The capture of the surviving Mumbai terrorist

Here is the story of how the one surviving Mumbai terrorist was captured.



Juan Cole presents some additional data on current relations between India and Pakistan, as well as a bit of background on Lashkar-e Tayiba. In spite of the fevered imaginations of many in the press, there are no indications of troop movements in either Pakistan or India, and Indian officials say they have no intention of attacking Pakistan.

Veteran terrorism correspondent Richard Sale reveals that some of the Lashkar-e Tayiba, a largely Punjabi group, had been fighting the US in Iraq in recent years. If any these attackers were Iraq War 'veterans,' that would help account for their sophistication and guerrilla training.

Pakistan is offering to set up a joint inquiry with India into the attacks.

Juan Cole approves of the way the Indian government is handling the Mumbai terror incident.

India's leadership is showing remarkable cool and proceeding deliberately, which is a good sign. If any group of ten fanatics can go about provoking a war, we are going to have a lot of wars.

Quite true.

An update and some informed background on the Mumbai terror attack

ABC News provides an update on the investigation into the Mumbai terror attack, and Juan Cole gives some good background on the region and the reasons for the conflicts. First, apparently the Indian Intelligence was warned of an impending terror attack by sea into downtown Mumbai. Second, NSA trackbacks from the sim cards out of cell phones carried by the terrorists apparently lead to Lashkar-e Tayiba in Pakistan. This appears to have many of the earmarks of a rogue terrorist operation, however. It may be more a demonstration of the weaknesses of both the Pakistani government and the Indian government than anything else.

U.S. intelligence agencies warned their Indian counterparts in mid-October of a potential attack "from the sea against hotels and business centers in Mumbai," a U.S. intelligence official tells ABCNews.com.

Intelligence agencies warned Indian counterparts of potential attacks in Mumbai.

A second government source says specific locations, including the Taj hotel, were listed in the U.S. warning.

One month later, Nov. 18, Indian intelligence also intercepted a satellite phone call to a number in Pakistan known to be used by a leader of the terror group, Lashkar e Taiba, believed responsible for the weekend attack, Indian intelligence officials say.

The Indian intercept also revealed a possible sea-borne attack, the officials say.

The chairman of the company that owns the hotel, Ratan Tata, told CNN that security was temporarily increased following a warning.

Tata told CNN Sunday that the enhanced measurers were later eased and, in any case, "could not have stopped what took place."

Since Friday, U.S. intelligence agencies have been tracking the phones and SIM cards recovered by Indian authorities from the Mumbai terrorists leading to a "treasure trove" of leads in Pakistan and several possible connections to the United States, officials say.

Officials say one of the cell phone SIM cards may have been purchased in the United States but would not provide any more details because of the ongoing nature of the investigation.

The phones also include the same Thuraya satellite phone intercepted in November by the Indian spy agency RAW, the Research and Analysis Wing, which runs an extensive electronic intercept operation.

NSA, the National Security Agency, has the technical means to retrieve all calls made from satellite and cell phones in the south Asia region.

Officials say one of the phones recovered was a Thuraya satellite phone.

"Once we have the number we will be able to know everyone who was called and where the calls were made from," one former intelligence office says.

A US counter-terrorism official says all leads continue to point Lashkar e Taiba, a Kashmir separatist group with strong ties to al Qaeda.

From Juan cole's Informed Comment:

The Indian counterpart of the CIA, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), intercepted a cell phone call on November 18 to a number in Lahore, Pakistan, known to be that of a Lashkar-i Tayiba handler, saying that the caller was heading to Mumbai. They later found the phone itself on a hijacked Indian fishing boat, which the attackers had taken over to camouflage their approach to the port.

The sole captured LeT operative, Kamal, is said by the Indian press to be from Faridkot village near Dipalpur Tahsil in Okara District of Pakistani Punjab, southwest of Lahore [I saw one article, which I can no longer retrieve, in which the Indian press mispelled the tahsil or county as Gipalpur]). This is such a remote and little-known place that even Pakistani newspapers were having difficulty tracking it down).

Kamal is said to be telling Indian security that he and the others trained in camps in Pakistani Kashmir. (The original princely state of Kashmir, largely Muslim, is divided, with one third in Pakistani hands and two-thirds in Indian; India joined its portion to largely Hindu Jammu to create the province of Jammu and Kashmir.)

Juan cole continues with a good summary of the history of the Kashmir conflict and the Lashkar-e Tayiba. Then he ends with this statement:

The Mumbai attacks were not the first of this scale on an Indian target by the LeT.

If the Pakistani government does not give up this covert terrorist campaign in Kashmir and does not stop coddling the radical vigilantes who go off to fight there, South Asian terrorism will grow as a problem and very possibly provoke the world's first nuclear war (possible death toll: 20 million).

The civilian government that has recently taken over Pakistan is weak. If it puts too much pressure on the military too quickly, it risks another coup and destabilization. But the training camps in Azad Kashmir must be closed.

India, Pakistan, and the Obama administration need to do some serious diplomacy on Kashmir, and try to settle this major global fault line before the 10.0 earthquake finally hits.

This description demonstrates some of the complexities involved in the India/Pakistan relationship. They will need U.S. and British help, but both nations will have to tread very carefully.Both the initial terror attack and the resulting government reactions are parts of the battle for control of public opinion. Improperly handled the government reactions can end up causing the terrorists to win and the governments of both Pakistan and India to come out in the end much weaker. But handled properly the governments can end stronger and the the terrorist groups can find themselves losing the public support that allows then to exist and operate.

Mumbai terror attack update 11 30 2008

CNN reported Saturday Nov 11 that the Taj Mahal Hotel had previously had warning of a possible terrorist attack on the hotel, and had stepped up precautions for a while. The nature of the warnings were not described. The precautions, such as baggage searches and sending people through a metal detector, were all oriented towards the front entrance.

Those precautions had become less intense recently. In any case, the terrorists were extremely familiar with the layout of the hotel. They came in through back doors through a kitchen and "...seemed to know [the hotel] in the night or the daytime," indicating a very high level of training for the operation.

Both the law enforcement agencies and fire fighters were found to have organizational and infrastructure deficiencies which delayed their responses and caused them to be less effective than they should have been.

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The Washington Post reported Friday, Nov 28, that "...the scale, sophistication and targets involved in the Mumbai attacks were markedly different from previous terrorist plots in India and suggested the gunmen had received training from outside the country."

Reports from Mumbai as of Nov 28, 2008

The terrorists’ attacks in Mumbai started three days ago, and as of last report the Indian police and Commandos are still mopping up the final members of the terrorist group. The attack was clearly thoroughly planned and the members of the attacking group were trained in military techniques. Where the attackers come from is not yet known, but Pakistan is the best guess. If members of the Pakistan Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) are involved, a likely scenario if this attack was initiated by Lashkar-e-Toiba, then the possibilities of Pakistan and India stepping away from the likelihood of further war become slimmer. The Lashkar-e-Toiba is reported to have denied involvement.

One thing that is very clear, though, is that regardless of the purpose of the attack or whether it is an attack by an Indian homegrown group or by organizations external to India, the attack is a major escalation in terror attacks in India. India has had more terrorist attacks than any other nation.

Investigations are on-going, and it appears that some of the terrorists were captured by the Indian police and Commandos, so many of the questions that exist today are likely to be answered soon.

News about the terrorist attacks in Mumbai:

• From CNN 11/28/2008 [No time given] - [Mumbai Police Commissioner Hasan] Gafoor said most of the attackers had been heavily armed. "They were carrying an AK-assault rifle, one or two hand guns, and grenades." [Snip}
  
  Pranab Mukherjee, the external affairs minister for Maharashtra state, where Mumbai is located, said the preliminary investigation "indicates that some elements in Pakistan are involved."
  
  "I can't tell you the details since the investigation is going on," he said. "Until the investigation is complete, it will be difficult to say where they came from and how they came."[Snip]
  
  The gunmen were young men in their 20s who "obviously had to be trained somewhere," a member of the Indian navy's commando unit said Friday.
  
  They fired at guests "with no remorse" and knew the layout of the hotels well enough to "vanish" after confronting security forces, the commando said.
  
  "Not everybody can fire the AK series of weapons, not everybody can throw a grenade like that," the commando said outside the Taj hotel. "It is obvious that they were trained somewhere." [Snip]
  
  The identity of the attackers remained a mystery. Police said they came by boats to the waterfront near the Gateway of India monument and the two hotels.
  
  Indian naval and coast guard investigators have determined that two vessels recently seized in the Arabian Sea have no links to the Mumbai attacks. A fishing trawler, however, remains in custody.
  
  The Press Trust of India, citing Union Cabinet Minister Kapil Sibal, reported the gunmen had worked for months to prepare, even setting up "control rooms" in the two luxury hotels ...



• From Washington Post 11/28/2008 1:06 pm EST - BERLIN, Nov. 28 -- Counterterrorism officials and experts said the scale, sophistication and targets involved in the Mumbai attacks were markedly different from previous terrorist plots in India and suggested the gunmen had received training from outside the country. But they cautioned it was too soon to tell who may have masterminded the operation, despite an assertion from a previously unknown Islamist radical group.
  
