Anatomy of the sloppy false flag operation

[M_Saint]

PART 1

Double Cover [1]: Nothing Can Ever Be The Same
Saturday, November 29, 2008

The Mumbai terrorist attacks began Wednesday evening and I've been reading about the situation -- and thinking hard -- ever since. The most noteworthy feature so far is the prevalence of unsubstantiated assertions that make no sense at all. I haven't been doing a systematic survey of the world's media -- just grabbing stories from wherever they pop up -- and every item I've stumbled across has been contaminated with spin. Or at least that's the way it strikes me.

Then again, maybe it's become impossible for terrorism -- and news of terrorism -- to strike me any other way. I've seen too much, I've been lied to too many times, to ever take anything at face value -- except the occasional (accidental?) admission of horrors committed by unrepentant (audacious!) perpetrators.

Now that we know the geniuses at the Pentagon have conceived and implemented a worldwide program of fomenting terrorism, nothing can ever be the same.

According to the Department of Defense, it is fighting a war on terror which requires, or allows, it to perpetrate (or con others into perpetrating) acts of "terrorism" which can then be used as pretexts for war against the "terrorist groups" thus "exposed".

This is not a new tactic. It has been used often and very successfully, by Americans both at home and abroad, and by foreign nationals both ancient and modern.

But now, in post-9/11 America, it is official policy.

Darkness Visible
How do we know this? Chris Floyd wrote about it in 2002 for the Moscow Times:
This column stands foursquare with the Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, when he warns that there will be more terrorist attacks against the American people and civilization at large. We know, as does the Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, that this statement is an incontrovertible fact, a matter of scientific certainty. And how can we and the Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, be so sure that there will be more terrorist attacks against the American people and civilization at large?

Because these attacks will be instigated at the order of the Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense.

This astonishing admission was buried deep in a story which was itself submerged by mounds of gray newsprint and glossy underwear ads in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times. There – in an article by military analyst William Arkin, detailing the vast expansion of the secret armies being massed by the former Nixon bureaucrat now lording it over the Pentagon – came the revelation of Rumsfeld's plan to create "a super-Intelligence Support Activity" that will "bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception." According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board, the new organization – the "Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)" – will carry out secret missions designed to "stimulate reactions" among terrorist groups, provoking them into committing violent acts which would then expose them to "counterattack" by U.S. forces.

In other words – and let's say this plainly, clearly and soberly, so that no one can mistake the intention of Rumsfeld's plan – the United States government is planning to use "cover and deception" and secret military operations to provoke murderous terrorist attacks on innocent people. Let's say it again: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and the other members of the unelected regime in Washington plan to deliberately foment the murder of innocent people – your family, your friends, your lovers, you – in order to further their geopolitical ambitions.

For P2OG is not designed solely to flush out terrorists and bring them to justice – a laudable goal in itself, although the Rumsfeld way of combating terrorism by causing it is pure moral lunacy. (Or should we use the Regime's own preferred terminology and just call it "evil"?) No, it seems the Pee-Twos have bigger fish to fry. Once they have sparked terrorists into action – by killing their family members? luring them with loot? fueling them with drugs? plying them with jihad propaganda? messing with their mamas? or with agents provocateurs, perhaps, who infiltrate groups then plan and direct the attacks themselves? – they can then take measures against the "states/sub-state actors accountable" for "harboring" the Rumsfeld-roused gangs. What kind of measures exactly? Well, the classified Pentagon program puts it this way: "Their sovereignty will be at risk."

The Pee-Twos will thus come in handy whenever the Regime hankers to add a little oil-laden real estate or a new military base to the Empire's burgeoning portfolio. Just find a nest of violent malcontents, stir 'em with a stick, and presto: instant "justification" for whatever level of intervention/conquest/rapine you might desire. And what if the territory you fancy doesn't actually harbor any convenient marauders to use for fun and profit? Well, surely a God-like "super-Intelligence Support Activity" is capable of creation ex nihilo, yes?

