July 20, 2005

Despite quite a lot of discussion on the issue, it seems clear now that the Mossad office in London received six minutes warning from British authorities of the London bomb attacks. This isn't surprising, as Netanyahu was in town and would have been guarded with extreme caution by both British and Israeli officials. Bibi is one of the most likely assassination targets in the world, and is a pain in the ass to look after wherever he goes. Six minutes warning was also presumably not enough time to shut down the subway system, if in fact the warning was even sufficiently precise to refer to a subway attack (it is unclear how specific Bibi's warning actually was, although it is odd that the conference he was to attend was in a hotel over one of the attacked subway stations). This leaves a startlingly big unanswered question: where did the warning come from? We're now definitively told that the non-suicide bombers/suicide bombers/non-suicide bombers were actually suicide bombers - and this time we mean it, dammit!, though the 'fifth man' seems to have again disappeared, the 'mastermind' isn't the mastermind, the real 'mastermind' is one of the bombers, and the whole nature of the explosives is inexplicably still being investigated - meaning that four unremarkable guys wandered into the London subway system all by themselves, leaving behind a car full of explosives (if there was no 'fifth man' or 'mastermind', was going to use these explosives?), and simply blew themselves up. Who then provided the warning? And why provide a warning so late that it was not useful?