  Officials in India, Europe and the United States said likely culprits included Islamist networks based in Pakistan that have received support in the past from Pakistan's intelligence agencies. [Snip]
  
  British security officials said they were studying photographs of some attackers but were still trying to establish their nationalities. [Snip]
  
  Analysts said this week's attacks surpassed previous plots carried out by domestic groups in terms of complexity, the number of people involved and their success in achieving their primary goal: namely, to spread fear.
  
  "This is a new, horrific milestone in the global jihad," said Bruce Riedel, a former South Asia analyst for the CIA and National Security Council and author of the book "The Search for Al Qaeda." "No indigenous Indian group has this level of capability. The goal is to damage the symbol of India's economic renaissance, undermine investor confidence and provoke an India-Pakistani crisis."
  
  Several analysts and officials said the attacks bore the hallmarks of Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-i-Muhammad, two networks of Muslim extremists from Pakistan that have targeted India before. Jaish-i-Muhammad was blamed for an attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001.
  
  Both groups have carried out a long campaign of violence in the disputed territory of Kashmir, which India and Pakistan have fought over for six decades.[Snip}
  
  In its Friday editions, the newspaper the Hindu reported that at least three of the suspects held by police were members of Lashkar-i-Taiba and that the assailants had arrived in Mumbai on a ship from Karachi, Pakistan.
  
  Earlier, Pakistan's government condemned the attacks and warned India against jumping to conclusions about who was responsible. Lashkar-i-Taiba issued a statement denying involvement.
  
  India has been plagued by a wave of terrorist attacks in recent years, many sparked by friction between Hindu nationalists and minority Muslim groups. The shootings in Mumbai were far from the worst to strike India's financial capital; bombings in 1993 and 2006 each killed more than 180 people.
  
  A group calling itself the Deccan Mujaheddin asserted responsibility for the attacks in e-mails sent to Indian media organizations Wednesday. Officials said they had never heard of the group. [Snip]
  
  Television footage showed the assailants carrying automatic rifles and backpacks filled with ammunition and grenades. Analysts said the fact that the gunmen quickly fanned across the city and were able to hold off Indian security forces over three days suggested that they had received training at organized camps.
  
  "What is striking about this is a fair amount of planning had to go into this type of attack," said Roger W. Cressey, a former White House counterterrorism official in the Clinton and Bush administrations. "This is not a seat-of-the-pants operation. This group had to receive some training or support from professionals in the terrorism business."
  
  Some experts said the operation bore resemblances to plots orchestrated by al-Qaeda, in that it involved multiple, simultaneous attacks targeting foreigners. In this case, according to witnesses, the gunmen sought out Americans and Britons, and also took hostages at the local headquarters of an Orthodox Jewish group.
  
  Others said they were dubious of a connection to Osama bin Laden's organization. They said al-Qaeda has relied on suicide bombers, not gunmen, and is not known to have cells in India.
  
  David Miliband, Britain's foreign secretary, told reporters that it was "premature to talk about links to al-Qaeda" and that it was still unclear who the intended targets were. "This is only the latest in a series of attacks in India over the last year or two," he said, adding, "Terrorism is not just a war against the West." [Snip]
  
  Other experts warned that there is a long list of suspects who could have played a role. For instance, Indian officials have blamed the 1993 bombings in Mumbai, which killed 257 people, on Dawood Ibrahim, an organized crime figure who remains on the run.
  
  "Anything could be in the cards," said Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism analyst at the Swedish National Defense College. "With most terrorist attacks, it's relatively clear-cut who is involved. In this case, it could be all sorts of constellations that are at work."



• From LA Times 11/28/2008 7:07 am PST - Even as troops moved floor to floor through the besieged hotels liberating trapped guests, the Indian government was blaming foreign elements for the mayhem. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh went on national television Thursday, asserting that the organizers of the attacks were "based outside the country."
  
  In what was seen as a thinly veiled indictment of Pakistan, he warned India's neighbors that "the use of their territory for launching attacks on us will not be tolerated." Other government officials were quoted in Indian media alleging that the squads of gunmen had charged ashore from rubber boats that fanned out from an unidentified mother ship.
  
  In response, Pakistan's defense minister condemned the Mumbai attacks and warned India to refrain from accusing its longtime rival of involvement. And some security experts warned that India has plenty of home-grown extremists who could be behind the violence.
  
  Whatever their origin, it was clear the squads of attackers were well prepared. The militants struck after months of reconnaissance during which they set up "control rooms" in the targeted hotels, according to Indian officials and an owner of one of the hotels.
  
  "It's the opening of a new front, a strike in a place that causes surprise," said Louis Caprioli, a former French counter-terrorism chief. "And it is unique because it's a military operation that leaves the security forces confused and disorganized.
  
  "For the first time in a long time, you see the use of combatants who take hostages, like the Palestinians in the 1970s," he said. "They were ready to die, but they were not suicide attackers."
  
  Past attacks on Indian targets here and abroad have been the work of an evolving, interconnected array of murky Pakistani extremist groups tied to Al Qaeda and, sometimes, current or former Pakistani security officials. They include Lashkar-e-Taiba, which took part in a bloody siege of the Indian Parliament in 2001 and seems a prime suspect in this case, according to officials and experts.
  
  "This is a group affiliated with Al Qaeda," said Sajjan Gohel of the London-based Asia-Pacific Foundation. "There are eerie similarities to the Parliament attacks."
  
  But Lashkar-e-Taiba has reportedly denied involvement. And anti-terrorism officials warned against speculation because the evidence is limited. India has a history of violence by Hindus and criminal mafias as well as Muslim extremists. [Snip]
  
  Simone Ahuja, an Asia Society associate fellow and founder of a video production house in Mumbai, said the choice of targets favored by foreigners was clearly a blow aimed at dislodging closer U.S.-India ties. And she said the damage done to the Taj Mahal hotel, a waterfront landmark that suffered bomb damage and whose giant towers were licked by flames, may leave emotional scars on the city.
  
  "People are in tears watching their city fall," said Ahuja, who shares her time between Mumbai and Minneapolis. "This is like what happened to the World Trade Center. This will fundamentally change the mental and visual landscape." [Snip]
  
  Meanwhile, the Indian media speculated on how the nation's intelligence network had not been aware of the plot.
  
  Officials said commandos seized a small arsenal of weapons that included hand grenades, tear-gas pistols, knives and more than 80 magazines of ammunition. Also found were four or five credit cards with the names and pictures of suspected militants, officials said.
  
  One report indicated that the militants may have come ashore after dark Wednesday. One fisherman told authorities he saw three boats land on the beach. Numerous men cast off life jackets and hurried off the beach. When a bystander asked one of the men who they were, he reportedly responded, "We're military, just shut up," the witness said.
  
  The tactics resemble what Lebanese American expert Walid Phares calls a "jihadi infantry" model: a well-trained, commando-style contingent using automatic weapons and grenades to take hostages and execute attacks across a city.
  
  "The M.O. is different than previous mass-casualty attacks," a senior European anti-terrorism official said. "It's too early to tell [who's behind this]. We are not drawing any definitive conclusions."



• From NY Times 11/27/2008 [No time given] - ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The terrorist attacks in Mumbai occurred as India and Pakistan, two big, hostile and nuclear-armed nations, were delicately moving toward improved relations with the encouragement of the United States and in particular the incoming Obama administration.
  
  Those steps could quickly be derailed, with deep consequences for the United States, if India finds Pakistani fingerprints on the well-planned operation. India has raised suspicions. Pakistan has vehemently denied them.
  
  But no matter who turns out to be responsible for the Mumbai attacks, their scale and the choice of international targets will make the agenda of the new American administration harder.
  
  Reconciliation between India and Pakistan has emerged as a basic tenet in the approaches to foreign policy of President-elect Barack Obama, and the new leader of Central Command, Gen. David H. Petraeus. The point is to persuade Pakistan to focus less of its military effort on India, and more on the militants in its lawless tribal regions who are ripping at the soul of Pakistan.
  
  A strategic pivot by Pakistan’s military away from a focus on India to an all-out effort against the Taliban and their associates in Al Qaeda, the thinking goes, would serve to weaken the militants who are fiercely battling American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
  
  But attacks as devastating as those that unfolded in Mumbai — whether ultimately traced to homegrown Indian militants or to others from abroad, or a combination — seem likely to sour relations, fuel distrust and hamper, at least for now, America’s ambitions for reconciliation in the region.
  
  The early signs were that India, where state elections are scheduled next week, would take a tough stand and blame its neighbor.[Snip]
  
  “If the Indians believe this was Lashkar-e-Taiba and Al Qaeda, as they are suggesting, we could see a crisis like 2002 with enormous pressure to do something,” an American official said on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the matter. “The key will be if the Indians see an ISI hand.” [Snip]
  
  Unless care is exercised, one of the apparent goals of the Mumbai attack will be achieved, said Moonis Ahmar, a lecturer in international relations at Karachi University. And the new American agenda of reconciliation between India and Pakistan will be sacrificed. “It’s a well-thought-out conspiracy to destabilize relations between the two countries,” Mr. Ahmar said.