The Rumsfeld-Bush plan to employ murder and terrorism for political, financial and ideological gain does have historical roots (besides al Qaeda, the Stern Gang, the SA, the SS, the KGB, the IRA, the UDF, Eta, Hamas, Shining Path and countless other upholders of Bushian morality, decency and freedom). We refer of course to Operation Northwoods, oft mentioned in these pages: the plan that America's top military brass presented to President John Kennedy in 1963, calling for a phony terrorist campaign – complete with bombings, hijackings, plane crashes and dead Americans – to provide "justification" for an invasion of Cuba, the Mafia/Corporate fiefdom which had recently been lost to Castro.

Kennedy rejected the plan, and was killed a few months later. Now Rumsfeld has resurrected Northwoods, but on a far grander scale, with resources at his disposal undreamed of by those brass of yore, with no counterbalancing global rival to restrain him – and with an ignorant, corrupt president who has shown himself all too eager to embrace any means whatsoever that will augment the wealth and power of his own narrow, undemocratic, elitist clique.

There is genuine transgression here, a stepping-over – deliberately, with open eyes, with forethought, planning, and conscious will – of lines that should never be crossed. Acting in deadly symbiosis with their supposed enemies, the terrorist mafias, Bush and his cohorts are plunging the world into an abyss, an endless night of black ops, retribution, blowback, deceit, of murder and terror – wholesale, retail, state-sponsored, privatized; of fear and degradation, servility, chaos: the perversion of all that's best in us, of all that we've won from the bestiality of our primal nature, all that we've raised above the mindless ravening urges and impulses still boiling in the mud of our monkey brains.

It's not a fight for freedom; it's a retreat into darkness.

And the day will be a long time coming.

Into The Dark
The darkness has been descending quickly. Chris Floyd wrote this column in early 2005:

More than two years ago, we wrote here of a secret Pentagon plan to foment terrorism: sending covert agents to infiltrate terrorist groups and goad them into action – i.e., committing acts of murder and destruction. The purpose was two-fold: first, to bring the terrorist groups into the open, where they could be counterattacked; and second, to justify U.S. military attacks on the countries where the terrorists were operating – attacks which, in the Pentagon's words, would put those nations' "sovereignty at risk." It was a plan that countenanced – indeed, encouraged – the deliberate murder of innocent people and the imposition of U.S. military rule anywhere in the world that American leaders desired.

This plan is now being activated.

In fact, it's being expanded, as the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh revealed last week. Not only will U.S.-directed agents infiltrate existing terrorist groups and provoke them into action; the Pentagon itself will create its own terrorist groups and "death squads." After establishing their terrorist "credentials" through various atrocities and crimes, these American-run groups will then be able to ally with – and ultimately undermine – existing terrorist groups.

Top-level officials in the Pentagon, the U.S. intelligence services and the Bush administration confirmed to Hersh that the plan is going forward, under the direction of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – just as we noted here in November 2002. Through a series of secret executive orders, George W. Bush has given Rumsfeld the authority to turn the entire world into "a global free-fire zone," a top Pentagon adviser says. These secret operations will be carried out with virtually no oversight; in many cases, even the top military commanders in the affected regions will not be told about them. The American people, of course, will never know what's being done in their name.

The covert units – including the Pentagon-funded terrorist groups and hit squads – will be operating outside all constraints of law and morality. "We're going to be riding with the bad boys," one insider told Hersh. Another likened it to the palmy days of the Reagan-Bush years: "Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador? We founded them and we financed them. The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it." Indeed, we reported here last summer that Bush has already budgeted $500 million to fund local paramilitaries and guerrilla groups in the most volatile areas of the world, a measure guaranteed to produce needless bloodshed, destruction and suffering for innocent people already ravaged by conflict.

Incredibly, as Hersh notes, the Bushists are now openly citing a sinister role model for their campaign: Britain's brutal repression of the Mau Mau in Kenya during the 1950s, when British forces set up concentration camps, created their own terrorist groups and killed thousands of innocent civilians in putting down an "insurgency" against their colonial rule. And in fact, Rumsfeld and other Bush officials increasingly talk of combating not just terrorism but a "global insurgency" – as if the whole world is now an American colony, filled with recalcitrant "natives" rising up against their rightful masters.

