Did the US know about the Mumbai attacks in advance?
Two of the three wives of David C. Headley, the Pakistani-American who pleaded guilty to helping to plan the Mumbai terror attacks in November and December 2008, warned American officials that Headley was a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group created and sponsored by Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency. Headley was working at the same time as an informant for the US Drug Enforcement Agency. As you may recall, several Israelis, including Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holzberg HY"D, were murdered in Mumbai's Chabad House, which was one of the targets. On Saturday, Mike Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said in a statement, “The United States regularly provided threat information to Indian officials in 2008 before the attacks in Mumbai.” He also said, “Had we known about the timing and other specifics related to the Mumbai attacks, we would have immediately shared those details with the government of India.”I wonder how many more stories like this there are in Arab and Muslim countries. I'll bet it's a large number.
Mr. Headley’s American wife was not the only one to come forward. The Moroccan wife described her separate warnings in an interview with The New York Times. Other interviews illustrate his longstanding connections to American law enforcement and the ISI.
Among the findings:
¶ An officer of the Pakistani spy agency handed Mr. Headley $25,000 in early 2006 to open an office and set up a house in Mumbai to be used as a front during his scouting trips, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to Indian investigators in Chicago in June. As part of Mr. Headley’s plea agreement, Indian investigators were allowed to interview him in Chicago, where he was arrested in October 2009.
¶ The ISI officer who gave Mr. Headley the cash, known as Major Iqbal, served as the supervisor of Lashkar’s planning, helping to arrange a communications system for the attack, and overseeing a model of the Taj Mahal Hotel, so that gunmen could find their way around, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to the Indians.
¶ While working for Lashkar, which has close ties to the ISI, Mr. Headley was also enlisted by the Pakistani spy agency to recruit Indian agents to monitor Indian troop levels and movements, an American official said.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:41 AM
2 Comments:
Carl - if you've had a chance to look over the Al Qaeda magazine Inspire, their terrorist operations suggestions are amateurish but the philosophy and people willing to kill for it are hugely relevant. And most of all, they are willing to go out of their way to kill Jews even in places where Jews don't stand out - like in Mumbai. That in itself makes a statement. We dismiss it to our peril.
What could go wrong indeed
I get the feeling that "the US" and everybody else gets info on these people and then just can't believe they would do things so horrid. Like Clinton gazing upon OBL as he escalated. And if they repeatedly lock down cities for these warnings, people will starve because free commerce will stop. It does sound like a bunch of law enforcement people have been on top of their game over the past month interdicting some cells ready to go on some more horridness, without shutting down life giving commerce.
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