• From The Guardian 11/2/2008 10:20 GMT - In this case it looks like Islamist extremism, for which Mumbai has been a particular target. More than 250 people were killed there in a series of 13 bomb blasts in 1993 blamed on Muslim militants. Two years ago more than 200 people were killed by bomb attacks on trains and railway stations. The police charged about 30 suspects belonging to a Pakistan-based group called Lashkar-i-Taiba and a northern group called Students Islamic Movement of India.
  
  The violence is fuelled by longstanding ethnic tensions that were inflamed by riots in Gujarat State near Mumbai six years ago. Nearly 2,000 people were killed, most of them Muslims. The most serious attacks followed those riots.
  
  But there is clearly something different about this attack. It has relied not on bombs, but a coordinated assault by men with rifles who seem to have arrived at some of their targets by boat. They appear to be on a suicide mission. In at least one instance they singled out Britons and Americans, and one of their targets was a Orthodox Jewish centre. Clearly there is outside influence on their strategy and ideology.
  
  It is too early to say whether there is an al-Qaida connection, and such links can take many forms, from active training and assistance in planning and logistics to simple inspiration from the internet.
  
  What is likely is that the attacks will get blamed on Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), as have previous Islamist atrocities. US counter-terrorism officials believe some ISI members played a role in an attack this year on the Indian embassy in Afghanistan.
  
  Mumbai may be the latest of many outrages that have their roots in recent Indian history – but the targeting of westerners suggests this is becoming globalised, intertwined with a brand of violent extremism emanating from Pakistan and Afghanistan.



• From Africasia.com 11/27/2008 1:19 pm Cairo - Egypt and the Arab League on Thursday denounced the "terrorist" attacks which left at least 100 people dead in India's financial hub Mumbai.
  
  Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak condemned the attacks and said his country "stands by the side of New Delhi in countering terrorism," state news agency MENA reported.
  
  Amr Mussa, who heads the 22-member Arab League, said such "criminal and terrorist acts aggravate the vicious circle of violence and counter-violence," the agency reported.
  
  The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's main opposition group, also condemned the "terrorist attacks" and called for the execution of the perpetrators.
  
  "These despicable acts of terror are an attack on humanity in general, not against people from certain nationalities or civilization," said a statement on the Brotherhood's website.
  
  "We hope that perpetrators of these heinous (acts) be brought to justice to receive the ultimate punishment for their crimes," said the Brotherhood, which control about a fifth of seats in parliament.



• From NDTV.com November 27, 2008 10:25 PM (Mumbai) - Terrorists who struck Mumbai had set up advance "Control Rooms" in the luxury Taj and Trident (Oberoi) hotels which was also targeted and did prior reconnaissance executing plans worked "over months", Union Cabinet minister Kapil Sibal said on Thursday night.
  
  Sibal said the unprecedented terror attack in the country's financial capital was planned "over months" and the terrorists were not carrying AK-47 rifles but sophisticated weapons like MP-6.
  
  "The terrorists have identified the targets earlier. Somebody had told them earlier. Enormous planning went into the incident. The terrorists were dropped by a mother ship and travelled in rubber boats which they docked (at Mumbai)," Sibal told a private news channel.
  
  Terrorists were not attacking people at random. It was a well though out plan, Sibal said.
  
  They had targeted certain key police officers even when they were wearing vests and protective head gears, he said, adding the terrorists shot them dead within minutes of their arrival.
  
  As security agencies pieced together various leads in the probe on India's worst ever terror strike, there were reports that a likely marine arm of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba may have been involved in the well-planned attacks that left 125 persons dead.
  
  The assessment by the Centre as Mumbai continued to be under siege for the second day came amid reports that the leader of the armed terrorists involved in the attack was killed by his own men.



• From The Daily Mail Last updated at 10:33 PM on 27th November 2008 [Presumend GMT] -- Police have captured one of the terrorists behind the Mumbai attack during the operation at the Taj Mahal hotel.
  
  He was named locally as Zakiruallah, a Punjabi from the Pakistan town of Faridkot.
  
  The 12 gunmen involved may have been trained in Pakistan by militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, Indian officials have claimed.
  
  Sources close to the operation said Zakiruallah told investigators that the group had been trained by Lashkar.
  
  But a spokesman for Lashkar denied involvement. The Pakistani government also condemned the attacks.
  
  It is believed the terrorists hijacked an Indian trawler, M V Alpha, which was used as a mothership from which to launch a maritime terror attack on the coastal city.
  
  Indian coastguards recovered the vessel off the Mumbai coast. The decapitated body of its captain was found on board.
  
  Two inflatable rafts were used to transport the men together with massive quantities of RDX explosive, hand grenades and AK-47 assault rifles, to Mumbai. [Snip]
  
  Ratan Tata, who runs the company that owns the Taj Mahal hotel, said they appeared to have scouted their targets in advance.
  
  'They seem to know their way around the back office, the kitchen. There has been a considerable amount of detailed planning,' he said at a press conference.
  
  The attack comes after it was revealed a domestic Islamic terror group warned it was planning a massacre in Mumbai two months ago.
  
  The Indian Mujahideen denounced the city's police anti-terrorist squad - known as the ATS - in September, accusing them of harassing Muslims.
  
  It said in an e-mail: 'You [the ATS] should know that your acts are not at all unnoticed. We are keeping an eye on you and just waiting for the right time to execute bloodshed. [Snip]
  
  Analysts believe the group which claimed direct responsibility for last night's terror attack, the Deccan Mujahideen, is a front for the Indian Mujahideen.
  
  Witnesses say the attackers were young South Asian men speaking Hindi or Urdu, suggesting they are probably members of an Indian militant group rather than foreigners.
  
  Deccan is an area of southern India, indicating the terrorists may be members of a south India offshoot or cell of the main group.
  
  Indian police say the Indian Mujahideen is an offshoot of the banned Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), but that local Muslims appear to have been given training and backing from militant groups in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh.
  
  SIMI has been blamed by police for almost every major bomb attack in India, including explosions on commuter trains in Mumbai two years ago that killed 187 people. [Snip]
  
  The Mumbai attacks also focused clearly on tourist targets, including two luxury hotels and a famous cafe.
  
  However, experts consider any links to al-Qaeda or that the attacks were inspired by Osama bin Laden's movement unlikely.
  
  Rohan Gunaratna, author of Inside Al-Qaeda and a terrorism expert at the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore, said he believed the group that carried out Wednesday's attack was Indian Mujahideen.
  
  Mr Gunaratna added: 'The earlier generation of terrorist groups in India were mostly linked to Pakistan. But today we are seeing a dramatic change. They are almost all homegrown groups. ... They are very angry and firmly believe that India is killing Muslims and attacking Islam.'
  
  British-based Jane's Information Group said it thought the attackers could be Indian but that taking hostages suggested a wider anti-Western agenda.
  
  'Until now, terrorist attacks in India have targeted civilians, often in busy market or commercial areas, and in communally sensitive areas with the intention to foment unrest between Hindu and Muslim communities,' said Urmila Venugopalan, Jane's South Asia analyst.
  
  'This stands in contrast to the national issues that appeared to motivate Indian Mujahideen,' Venugopalan said. [SNIP]
  
  Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh blamed 'external forces' but stopped short of blaming Pakistan. Both are nuclear-armed countries.
  
  Risk forecasters Exclusive Analysis added that it was 'highly unlikely' that they were authorized or even known about at the top level in Pakistan.

This was a long term operation, well planned, rehearsed, and well financed. Should Indian Intelligence services have gotten wind of it earlier? Did they miss something? Here is an analysis by someone who seems to know what he is talking about. He doesn't think that the attack on Mumbai is especially sophisticated, consisting of well known techniques and equipment, but he does wonder why Indian Intelligence didn't spot it earlier. Based on his analysis I would doubt the report that one news organization I quoted above made that said a policeman thought the terrorists were using highly sophisticated weapons rather than AK 47's.

Simone Ahuja (above) stated “This is like what happened to the World Trade Center. This will fundamentally change the mental and visual landscape.” She is probably correct. But what happens next is going to determine whether the changed mental and visual landscape favors the terrorists or the Indian people. That, too, is an issue that remains up in the air.

What's the reason for the terrorist attacks on Mumbai?

As has been all over the news, there has been a series of highly coordinated terrorist attacks largely on landmark hotels in the Indian city of Mumbai. The first reports that were published by American media emphasized the apparent focus on taking American and British citizens as hostages or captives. A shadowy and previously unknown organization calling itself Deccan Jihad is reported to have taken credit for the attacks.

Mark Kleiman offers a speculation regarding why the attacks occurred at this time.

The important context for the Mumbai bombings must surely be the peace initiative launched by the Pakistani President earlier in the week and seemingly moved forward by a meeting of the two foreign ministers yesterday. That makes the obvious suspects the folks who have the strongest interests in keeping India and Pakistan at daggers drawn: the Pakistani ISI (which Zardari had already stripped of its role in domestic politics) has to be the prime suspect, and apparently India has such suspicions. But there's also the Pakistani military, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Hindu nationalists.

Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent and an expert on terrorism, has said much the same thing.

“There has obviously for many, many years been a type of feelings by India that, say, 150 or so million Muslims who are in the minority are feeling sort of hard done by in terms of the Hindu majority. There are also complaints by Indian Muslims about the way Kashmir is progressing, that enclave, and that is a huge, huge flashpoint. But what’s really amazing is that often, it’s blamed on tensions with Pakistan. And yet, this comes at a time where the president of Pakistan has really made an unprecedented overture to India in terms of trying to warm up relations, trying to secure a lasting peace. And just today, Indian and Pakistani officials were having meetings, and they ended it with a joint declaration that they wanted to co-operate on ending terrorism and combating terrorism,” the terrorism expert said.

The terror attacks may well be a desperate effort to force the governments of India and Pakistan to stop their apparent rapprochement and return to their previous positions of deadly enemies.

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Addendum November 28, 9:40 am CST
Reuters presented some background information at 8:39 am EST Nov 27. They describe two organizations considered likely candidates to have directed the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Indian Mjuahideen. The article briefly describes those two organizations.

For more extensive information, here is the wikipedia entry on Lashkar-e-Toiba and here is the wikipedia entry on the Indian Mjuahideen. As always with wikipedia, consider the references the articles provide and remember that such articles can be manipulated by people with axes to grind.

Reuters offered two inferences which could be drawn from the tactics used:

• WHAT CAN BE INFERRED FROM THE ATTACKERS' TACTICS?
  
  The Mumbai attacks were unusual in that they involved coordinated attacks by gunmen on multiple targets, hostages were taken, and foreigners were specifically targeted.
  
  Several analysts say these tactics point to Lashkar-e-Taiba as being involved. The attacks on symbolic targets designed to gather maximum publicity, and the specific targeting, point to a group following al Qaeda ideology and tactics.
  
  The attacks also show a considerable degree of sophistication, another factor pointing to an experienced group like Lashkar-e-Taiba.
  
  The Indonesian Mujahideen have also surprised police with the sophistication of their attacks, however, although until now these have always been bomb attacks on Indian targets.
  
  In May, the Indian Mujahideen made a specific threat to attack tourist sites in India unless the government stopped supporting the United States in the international arena.
  
  The threat was made in an e-mail claiming responsibility for bomb attacks that killed 63 people in the tourist city of Jaipur. The mail declared "open war against India" and included the serial number of a bicycle used in one of the bombings.
  
  
• WHAT CAN BE INFERRED FROM THEIR DEMANDS?
  
  A man speaking Urdu with a Kashmiri accent phoned an Indian TV station, offering talks with the government and accusing the Indian army of killing Muslims in Kashmir. This suggests the attackers are involved with a Kashmiri group like Lashkar-e-Taiba.
  
  The demands of the Indian Mujahideen -- like their targets -- have always tended to be much more domestic. The group issued an e-mail threat in September to attack Mumbai but directed its anger at the Mumbai police anti-terrorist squad, accusing them of harassing Muslims.
  
  "If this is the degree your arrogance has reached, and if you think that by these stunts you can scare us, then let the Indian Mujahideen warn all the people of Mumbai that whatever deadly attacks Mumbaikars will face in future, their responsibility would lie with the Mumbai ATS and their guardians," it said.
  

Terrorism is always a tactic used by weak organizations to try to delegitimize the accepted government of any nation so that those weaker organizations can either force the government to accept and implement their demands or even cause the government to fall so that the weaker organization can replace it.

In this case the flashpoint is probably the status of Kashmir, the key disagreement between Pakistan and India since the original partition of those two countries in 1947 out of British India. Organizations like Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Indian Mjuahideen are known to share training and personnel, and are known to be supported by segments of the Pakistani Inter-services Intelligence (ISI). elements of the ISI also provide support to the Taliban operating in Afghanistan out of the northern Pakistani province Waziristan.

All of this lends credence to speculations that the Mumbai terrorist attacks are efforts to derail the efforts of the new government of Pakistan to take tighter control over Waziristan and Pakistan in general. The recent efforts towards a peace initiative recently begun by the Pakistani President and advanced by the two foreign ministers of Pakistan and India are clearly anathema to the Islamic terrorist organizations.

Since the United States and Great Britain can both be expected to encourage the Pakistani President to exert greater control over Pakistani territory and also to work towards a rapprochement between the two nuclear powers - India and Pakistan - the logic behind the Mumbai terrorist attacks and the apparent effort of the terrorists to take American and British hostages appears quite logical. The terrorist attacks appear to be the lashing out by a weak opposition organization as the governments of both Pakistan and India move to threaten their existence and their goals.

Suicide attacks are not based on Religion

The reason why so many terrorist are attacking Americans, even committing suicide attacks to do so, is radical religion, right?

Nope. Not according to Robert Pape in his book Dying to Win: The Strategic logic of suicide terrorism. The most prolific users of suicide attacks are the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka. They are secular Marxist-Leninists who are demanding their own homeland. Religion is not a cause for them, though it may sometimes be a recruiting tool.

The New York Times provided this summary of his conclusions:

…Since Muslim terrorists professing religious motives have perpetrated many of the attacks, it might seem obvious that Islamic fundamentalism is the central cause, and thus the wholesale transformation of Muslim societies into secular democracies, even at the barrel of a gun, is the obvious solution…

Over the past two years, I have compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003—315 in all…The data show that there is far less of a connection between suicide terrorism and religious fundamentalism than most people think.

The leading instigator of suicide attacks is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion. This group committed 76 of the 315 incidents, more than Hamas (54) or Islamic Jihad (27). Even among Muslims, secular groups like the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Al Aksa Martyr Brigades (Fatah affiliated, DL) account for more than a third of suicide attacks.

What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks actually have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in seeking aid from abroad, but is rarely the root cause.

Three general patterns in the data support these conclusions. First, nearly all suicide terrorist attacks -- 301 of the 315 in the period I studied -- took place as part of organized political or military campaigns. Second, democracies are uniquely vulnerable to suicide terrorists; America, France, India, Israel, Russia, Sri Lanka and Turkey have been the targets of almost every suicide attack of the past two decades. Third, suicide terrorist campaigns are directed toward a strategic objective: from Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to Kashmir to Chechnya, the sponsors of every campaign -- 18 organizations in all -- are seeking to establish or maintain political self-determination.

…Before the Sri Lankan military began moving into the Tamil homelands of the island in 1987, the Tamil Tigers did not use suicide attacks. Before the huge increase in Jewish settlers on the West Bank in the 1980's, Palestinian groups did not use suicide terrorism.

And, true to form, there had never been a documented suicide attack in Iraq until after the American invasion in 2003.

Understanding that suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation rather than a product of Islamic fundamentalism has important implications for how the United States and its allies should conduct the war on terrorism.

As Daniel Levy (from whom I directly took the NY Times quote) wrote:

Bottom line then – it’s the occupation stupid.

Why are Iraqi's committing suicide to attack Americans? Because we invaded Iraq.

Why did bin Laden attack on 9/11? Because American had troops permanently based in Saudi Arabia, his land.

So America's global war on terrorism should be focused on dealing with blowback from our own policies*, not trying to repress religion in other lands. Of course, that might be a hard-sell to a religious evangelist who was raised on stories of martyrdom for the faith, but it appears that the dying for your own land takes priority over dying for your faith.

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*Economic, diplomatic and military.

Krugman on the amazing political silence on the economic crisis

Paul Krugman points to the general silence from McCain, Obama and Clinton on the current economic crisis.

He does point out the idiocy of McCain's economic advisor, Kevin Hassett, "...the co-author of “Dow 36,000” — [who] insisted that everything would have been fine if state and local governments hadn’t tried to limit urban sprawl." He does not point out that McCain's primary economic advisor, ex-Senator Phil Gramm, is the single most responsible individual (besides Alan Greenspan) for the current banking crisis. How? Gramm was the guy who pushed through the removal of the FDR era Glass-Stegall Act which separated retail banking from insurance and security banking and put retail banking under regulation to prevent the kinds of idiocies that have created the current banking crisis.

My bet is that Obama and Clinton haven't brought up the economic crisis because they essentially agree on both the causes and the cures. Such agreement is not going to create a competitive distinction between the two of them, so whichever becomes the Democratic nominee (probably Obama) will use it to distinguish between himself and the fish-in-a-barrel - uh, I mean target, McCain.

Since Bush is doing his best Herbert Hoover non-action routine as America's banking system collapses before our eyes and Ben Bernanke of the fed paddles desperately to try to shore up the mess given us by the Reagan Revolution, the Presidential election is rapidly becoming a competition between Republican fear-mongering and proposals for rational government presented by a half-Black, half-White Democratic candidate.

If America really is the great shining light on the hill that nationalists and nativists like to claim, then fear-mongering will fail completely. Since I happen to think that as great as America really is, it is also deeply flawed, unfortunately fear-mongering has a chance.