The activation of the Pentagon terrorist operation is part of Bush's second-term expansion of the "war on terror." Despite some obfuscating rhetoric about "diplomacy," the Bush regime is pressing ahead with a hard-line strategy aimed at opening new military fronts in the "global free-fire zone." Any dissenting voices within the government are being ruthlessly purged. The Pentagon's secret forces are set for operations in at least 10 countries, and Bush insiders "repeatedly" told Hersh that "Iran is the next strategic target."

Iran has long been a focus of the small clique of "global dominationists" – led by Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and their acolytes – who engineered the invasion of Iraq. This group is determined to "whack Iran," as one insider put it, and they're not at all discouraged by the debacle in Iraq; indeed, to them it's a rousing success. Their first objective – openly stated years ago, before Bush took office – was the overthrow of Saddam's regime and the planting of a U.S. "military footprint" in Iraq. This has now been done. The fact that it has plunged the Iraqi people into a hell of violence, chaos, terror and extremism is of no real concern to the clique. Their lofty rhetoric about "freedom" and "liberation" is meaningless sham, shuck and jive for the rubes. By the admission of the clique's own publications, they seek strategic control over the world's energy resources in order to preserve and expand American geopolitical and economic hegemony in the new century. Everything else – including the security of the American people, put at increasing risk by the clique's reckless policies – is of secondary importance.

U.S. forces are already conducting military reconnaissance inside Iran in preparation for strikes on alleged nuclear weapons facilities, Hersh reports. The Pentagon is feverishly updating war plans for a "maximum ground and air invasion of Iran," incorporating the new staging areas now available in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, while employing an Iranian terrorist group, MEK, to launch covert ops and terrorist acts against Tehran. MEK was once given sanctuary by Saddam Hussein, who used the group as a brutal enforcer against Kurd and Shiite insurgents. Now Bush, "riding with the bad boys," has embraced the MEK murderers as his own.

In their ignorance and arrogance, the Bushists will almost certainly strike at Iran – despite the fact that even Iranian dissidents support the effort to make their nation a nuclear power and would join the mullahs in retaliation. The result will be a conflict far surpassing the horror and magnitude of the Iraq disaster.

In our original report on the Pentagon's terror scheme, we wrote: "Bush and his cohorts are plunging the world into an abyss, an endless night of murder and terror – wholesale, retail, state-sponsored, privatized; of fear and degradation, servility, chaos, and the perversion of all that's best in us." Now the night has come. Now the United States stands openly – even proudly – for terrorism, torture and the Hitlerian principle of aggressive war. America has fallen into the pit – and the hopes of the world go with it.

And It Makes Me Wonder ...
This deliberate crossing of the line -- or diving into the pit, as you prefer -- has demolished any shred of "plausible deniability" the CIA and its clandestine operations may once have enjoyed.

And now, whenever we see terrorist acts -- especially attacks such as these: spectacular multi-pronged assaults that seem to come from nowhere, which are claimed by groups nobody has ever heard of -- we always have to wonder. And for every detail that doesn't make sense, a dozen suspicions arise.

Winter Patriot: Double Cover [1]: Nothing Can Ever Be The Same

 

[M_Saint]

Double Cover [2]: What Is A Commando Raid?
Sunday, November 30, 2008

Coordinated Terror Attacks
Here are some brief snippets from more-or-less randomly selected mainstream news reports pertaining to the Mumbai attacks. I have added the emphasis.

New York Times:

Coordinated terrorist attacks struck the heart of Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, on Wednesday night, killing dozens in machine-gun and grenade assaults on at least two five-star hotels, the city’s largest train station, a Jewish center, a movie theater and a hospital.

