[lbo-talk] Liston vs Ali and other conspiracies

Daniel Davies d_squared_2002 at yahoo.co.uk
Fri Jul 22 00:28:23 PDT 2005


On the specifics of the Liston/Ali fight, if Liston did throw the fight then he had excellent timing because he went down immediately after having taken an absolute pearl of a shot. In general, I don't put much store in "power" in the heavyweight division. At middleweight or lower, there are big differences in punching power; some boxers have the strength to knock an opponent spark out and some don't. But any professional heavyweight boxer, more or less by the physics of things, will knock you out if he lands a punch cleanly, at that's what happened in the Liston fight.

On the London bombing conspiracy theories, it is true that there are a number of things that don't add up. In particular, I don't believe that the TATP factory in Leeds was the source of the Tube bombs, because a) TATP is an unstable explosive uniquely unsuited to being carried all the way from Leeds to London and b) it's very powerful compared to the physical damage done by the Tube bombs. I think that the original information (that the bombers were using military TNT) was correct. But what has most likely happened here is that the police have taken the opportunity of the bombings to round up a load of other bad lads that they'd had their eye on and bundle them up into the bombings investigation. As conspiracies go, this isn't much of one; nor is it all that surprising to me that the boys in blue also decided to cover up their actual sources of information about the identity of the bombers by relying on that old chestnut, the (presumably fireproof) "driving licence found in the wreckage".

It is not all that much of a coincidence that there was a disaster planning simulation exercise going on on that day. There are always disaster planning exercises of one kind or another going on in London; that's why there are firms whose business is to do them, and it is not particularly suprising that one of those firms was going about its business on the 7th of July.

The Mossad bloke in the Jerusalem Post did not "know more than anyone else". His article is in fact very short on actual facts and much longer on pompous speculation. The sentence "The multiple, simultaneous explosions that took place today on the London transportation system were the work of perpetrators who had an operational capacity of considerable scope" is actually wrong. He also gets one important operational detail wrong; he talks about Russell Square as being a "target area" but it wasn't. Passengers came out of Russell Square Tube station but the bomb actually exploded in King's Cross and the bus bomb exploded in Tavistock Place. The media reports all referred to Russell Square and this bloke read them.

The rewriting of the timeline puzzles me a hell of a lot and something does seem very phony indeed about the police claim that they didn't hear anything about the Edgeware Road bomb until someone dialled 999 half an hour after it actually happened. But in order to get from this curious anomaly, to the conclusion that it was all put together by British security forces, you would need a *lot* of intermediate premises, none of which seem to me to be well-supported.

Now, given that the Aussies have skittled us 92 for 7, where's all that bloody sympathy when we need it?

best dd

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