Still, I think that if he survives the campaign (I remember JFK, Martin Luther King and RFK quite well, all victims of fear) then I think we will see Barack Obama sworn in as President next January to preside over the worst Recession America has seen since the Great Depression.

But what do I know about the future? It wasn't too many months ago I thought the Presidential race was going to be between Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton. as for right now, it is clearly shaping up to be a race between fear-mongering, voter suppression and crooked elections on one side versus rational approaches to the difficult problems of the economy, the occupation of Iraq, and racism in America that the Bush administration no longer even addresses realistically.

Incompetent conservative Bush failed to prevent 9/11

Unlike the compliant American media, the Sidney Morning Herald has now published the truth that exposes how utterly incompetent the Bush administration was in protecting America from terrorism. Here is how the SMH describes how the Bush administration dealt with the of Intelligence presented to the Bush and his official which warned of the danger of a 9/11 type event which bin Laden was expected to carry out:

The warnings were going straight to President Bush each morning in his briefings by the CIA director, George Tenet, and in the presidential daily briefings. It would later be revealed by the 9/11 commission into the September 11 attacks that more than 40 presidential briefings presented to Bush from January 2001 through to September 10, 2001, included references to bin Laden.

And nearly identical intelligence landed each morning on the desks of about 300 other senior national security officials and members of Congress in the form of the senior executive intelligence brief, a newsletter on intelligence issues also prepared by the CIA.

Here is a listing of some of the Intelligence warnings which the decision makers in the Bush administration, from Bush on down, were aware of.

• "Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack" (May 3)
• "Terrorist Groups Said Co-operating on US Hostage Plot" (May 23)
• "Bin Ladin's Networks' Plans Advancing" (May 26)
• "Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent" (June 23)
• "Bin Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats" (June 25)
• "Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile
  Attacks" (June 30),
• "Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays" (July 2)

And what did the Bush administration do about all this information?

Other parts of the Government did respond aggressively and appropriately to the threats, including the Pentagon and the State Department. On June 21, the US Central Command, which controls American military forces in the Persian Gulf, went to "delta" alert - its highest level - for American troops in six countries in the region. The American embassy in Yemen was closed for part of the summer; other embassies in the Middle East closed for shorter periods.

But what had Rice done at the NSC? If the NSC files were complete, the commission's historian Warren Bass and the others could see, she had asked Clarke to conduct inter- agency meetings at the White House with domestic agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration and the FBI, to keep them alert to the possibility of a domestic terrorist strike.

She had not attended the meetings herself. She had asked that the then attorney-general, John Ashcroft, receive a special briefing at the Justice Department about al-Qaeda threats. But she did not talk with Ashcroft herself in any sort of detail about the intelligence. Nor did she have any conversations of significance on the issue with the FBI director, Louis Freeh, nor with his temporary successor that summer, the acting director Tom Pickard.

There is no record to show that Rice made any special effort to discuss terrorist threats with Bush. The record suggested, instead, that it was not a matter of special interest to either of them that summer.

Bush seemed to acknowledge as much in an interview with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post that Bush almost certainly regretted later. In the interview in December 2001, only three months after the attacks, Bush said that "there was a significant difference in my attitude after September 11" about al-Qaeda and the threat it posed to the United States.

Before the attacks, he said: "I was not on point, but I knew he was a menace, and I knew he was a problem. I knew he was responsible, or we felt he was responsible, for the previous bombings that killed Americans. I was prepared to look at a plan that would be a thoughtful plan that would bring him to justice, and would have given the order to do that. I have no hesitancy about going after him. But I didn't feel that sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling."

If anyone on the White House staff had responsibility for making Bush's blood "boil" that summer about Osama bin Laden, it was Rice.

The key person who should have pulled all this together and gotten Bush to become aware of the overall picture was the director of the National Security Council, Condaleeza Rice. It is clear that she failed to do anything. Her main action since then has been to get her loyal subordinate, Philip Zelikow, appointed executive director of the 9/11 Commission so that he could cover up her total failure in the run-up to 9/11.

So the evidence is making it clear that the key decision-makers in the Bush administration ignored all warnings of a major terrorist action against the U.S. The question that will probably never be answered definitively was whether they did this intentionally.

It is my speculation that the Bush administration wanted to generate public support for an attack on Iraq. It is well known (Paul O'Niel's book) that the first consideration the Bush people had upon taking office in January 2001 was trying to determine how to attack Iraq. What better excuse than a terrorist attack on American soil? As Naomi Klein has documented, these are people who believe in The Shock Doctrine as a way to frighten the public into supporting an unprovoked attack on Iraq. The rather extreme lies and misrepresentations expressed by members of the Bush administration to justify the attack on Iraq made it clear that they would do or say anything to get their war. They assumed that the success of the attack on Iraq and the positive restructuring of the entire middle east that they expected to result would justify the means they used to conduct the invasion.

The utter failure of the Iraq invasion and occupation has made it even more important that they conceal their actions that led to the disaster. One set of those actions was their inaction in the face of terrorist threats and their failure to prevent 9/11.

The Sidney Morning Herald has published the story of the complete failure of the Bush administration to prevent or avoid 9/11. The reason for their clear failure is not as clear, but once you recognize that they are conservative true-believers who think that their prescriptions are certain to work but are blocked by their domestic enemies, it becomes easy to accept that they would take any action to conduct the invasion of Iraq because they believed it would allow conservative free market forces to be freed to create a democratic free-market paradise in the Middle East that everyone living there would want to join.

The failure of that fantasy is as clear now as it was predictable in 2001, but the conservative true-believers won't accept that they are out of touch with reality. Expect them to search for domestic enemies who "sabotaged" their efforts. That's what it means to be a conservative true-believer. Conservatism is seen as perfect and can never fail, so failures must either be the result of sabotage by enemies of conservatism or by alleged conservatives who tried to implement the conservative vision but who were insufficiently conservative to achieve it. Had they tried harder, put more effort into process, sacrificed more, then conservative doctrine would have prevailed.

The fact is that the Bush administration attempted to apply conservative doctrine to the combined problems of the Middle East and terrorism in 2001 and their efforts failed. Everything they have done since then has consisted of efforts to conceal their failure, punish and eliminate their domestic enemies who - presumably - caused that failure, and to apply conservative principles with greater effort in the face of great resistance.

The result is the greatest failure of any American Presidency ever, even greater than the disaster that Andrew Johnson made of Reconstruction after the Civil War and the economic disaster Herbert Hoover failed to deal with when conservative economic principles created the economic disaster we now call the Great Depression. And it all started because, for whatever reason, the Bush administration failed to act on all the many warnings they got in 2001 of an impending terrorist attack.

An accurate look at the terrorist threat to America.

I. Introduction
II. Ignatius' review
III. What this means
IV. Bush political response
V. Conclusion

I. Introduction

Ah Hah!

Someone with more expertise than I have has confirmed my belief that the so-called "Clash of Civilizations" that Bush, Cheney, McCain and the conservatives want all of us to panic over is almost entirely fiction! As I have been writing for some time now, there is no great organized massive threatening block of enemies out there in the dark threatening to destroy America.

That is not to say that there are no enemies out there who want to do American and Americans harm. There are. But they are really little more than a bunch of disorganized bandits hiding in mountains and jungles and occasionally trying to make brave statements with their terrorist activities.

Their terrorists actions consist primarily of raids on soft (unprotected) targets for the purpose of getting media attention. The media is catered to by attacks characterized by randomness and utter depraved viciousness designed to frighten Americans, but there are no real militarily effective attacks. There can't be. There is no great organization out there that has the capability of taking over America and converting it to radical Islam or anything like that. So we need to look realistically at what the terrorist threat consists of, at what we can and need to do about that terrorist threat, and why the Bush administration has so greatly exaggerated the terrorist threat to conceal their numerous failures to govern.

First we need to look at the true terrorist threat. Former CIA officer and more recently forensic Psychiatrist Marc Sageman has published a book based on his case studies of over 500 Islamic terrorists to explain "...who they are, why they attack and how to stop them." David Ignatius reviews Sageman's book Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century.

II. Ignatius' review of Sagemen's book (excerpt)

Sageman's message is that we have been scaring ourselves into exaggerating the terrorism threat -- and then by our unwise actions in Iraq making the problem worse. He attacks head-on the central thesis of the Bush administration, echoed increasingly by Republican presidential candidate John McCain, that, as McCain's Web site puts it, the United States is facing "a dangerous, relentless enemy in the War against Islamic Extremists" spawned by al-Qaeda.

The numbers say otherwise, Sageman insists. The first wave of al-Qaeda leaders, who joined Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, is down to a few dozen people on the run in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. The second wave of terrorists, who trained in al-Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan during the 1990s, has also been devastated, with about 100 hiding out on the Pakistani frontier. These people are genuinely dangerous, says Sageman, and they must be captured or killed. But they do not pose an existential threat to America, much less a "clash of civilizations."