The NYT has a map showing where the attacks took place -- 13 locations in all.
Who Was Caught By Surprise?
Michael Evans of the [UK] Times:

British security and intelligence sources said there had been increasing concern, particularly in the United States, that a “terrorist spectacular” was on the cards. [...] The Americans have been expecting an atrocity partly because of the recent CIA success in eliminating figures in al-Qaeda, using Predator unmanned drones, firing Hellfire missiles at hideouts in the tribal regions of Pakistan. About a dozen al-Qaeda figures have been killed this year.

MSNBC:

Spy agencies around the world were caught off guard by the deadly attack, in which gunmen sprayed crowds with bullets, torched landmark hotels and took dozens of hostages.

"We have been actively monitoring plots in Britain and abroad and there was nothing to indicate something like this was about to happen," a British security official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of his work.

Britain is the former colonial power in India and Pakistan and closely monitors terrorist suspects in those countries.
MSNBC:

"This type of terrorism is spreading, through Pakistan and now India, but we were all surprised by such a large-scale attack like this," said Wajid Hassan, Pakistan's High Commissioner in London. "This is no coincidence that this type of attack happened so soon after the bombing of the Marriott Hotel. People from all countries are being paid to fight this al-Qaida war. This is a war that goes beyond any nationality."

How Many Attackers Were There?
Al Jazeera:

An estimated 100 armed men launched what India police called "terrorist attacks" on 10 locations in India's financial centre.

CNN:

The identity of the attackers remained a mystery. CNN-IBN quoted police sources as saying they believed there were some 26 gunmen, most of them young.

What Happened?
CNN:

Police say the attackers came by boats to the waterfront near the Gateway of India monument.

Nine suspects have been arrested in connection with the attacks, and seven are fishermen, police said. Police also found a boat loaded with explosives near the Taj Mahal, also located on the waterfront.

The gunmen hijacked cars -- including a police van -- and split into at least three groups to carry out the attacks, police said.

One group headed toward the Cafe Leopold, a popular hangout for Western tourists, firing indiscriminately at passers-by on the street. They then opened fire and lobbed grenades at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station, a Victorian building.

As police rushed to the scene of the attacks, gunmen attacked the Cama Hospital.

Two other groups attacked the Oberoi and Taj Mahal, police said.

IHT:

The gunmen appear to have come ashore at the Sassoon Docks, not far from the Leopold. They moved on to the train station, the old Victoria Terminus, and then opened fire on Cama and Albless Hospital — where some of their earlier victims encountered a second round of gunfire. At one point, the gunmen hijacked a police vehicle and opened fire on journalists and spectators gathered near a famous theater, the Metro Cinema.

Witnesses and security camera video of the gunmen built a portrait of them as young men dressed in jeans and trendy T-shirts, bearing rucksacks and guns. It remained unclear who they were, what they wanted, or how many survived.
Who Were The Targets?
Boston Globe:

Several witnesses said the gunmen demanded to see passports from cornered guests, separating American and British tourists from the others.

MSNBC:

"I guess they were after foreigners, because they were asking for British or American passports," said Rakesh Patel, a British witness who lives in Hong Kong and was staying at the Taj Mahal hotel on business. "They had bombs."

New York Times:

Rakesh Patel, a British businessman who escaped the Taj, told a television station that two young men armed with a rifle and a machine gun took 15 hostages, forcing them to the roof.

The gunmen, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, “were saying they wanted anyone with British or American passports,” Mr. Patel said.

Al Jazeera:

Witnesses at the hotels that were targeted said the attackers had singled out British and American citizens.

"They kept shouting: 'Who has US or UK passports?'" Ashok Patel, a British citizen who fled from the Taj Mahal hotel, said.

Several European legislators, visiting Mumbai ahead of a European Union-India summit, were among those inside the Taj when it was besieged.

AFP:

Guests who escaped recounted how the gunmen had methodically tried to round up US and British citizens.

"They said they wanted anyone with British and American passports," said one Briton, Rakesh Patel.

New York Times:

Alex Chamberlain, a British citizen who was dining at the Oberoi, told Sky News television that a gunman ushered 30 to 40 people from the restaurant into a stairway and, speaking in Hindi or Urdu, ordered everyone to put up their hands.

