Chancery Lane was chosen as one test site. With many staff travelling to work via the London underground system, the chosen exercise simulated incendiary devices on three trains, very similar to a real IRA attack in 1992, as well as other events.

As there had been eighteen terrorist bomb attacks on tube trains prior to 2005, choosing the London Underground was logical rather than just prescient. With this in mind it was hardly surprising that Deutsche Bank had run a similar exercise a few days before and, prior to that, a multi-agency (and much publicised) exercise code-named Osiris II had simulated a terrorist attack at Bank tube station. Moreover, I had also taken part in a BBC Panorama programme in 2004 as a panellist alongside Michael Portillo MP et al, in an unscripted debate (we had no idea at all what the scenario was to be?) on how London might once again, deal with terrorist attacks, only this time it was fictional (created entirely by the BBC).

In short, some of the research for our exercise had already been done. The scenario developed for our client even started by using fictitious news items from the Panorama programme then, as with any walk through exercise, events unfolded solely on a screen as dictated by the facilitator without any external injects or actions beyond the exercise room. Also factored into the scenario was to be an above ground fictitious bomb exploding not far from the head office of the protected Jewish Chronicle magazine where for exercise purposes, our imagined terrorists would have been aware that commuters would now be walking to work (past a building already considered a target) as some tube stations would have been closed.

Of just eight nearby tube stations that fell within possible exercise scope, three were chosen that, by coincidence, were involved in the awful drama that actually took place on 7 July 2005. A level of scenario validation that on this occasion, we could have done without.

An exercise that turns into the real thing is not that unusual. For example, in January 2003, thirty people were injured when a tube train derailed and hit a wall at speed. At the same time, the City of London Police were running an exercise for their central casualty bureau where the team quickly abandoned their plans and swung into action to cope with the real thing.

For a surprising number of people such coincidents[sic] cannot be accepted as such. There just has to be a conspiracy behind them, despite the obvious point that painstaking research will always identify probable above possible scenarios. By the way, the only reason I was asked to speak on TV news that day, when there was still much confusion about the real tragedies, was to encourage more organisations to thoroughly plan their own exercises knowing the threat of "terrorism" is and remains, very real. One tragic consequence being Islam, a great Abrahamic, monotheistic faith (along with Judaism and Christianity), has undeservedly become vilified by some people.”
Peter Power (April 6, 2009) 

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External links

• About Peter Power
• Summary of Peter Power and Visor Consultants' "simultaneous bombs" drill, as of 2011-01
• BBC - Organising forward command. Kings Cross 18 November 1987

References

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