It's the third wave of terrorism that is growing, but what is it? By Sageman's account, it's a leaderless hodgepodge of thousands of what he calls "terrorist wannabes." Unlike the first two waves, whose members were well educated and intensely religious, the new jihadists are a weird species of the Internet culture. Outraged by video images of Americans killing Muslims in Iraq, they gather in password-protected chat rooms and dare each other to take action. Like young people across time and religious boundaries, they are bored and looking for thrills.

"It's more about hero worship than about religion," Sageman said in a presentation of his research last week at the New America Foundation, a liberal think tank here. Many of this third wave don't speak Arabic or read the Koran. Very few (13 percent of Sageman's sample) have attended radical madrassas. Nearly all join the movement because they know or are related to someone who's already in it. Those detained on terrorism charges are getting younger: In Sageman's 2003 sample, the average age was 26; among those arrested after 2006, it was down to about 20. They are disaffected, homicidal kids -- closer to urban gang members than to motivated Muslim fanatics.

Sageman's harshest judgment is that the United States is making the terrorism problem worse by its actions in Iraq. "Since 2003, the war in Iraq has without question fueled the process of radicalization worldwide, including the U.S. The data are crystal clear," he writes. We have taken a fire that would otherwise burn itself out and poured gasoline on it.

The third wave of terrorism is inherently self-limiting, Sageman continues. As soon as the amorphous groups gather and train, they make themselves vulnerable to arrest. "As the threat from al-Qaeda is self-limiting, so is its appeal, and global Islamist terrorism will probably disappear for internal reasons -- if the United States has the sense to allow it to continue on its course and fade away."

III. What this means

Not only is there no great Islamic Jihad based organization that threatens the foundations of America, there cannot be. While there are a number of people motivated to attack America and Americans, to the extent that the organize, train and try to become more efficient they become highly vulnerable to police and special operations attacks. Their very efforts to attack America are self-defeating, and it is only dreamy youths who think that such efforts have any possibility of success.

When the Bush administration took office, Dick Cheney had the idea that successful terrorists had to have state sponsorship, so he essentially ignored al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Based on Sageman's analysis, it would appear that Cheney's instinct was correct. In the absence of state support that provides training and safe sanctuary areas terrorist organizations could not become major threats. The only thing that was wrong was that improved technology and greater global travel and communication does allow non-state supported terrorist organizations the ability to conduct occasional spectacular attacks that are politically threatening to the incumbent leaders of attacked nations.

Al Qaeda was, in fact, state-sponsored terrorism. They were funded largely by extremists’ religious individuals who spent oil money through Pakistan to create the Taliban-led state of Afghanistan who provided sanctuary to Osama bin Laden after Saudi Arabia and Sudan kicked him out. The attack on 9/11 was a one-off result of what was almost state-sponsored terrorism. The funding from Saudi Arabia has been allowed by the Saudi Royal family to bleed-off internal discontent within the Arabian Peninsula, and the creation of the Taliban and the Afghanistan state they ran was a result of the semi-failed state of Pakistan. The American invasion of Afghanistan was a completely appropriate reaction to 9/11 and, according to Sageman, has resulted in the effective destruction of the first wave of terrorists.

IV. The Bush political response

9/11 was a spectacular failure for the new Bush administration. It was a clear demonstration that their focus on missile defense and containment of China was a failed foreign policy. They wanted to do something similarly spectacular to cover up for their failure to prevent 9/11. They had intended to attack Iraq from their first month in office, and 9/11 provided an excuse. Unfortunately, as soon as the public was aware that al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan and was being protected by the Taliban, they were forced to redirect some resources to the invasion of Afghanistan. Because of their continued focus on attacking Iraq, Osama was never caught, but as Sageman points out, the first wave of terrorists has since been effectively destroyed. Without a state-provided sanctuary, terrorist organizations cannot survive.

The point to remember is that the invasion of Iraq was intended as an effort to consolidate Republican control of the American government. Such military and foreign policy actions are the strongest power of the American President. That's why Bush, and now McCain, speak of the Presidency as being Commander-in-Chief. The American President is sharply constrained by the Constitution in all other actions, so Bush and Cheney want everything the President does run under the title of Commander-in-Chief, and they need the Iraq War to continue for that to be effective.

The only real threat to the Bush administration from Iraq is the casualty rate, and by extending the time in Iraq to the point where most of the local ethnic cleansing is finished. With the end of the ethnic cleansing, the American casualty rate has dropped to where the American media is essentially ignoring that country. The Shiite government America has installed makes this easier by not protecting reporters, so that no real information can get out. As long as there is no effective information coming out of Iraq and the casualty rate is low, the Bush administration has been able to extend the Iraq occupation (it's no longer a war) until the end of the Bush administration.

After that the Democratic President, who has no need for the war to maintain his or her power, will withdraw the troops, giving the Republicans the opportunity to blame the Democrats for "losing" the war in Iraq. But as Sagemen points out, the war in Iraq has no purpose except to stir up resentment against Americans and create new terrorists out of stupid young men. The creation of those enemies is what maintains the Republican Party as a viable political entity. Without a steady stream of apparent enemies, there is no reason to vote Republican. The Republican Party has demonstrated its total failure and corruption and has no ability to correct itself.

The Republicans are aware of this. McCain is going to run a campaign against (probably Obama) in which is himself runs above the fray and has kind words, much as Bush did in 2000. But below that level there are at least three-quarters of a billion dollars aimed to label the Democratic nominee with a series of repeated and very nasty lies. (See Josh Marshall's description of the coming Republican campaign.)

V. Conclusion

The nature of the terrorist threat has been obvious to the experts for several years now, but with the publication of Sageman's book we now get objective facts we can review without trying to decide who to trust to tell us the truth.

By looking realistically at the nature and extent of the terrorist threat, it becomes clear that the Bush administration has been severely exaggerating it, encouraging the terrorists, and using that threat to extend their otherwise completely failed administration in power. That fact is that in a Parliamentary system 9/11 itself would have caused the government to fall and the Prime Minister to resign. So would the invasion of Iraq, abu Ghraib, Katrina, and any number of other failures over which Bush and Cheney have presided.

So let's look at the situation realistically. There is going to be a Democratic President elected in November 2008, but the current Congress is complicit in the incompetence and failures of the last seven plus years. That includes most of the Democratic leadership, and they are all going to try to avoid investigating the disasters America has suffered under its failed government. That must not be permitted.

America will require years to recover from the Bush administration series of disasters. A close look at the terrorist threat that has been used by our politicians to justify these disasters is one major step in correcting the problems and rebuilding an America under the Constitution and Rule of Law that we can be proud of. Sageman's book is a major step forward in this effort.

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If you find that the use of headings and internal links improves the readability of this essay, leave me a comment. If it doesn't, suggestions would also be nice.

Only about 700 foreign fighters entered Iraq this year

The insurgency in Iraq was and remains mostly Sunni and Iraqi. Sixty percent of the 700 foreign fighters who arrived in Iraq this year to help the Iraq insurgents came from America's allies, Saudi Arabia and Libya. From the fort Worth Star-Telegram:

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. -- The New York Times

BAGHDAD -- Saudi Arabia and Libya, both considered allies by the U.S. in its fight against terrorism, were the source of about 60 percent of the foreign fighters who came to Iraq in the past year to serve as suicide bombers or to facilitate other attacks, according to senior U.S. military officials.

The data come largely from a trove of documents and computers discovered in September, when American forces raided a tent camp in the desert near Sinjar, close to the Syrian border. The raid's target was an insurgent cell believed to be responsible for smuggling the vast majority of foreign fighters into Iraq.

The most significant discovery was a collection of biographical sketches that listed hometowns and other details for more than 700 fighters brought into Iraq since August 2006.

The records also underscore how the insurgency in Iraq remains overwhelmingly Iraqi and Sunni. U.S. officials estimate that the flow of foreign fighters was 80 to 110 per month during the first half of this year and about 60 per month during the summer. The numbers fell sharply in October to no more than 40, partly as a result of the Sinjar raid, the officials say.

Saudis accounted for the largest number by far of fighters listed on the records -- 305, or 41 percent -- U.S. intelligence officers found as they combed through documents and computers in the weeks after the raid. The data show that despite increased efforts by Saudi Arabia to clamp down on would-be terrorists since 9-11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi, some Saudi fighters are still getting through.

Libyans accounted for 137 foreign fighters, or 18 percent of the total, the senior U.S. military officials said.

So the insurgency in Iraq is primarily Iraqis with little external support. If bin Laden's al Qaeda is doing anything (beyond just world-wide fundamentalist jihadi public relations on TV and the Internet) it isn't doing much of anything at all in Iraq.

That means the fighting in Iraq is almost entirely an Iraqi internal civil war rather than being caused by international terrorism, so U.S. troops are not fighting international terrorism while they remain in Iraq. It looks like our diplomats should be working with the governments of Saudi Arabia and Libya prevent or find and catch the volunteers going to Iraq.

The other part of the war on terror should involve the U.S. fighting a real public relations battle on TV and the Internet. The key is to gain control of the hearts and minds of the majority non-aligned people in the Middle East. They can be reached by offering the same messages of hope that won the Cold War, but the only thing the Bush administration has offered with the invasions and threats of invasions and bombings is reasons to fear and hate America. Any effective PR battle will be delayed until AFTER the U.S. withdraws from Iraq and Dick Cheney stops threatening to bomb Iran.