"They were talking about British and Americans specifically. There was an Italian guy, who, you know, they said: 'Where are you from?' and he said he's from Italy and they said 'fine' and they left him alone. And I thought: 'Fine, they're going to shoot me if they ask me anything' — and thank God they didn't," he said.

Telegraph:

Alex Chamberlain, a sports website director, escaped from the hotel through a fire exit. The militants ordered everyone upstairs, told them to put their hands up and asked if there were any British or Americans, he said. "My friend said to me: 'Don't be a hero, don't say you are British'."

CNN:

Alex Chamberlain, a Briton who works for Indian Premier League cricket, was in the Oberoi hotel when the attackers opened fire. Chamberlain said that a group of about 40 people was "marched up like sheep" to the roof by a "young guy with a submachine gun, who was about 22 or 23."

The gunmen then asked if any of the hostages were British or American, Chamberlain told SkyNews.com.

"My Indian friend told me, 'don't be a hero' and 'tell him you're Italian' and that kind of stuff," Chamberlain said.

AFP:

"They told everybody to stop and put their hands up and asked if there were any British or Americans," Alex Chamberlain, a British guest at the Oberoi/Trident hotel, said after fleeing his captors via a fire escape.

"My friend said to me, 'don't be a hero, don't say you are British.'"

Al Jazeera:

They just fired randomly at people and then ran away.
-- Nasim Inam, at Chhatrapati Shivaji railway terminus

MSNBC:

At least three top Indian police officers — including the chief of the anti-terror squad — were among those killed, said A.N. Roy, a top police official.
What Is A Commando Raid?
Somini Sengupta for the New York Times:

Even by the standards of terrorism in India, which has suffered a rising number of attacks this year, the assaults were particularly brazen in scale and execution. [...] Unlike previous attacks in India this year, which consisted of anonymously planted bombs, the assailants on Wednesday night were spectacularly well-armed and very confrontational. In some cases, said the state’s highest-ranking police official, A. N. Roy, the attackers opened fire and disappeared.

Boston Globe:

Security officials and analysts agreed that the assaults represented a marked departure in scope and ambition from other recent terrorist attacks in India, which targeted local people rather than foreigners and hit single rather than multiple targets.

The Mumbai assault, by contrast, was "uniquely disturbing," said Sajjan Gohel, a security specialist in London, because it seemed directed at foreigners, involved hostage-taking, and was aimed at multiple "soft, symbolic targets." The attacks "aimed to create maximum terror and human carnage and damage the economy," he said by phone.
How Much Planning Was Involved?
Boston Globe:
Although Mumbai has been the scene of several terrorist attacks in recent years, analysts said Wednesday's assaults required a previously unseen degree of reconnaissance and planning. The scale and synchronization of the attacks pointed to the probable involvement of experienced commanders, some observers said, suggesting possible foreign involvement.

CNN :

State media 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 that were targeted.

The Times:

Indian officials said that it was too early to say which [group] carried out last night’s attacks, but the scale, complexity and targets suggested that it was the work of an Islamist group.

It may indeed have been the work of an Islamist group. But to my eye, the scale, the complexity and the targets -- combined with the reporting -- suggested that it was something else entirely.

Winter Patriot: Double Cover [2]: What Is A Commando Raid?

 

[M_Saint]

Double Cover [3]: What Is A False Flag Attack?
Winter Patriot


November 30, 2008

We continue our look at mainstream coverage of the Mumbai attacks:

Michael Evans of the Times:


The group that claimed to be behind last night’s attacks on Bombay -- the Deccan Mujahideen — has not hitherto been heard of in India, let alone in the outside world.

Boston Globe:

An e-mail message to Indian media outlets taking responsibility for the attacks said the militants were from a group called Deccan Mujahedeen. The word "Deccan" refers to a plateau in southern India, and "Mujahedeen" refers to holy warriors. Almost universally, analysts and intelligence officials said that name was unknown.

Deccan is a neighborhood of the Indian city of Hyderabad. The word also describes the middle and south of India, which is dominated by the Deccan Plateau. But the combination of the two words, said Gohel, is a "front name. This group is nonexistent."