That is not to say the military is not needed to go after terrorists. Military force is still needed to go after the really nasty creeps like Bush's friend, bin Laden. (Why was he ever allowed to escape from Tora Bora?) Instead Bush and Cheney got our military totally bogged down in an unnecessary invasion and occupation of Iraq which is mostly counterproductive to the effort of effectively going after terrorists on a world-wide basis.

The presence of American troops in Iraq at present is doing little except destroying the combat effectiveness of our troops, damaging our reputation world wide with the collateral damage and the Blackwater (and other) mercenaries, while simultaneously destroying the American federal budget in case those troops are really needed somewhere.

Consider this, also from the bottom of the same article in the fort Worth Star-Telegram:

General speaks out: Retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq shortly after the fall of Baghdad, said he supports Democratic legislation that calls for most troops to come home within a year. "The improvements in security produced by the courage and blood of our troops have not been matched by a willingness on the part of Iraqi leaders to make the hard choices necessary to bring peace to their country," Sanchez said in remarks to be aired Saturday for the weekly Democratic radio address.

Our real enemies are not in Iraq now, if they ever were. It is time for us to apologize to the Iraqis, offer reparations and get out of their country. It is time to get serous about fighting international terrorism and leave the Iraqi sideshow.

Saudis say US could have prevented 9/11

Ex-Saudi Arabian Ambassador describes 9/11 as a major failure of U.S. Intelligence. The information was available to the U.S. Intelligence agencies to prevent 9/11. From CNN:

Speaking to the Arabic satellite network Al-Arabiya on Thursday, Bandar -- now Abdullah's national security adviser -- said Saudi intelligence was "actively following" most of the September 11, 2001, plotters "with precision."

"If U.S. security authorities had engaged their Saudi counterparts in a serious and credible manner, in my opinion, we would have avoided what happened," he said.

The hijackers were known, and they were under observation by the Saudi Arabians.

Cheney and Bush did not believe that terrorism was going to be a problem unless it was state-sponsored. This was in spite of repeated warnings by Clinton and Clinton's White House staff, and in spite of Clinton leaving Richard Clarke at the National Security Council to coordinate anti-terrorism activities.

Instead of listening to the warnings, the Bush White House downgraded Clarke and ignored him. Is it any surprise that the Intelligence agencies did not ask the Saudi Arabian Intelligence agencies what they knew?

The only question remaining unanswered about the Bush failure that permitted 9/11 is whether that failure was intentional or just simple stupidity. Since the Bush White House has demonstrated repeatedly that they are both nasty enough to permit 9/11 in order to justify their already-planned invasion of Iraq, and they they are sufficiently incompetent in running government to simply not know how to deal with a problem like terrorism, we need further evidence to determine if it was malice or stupidity.

[h/t to Laura Rozen.]

Why hasn't America been attacked by terrorist since 9/11?

To answer that question you can take the Bush administration's self-serving excuses. Those are that 1. "We are fighting them in Iraq so that they won't come over here.

Yeah, right. We invaded a country without a connection to the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, and only after we invaded and occupied their country, destroyed their government and economy, did they create an all new set of terrorists to try to force our occupying forces out. This stops terrorists from attacking America -- how? The mechanism is, to put it politely, highly unclear.

What is clear is that by invading Iraq with no justifiable reason the American Republican Party was starting an unnecessary war that would create its own opponents. the opponents, facing the most powerful military in the world they adopted asymmetric warfare and invited outside help for training and materials from existing terrorist organizations.

Then, not only did the Bush administration Republicans motivate the creation of bands of insurgents who had to use what the Republicans call "terrorist" techniques of fighting, they stupidly failed to control Iraq while they destroyed the Iraqi Army and Police who might have stopped the growth of the insurgency.

Now Iraq has numerous militias and insurgent groups using asymmetric warfare on each other and on the occupying American troops. The American troops in Iraq are a great recruiting and fundraising tool for the insurgents and militias, and the fighting teaches them the best and most effective techniques with which to take on the most powerful military in the world.

The so-called terrorists in Iraq were not their before the Republican invasion of that country. They are a creation of the U.S. Republican Party militarists and nationalists. They wouldn't have been there had George Bush and Dick Cheney not created them!

Then we get Bush excuse no. 2. The terrorists have not attacked America because the newly created Department of Homeland Security has greatly increased America's defenses against terrorists.

It is hard to know whether DHS has actually been in any way successful, since The Bush administration keeps everything behind a wall of secrecy. The secrecy itself is a major destruction of open democratic government, but the secrecy seems primarily intended to protect the Republican Party rather than to keep "terrorists" from learning the more effectively attack America.

But the secrecy is doing the job it was intended to do. It keeps Americans from knowing what their government is doing to them.

For a more extensive description of how effective DHS has been, go read Amy Zegart at the Reality-Based community.

This is all an American-centered view, focused on why there has been no follow-up to the 9/11 attack. But there is more information to look at, and James Wimberly asks the next great question - Why Hasn't Spain Been Attacked Since 11-M?, then provides a short set of answers.

Gen. Petreaus was asked the key question during his interview Monday. Is America safer for the invasion of Iraq? Gen Petreaus waffled and did not answer at that time, getting a rebuke from his boss, George Bush. More lies and secrecy from the Bush administration.

Democracy does not work when the leaders of the government are allowed to keep their actions secret and lie to the public. Bush, Cheney and the Republican Party are working hard to destroy the American democracy and replace it with an authoritarian government run by plutocrats like themselves. There is no other explanation for what is happening.

Not only are we not safer from terrorists than we were September 11, 2001, they have successfully changed the subject to the (relatively minor) threat of Islamic-based terrorism while they put basic American democracy into grave threat!

How do terrorists think?

Here is an excerpt from an article by Juan cole.

Terrorists imagine the world in black and white, as full of demons and angels, and place themselves on the side of the angels. Sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer has called this way of thinking "cosmic war." Small terrorist cells arise in part because their members develop a specific way of looking at the world, which they reinforce for one another in everyday interactions. As the group becomes more and more distinct in its views from the society around it -- and more isolated -- its members can cross boundaries of reason and human sentiment, becoming monstrous. [Snip]

Paul J. Hill, who shot down abortion clinic physician Dr. John Britton in 1994 in Florida, was a formally trained clergyman who started out committed to helping people spiritually, not killing them. He became so overwrought about what he considered genocide inflicted on the unborn, however, that he felt compelled to save innocents by killing Dr. Britton. The reverend reflected, chillingly, afterward, "If I wounded him, just shot him in the leg or shoulder, I knew there was an excellent probability that he would return to killing innocent children. In my thinking it just became: I had to kill him."

Becoming a religious terrorist depends on several steps. The first is conversion to a way of thinking by which the perpetrators identify with a core group that they wish to protect, but which they believe is being subjected to great harm. Typically this group is imagined to be composed of innocents or lonely carriers of divine truth, whose existence is both essential and yet precarious."

Learning to think this way is both an individual and a group process. It appears to be effective in producing all kinds of extremists. Fortunately, violent extremists are relatively rare. Unfortunately, not rare enough.

While individuals who conduct terrorist actions (like Paul Hill) need to be held individually responsible for their actions, the isolation and group impetus towards violent action is also important. Or in other words, education and socialization are more important that cops and punishment.

Right-wing DixieCrat terrorism -- recent history

Meteor Blades reminds those of us who love the ideals of America that on Jun 21, 1964, three young men were murdered by members of the KKK in Mississippi because they dared to try to register African Americans as voters.

The Black slaves had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War and their freedom was enshrined into the Constitution in the 13th Amendment in 1865. Then the 15th amendment, passed in 1870, guaranteed that "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

Nearly a century later the White over-class, represented by the KKK, was murdering individuals who tried to exercise that Constitutional Right or help others to do so. This was only eight months after the Church bombing in Birmingham in which four teenage girls died for the "crime" of being Black. The killers hid behind the twin veils of secrecy and intimidation of witnesses for decades, as right-wingers usually do.

It was these killers, the southern KKK in its many versions, together with the angry frightened white supporters who were being forced to share power with people their families had owned as property (like dogs and horses) a century earlier who were taken wholesale into the Republican Party in Nixon's and Lee Atwater's Southern Strategy of 1972.

Dick Cheney and the Southerners in the American Republican Party are the direct familial and ideological descendants of these frightened, vicious people. They deny it, saying that they do not approve of such terroristic tactics and of the KKK. But the fact is, the two incidents mentioned here proved counter productive. They brought down more heat than could be dealt with, and in fact encouraged a lot more people to work to share the Civil Rights all Americans were supposed to have with African-Americans. The change in the attitudes of the Southern racists was not because terrorism was immoral (illegal had never bothered them) but was because it had quit being a successful strategy -- nearly a century after the Civil War.