"It's even unclear whether it's a real group or not," said Bruce Hoffman, a professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the author of the book "Inside Terrorism."

Somini Sengupta for the New York Times:

A group calling itself the Deccan Mujahedeen said it had carried out the attacks. It was not known who the group is or whether the claim was real.

Al Jazeera:

the Indian media, citing unidentified police investigators, reported on Friday that three alleged attackers had confessed to being members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based group which aims to end Indian rule in Kashmir.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, which means army of God, had earlier denied any role in the attacks.

The Hindu newspaper said interrogation of the suspects revealed that Lashkar operatives had left Karachi in Pakistan in a merchant ship early on Wednesday and went ashore at Mumbai on a small boat before splitting up into teams to attack multiple locations.

CNN:

The Indian navy, stepping up patrols on the country's western coast after the attack, was questioning the crew of the MV Alpha, a ship they detained with the help of the Indian coast guard, British authorities said. The authorities said they believe the attacks originated from this ship, which they believe is from Karachi, Pakistan.

The British authorities also said three speedboats -- carrying weapons and militants -- traveled along the Indian coast from the ship to Mumbai and launched the attack.

However, Karachi police said have no evidence the attackers departed from their city, Waseem Ahmad, the police chief, said.

All Signs Point To Al Qaeda

Michael Evans of the Times:

The multiple attacks on Westerners in Bombay last night showed all the signs of an al-Qaeda strategy — picking on vulnerable Western "soft targets" but not in a country where there would be maximum security.

Michael Evans of the UK Times:

Bombay has been targeted before when 180 people died during a bomb attack on the railway station in 2006, but that incident was put down to militants, not al-Qaeda, and the Indian government suspected that the attackers had links to Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI.

This attack, however, involving the taking of Western hostages made it more likely that the operation’s masterminds were from the core leadership of al-Qaeda, which is based in the lawless tribal regions close to the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.

MSNBC:

[A] British security official told the AP on condition of anonymity that the attack doesn't look to have been directed by al-Qaida's core leadership, which has been weakened by the deaths of several leaders and key operatives in recent months.

Al-Qaida's core leadership is believed to be fewer than 100 people now, said Rohan Gunaratna, author of "Inside Al-Qaida" and a terrorism expert at the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore.

Boston Globe:

Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims and not linked to Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba, another violent South Asian terrorist group.

"There's absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it," she said of the attack. "Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar. They don't do hostage-taking and they don't do grenades."

Timing And Motive
Keith Bradsher and Somini Sengupta for the International Herald Tribune:

The suspicions raised by the attack seemed a blow to relations between India and Pakistan, which had been recovering from a low earlier this year after India blamed the Pakistani intelligence agency for abetting the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan.

UPI:

A CNN report said the attacks came just after Asif Ali Zardari, the new Pakistani president, went farther than any of his predecessors in expressing a desire for better ties with India. Zardari was quoted as saying he would even like to see the two nuclear powers jointly fight terrorism.

Washington
MSNBC:

"We condemn these attacks and the loss of innocent life," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said.

Israel
Ha'aretz:

The Israeli defense establishment Thursday avoided stating explicitly if the attack on Chabad House in Mumbai was planned or coincidental. One scenario raised was that the terrorists arrived there randomly while fleeing after an exchange of gunfire with Mumbai police. It is also possible that Chabad was targeted as part of an attack in which hotels were "marked" as points for the abduction and murder of Western tourists, centrally American and British citizens.
AFP:

Israeli forces were believed to be involved in the rescue attempt at the Jewish centre. "The Israelis are the ones who are running the show," one diplomatic source told AFP.
Ha'aretz:

Israel sent a number of intelligence officers to India Thursday to assist in analyzing the major terrorist attack on Mumbai.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak Thursday offered India security, intelligence and humanitarian aid in dealing with the situation.

It appears the Indian government is not interested in high profile security assistance from Israel. Throughout the day, the Homefront Command prepared to send an aid delegation to India, but efforts were halted when it became clear that Mumbai was not enthusiastic about the prospect.