I was in college in 1964, so I guess that Meteor Blades and I are about the same age. I suspect he grew up in the North and saw from a distance how bad this terrorism and intimidation was. I grew up in east Texas, and it was so normal that I only realized that I was attending an all-white segregated High School because my parents made sure I was aware of Brown vs. Board of Education and because I watched TV clips of the National Guard trying to keep the peace and get the Black students safely into the Arkansas schools in the late 50's under Eisenhower. The very few incidents that made it into the news (the local editor did not want to lose subscriptions - or have his building burned down) don't touch on the violence and anger of that period.

It is somewhat better now. That is largely because the worst of the racists and terrorists have died off or gotten too old to be very active. I had thought that our kids were getting better, and that the right-wing American terrorists were becoming extinct, but the American conservative movement has either resurrected them or created a new set of terrorists with which we have to deal. Race is less the issue than it was, but now Class has come to the fore in ways not seen since the late 19th and early twentieth century, and war is still an acceptable tool to them to use for little more than just getting wealthier. And the only reason personal terrorism has declined in America is that the upper classes and wealthy have decided that it is no longer an effective tool to use to keep and augment their positions. In many ways, centralized ownership and control of the mass media has replaced much of the retail level terrorism of earlier years.

I guess that is a little better but it, too, has to be dealt with.

In the meantime, let's remember that the three murdered members of the Congress of Racial Equality died to give us many of the things that are better about America now. Those of us here now need to try to clean our nation up even more, so that we can hand it off even more improved to our children.

God! I must either be getting old or I'm in a preachy mood this morning! Or both.

Christian Terrorist supporters to celebrate the terrorist Paul Hill

Digby has warned us that the "Christian" groups who opposed abortion plan a four day long celebration of the terrorist Martyr Paul Hill in Milwaukee, WI in late July.

This from Talk to Action:

Our winners [of the Theocrat of the Week award] this week plan to reenact the the actions of theocratic martyr Paul Hill next month in Milwaukee. On July 29, 1994 Paul Hill, who sought to set a good example for Christian theocratic revolutionaries, assasinated abortion provider Dr. John Britton and James Barrett one of his escorts, and seriously wounding another, June Barrett, outside an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida.

George L. Wilson of Children Need Heroes and Drew Heiss of Street Preach are planning to honor Paul Hill in a series of events called "Paul Hill Days" in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, July 26th - 29th -- "to honor him as God's man and our hero."

Why Milwaukee? Why not? There are people here who recognize Paul Hill as a hero, and we would love to welcome others from around the country who share our belief. Hopefully, in the future, others will host events in their cities.

Planned events include:

Activities at our two remaining killing centers

Literature distribution

Ministry at the Federal Courthouse

Reenactment of 7-29-1994

Paul Hill March

Ministry at other public forums

It should be noted that George L. Wilson, the proprietor of Children Needs Heroes, recognizes two other heroes he believes America's children should learn about: Shelly Shannon, who was convicted of the attempted assassination of Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kansas, among other serious crimes, including a series of arsons; and of course, James Kopp, who was convicted in the sniper assassination of Dr. Barnett Slepian in Amherst, New York. Kopp is also the chief suspect in several other shootings.

All three are recognized as Heroes of the Faith by the Army of God, members of which are likely to be on hand for the festivities.

Paul Hill, Shelly Shannon, James Kopp and Eric Rudolph are all Christian terrorists. There is no difference between them and the Islamic terrorists who strap on suicide bombs to kill "unbelievers" in the Middle East to enforce Burkhas on their women.

All these terrorists have assumed the right to kill people they cannot convince to accept their beliefs, and they do it in the name of an unreasoning God that only they hear telling them to kill. All involve a few active terrorists supported by a much larger group of active supporters of terrorism, and the larger groups recruit and encourage other killers to do their bidding by calling them "heroes."

Those people represent Satan's Armies, not those of any God or of Allah. Those terrorists are Evil, and so are the people who wish to make heroes of them. Wilson and Hiess applaud those terrorists for killing umbelievers, and want to recruit more of them for more killing.

The unbelievers the the Christian terrorists want to kill in America are the majority of us who support a woman's right to choose what to do with her body. The Islamic terrorists consider the western attitude of allowing our women to let others see her face or her body. In both religions it is terrorists who demand that women be controlled by them. Since the terrorists represent minority extremist cults but demand that everyone obey them, they are frustrated beyong belief. So they send their evil terrorists out to kill unbelievers.

In both cases they consider the beliefs of the unbelievers to be a violation of what they interpret to be God's (or Allah's) Law, and they use this as justification to kill the unbelievers without warning or mercy. Then the congregation members of these dangerous cults present the terrorists as 'heroes' to get their own children to emulate them.

Make no mistake. These people are every bit the same as the terrorists like Muhammed Atta and his crew of 18, or for that matter like Timothy McVeigh.

But Hey! Maybe Terrorists are an oppressed minority too. Why shouldn't their supporters celebrate them and hold them up as heroes for their children to emulate? If that's the case, then think that "Children Need Heroes," "Street Preach" and "Army of God" are thinking too small. Four days in Milwaukee for just a single martyred terrorist? Just one miserable terrorist? Surely they can do better. They need to expand their horizons. They need to celebrate the terrorist actions of lots of terrorists. Like Timothy McVeigh and David Koresh, Mohammed Atta and his 18 helpers, Osama bin Laden, the London terrorists, the Madrid terrorists, and all the other worthy terrorists who have been so prominent in killing those God hates in recent years.

So I think that we in the blogosphere should help them. We need to thank all those fine businesses and churches in Milwaukee for their support of terrorism. And it should be on a non-sectarian basis. Any religious terrorist deserves to be honored during Paul Hill Christian Terrorist Days.

I am proposing that we here in the blogosphere all send letters, emails and FAXes to organizations there in Milwaukee and Madison, WI. thanking them for their support of Paul Hill Christian Terrorist Days.

Just to start the ball rolling, here are a few addresses and phone numbers to contact:

Milwaukee Wisconsin Chamber of Commerce
Metro Milwaukee, WI.

Association of Commerce
756 N. Milwaukee St.
Milwaukee, WI 53202
Phone: 414-287-4100
Fax: 414-271-7753
Milwaukee, WI Official Chamber of Commerce Website:http://www.mmac.org

Tom Barrett
Mayor of Milwaukee
200 E. Wells Street
City Hall Rm.201
Milwaukee, WI 53202
Phone: (414) 286.2200
FAX: (414) 286.3191
mailto:mayor@milwaukee.gov/

Governor Jim Doyle
Office of the Governor
115 East State Capitol
Madison, WI 53702
608-266-1212
www.wisgov.state.wi.us/
http://www.wisgov.state.wi.us/contact.asp?locid=19

[Governor’s office in Milwaukee]
Milwaukee Office
Room 560
819 North 6th St.
Milwaukee, WI 53203

Chamber of Commerce
501 E. Washington
Madison, WI 53703
(608) 258-3400

Dirksen Federal Building
219 S. Dearborn Street
Chicago, IL 60604 or
619 U.S. Courthouse and Federal Building
517 E. Wisconsin Ave
Milwaukee, WI 53202

The Catholic Diocese in Milwaukee would also like to hear from us, I am sure.

Hey, this is a great way for all those governments, religious organizations and businesses to be recognized for their support to the community of terrorists. Of course they will be happy to hear from us. So let's let them know we recognize their efforts.

Politely, of course.

Potential Right-wing xtian terrorist caught at Falwell's funeral

Some of Jerry Falwell's students felt that the danger of protesters at his funeral was so high that they prepared and brought low-burn gasoline bombs to use on the protesters. The level of paranoia this demonstrates is frightening in itself.

Digby predicts that when a Democrat is elected President in 2008 it will set off a spate of right-wing terrorist activities right here in USA. Timothy McVeigh (See also an interview with Timothy McVeigh.) and Eric Rudolph (See also Eric Rudolph at Wikipedia) are not the only crazies the right-wing has to field with bombs and guns. Both had numerous supporters who aided and hide them. The "Army of God strongly supported Eric Rudolph, and a variety of right-wing militants, gun-nuts and religious types apparently provided some support to Timothy McVeigh. The FBI has played down the people who actually aimed and set off those two and carefully not gone after them.

The anthrax letters sent to a variety of Democratic politicians and News media in 2001 figures has to be considered American right-wing terrorism, based on the fact that the targets are all considered enemies by so many right-wingers. (See also the Anthrax attack website by Ed Lake.

With Bush in office, the right-wing (and especially the Christianists) have felt they were making progress in bringing America into the Dominion. I'm sure that the election of 2006 shook them up, but right now it could be just a setback. But a strong election of a Democratic President in 2008 together with further deterioration of the national Republican political position could set off a bunch of the crazies. Since the police forces are often right-wing themselves, they won't make a big deal of it. The question is whether the media will.

With the media track record over the last 15 or so years, I doubt they will look at it or report it if they see it.

Orcinus has been following such things. Go look at his writings on "Eliminationism in America."

See also:

• Abortion-related violence


• Alpha 66


• Army of God


• Christian Identity


• Christian terrorism


• Domestic terrorism in the United States.


• History of the Army of God


• Paramilitary