Aha!
Daily Express [UK]:

A police source [...] suggested that the attack could have been revenge for the killing of Rashid Rauf, a British Al Qaeda chief blown up by the US last week.

That's a good one. I'd take that bet!

This carefully planned and coordinated assault could have been revenge for an alleged killing that happened (if it did happen) just four days earlier.

Yes! Exactly! Now I understand!!

 

[M_Saint]

Double Cover [4]: Beyond Ridiculous
Winter Patriot



December 3, 2008



Despite the apparent confusion and the obvious media spin, the picture that emerged from the early reporting of the Mumbai attacks was a fairly comprehensible one: a picture of a false flag commando raid.

It was a commando raid, as opposed to a suicide bombing or other forms of terrorist attack; surely that much was clear to everybody. There were multiple commandos and multiple targets, and it was obvious that a great deal of knowledge and skill must have gone into the planning.

But it was also clearly a false flag attack, as the multiple simultaneous attempts to pin the blame (or take the responsibility) made no sense, singly or in combination. Even as the shooting was going on, the Indian government was saying the attackers (whoever they were) had come from outside the country. A "terrorist group" calling itself the "Deccan Mujahideen" had claimed responsibility, but no terror expert had ever heard of such a group.

In reality-based situations (of which this is not one!), the analysis of such a horrible crime would begin with the known facts, and it would proceed in a systematic fashion, from the knowns to the unknowns.

For instance, one might start with the observation that the Mumbai assault was a highly-coordinated commando raid, and then raise the questions: "Who does this sort of thing?" and "Among those who do this sort of thing, who had something to gain by doing this?"

These are questions we never saw asked, let alone answered, in the mainstream media. It seems quite clear to me, and one of the reasons for the title of this series, that they don't ask these questions because they're afraid of the answers. So instead of intelligent, penetrating, appropriate analysis, we got nonsense.

To begin with the official account, let's just say the official account of the attacks makes very little sense. Supposedly there were only ten attackers, and supposedly they attacked in 13 locations more or less simultaneously. Nobody in the mainstream seems prepared to ask how something like this could have happened without inside help. Some analysts pointed out that a high degree of local knowledge must have been required for such an attack, but they went on to conclude that therefore the attackers must have been foreigners. It was difficult to imagine a more counter-intuitive conclusion; but not for long.

Nobody asked: "Who could do this?" or "Who would do this?" Instead they asked: "How did al Qaeda do this?" and "Why did al Qaeda do this?" After a while it became more or less obvious that the Mumbai attacks didn't involve hijacked airplanes crashing into buildings (like al Qaeda in North America) or suicide bombers and car bombs (like al Qaeda in the Middle East). And connecting al Qaeda to these attacks directly became a bit of a problem. So then instead of asking "Who else could have done this?", they began to ask: "How are the perpetrators of this attack connected to al Qaeda?"

Still jubilant over the alleged death of Rashid Rauf, the alleged leader of the so-called Liquid Bombers, who was (or wasn't) killed in Pakistan just four days before the Mumbai attacks began, some terror warriors sought to connect the attacks to the death of the alleged terrorist mastermind and provide a motive at the same time. Thus we were privileged to read that the attacks may have been carried out in revenge for the killing of Rashid Rauf.

Perhaps we could forget -- if only for a moment -- that more than 400 people were killed or wounded in Mumbai, and not one of them had ever harmed Rashid Rauf. Perhaps we could imagine a bizarre terrorist mind in which somehow ordinary Indian citizens were held responsible for American drones dropping Hellfire missiles on alleged terrorists in Pakistan.

But we couldn't bring ourselves to believe that these brazen, coordinated attacks were carried out in revenge for something that had happened only four days earlier. So the terror warriors needed another, slightly plausible, al Qaeda connection.

It didn't take them long to find one. And now British terror warriors are going to India to investigate the possibility that Rashid Rauf may have planned the Mumbai attacks.

As Ben Goldby reported for the Birmingham Mercury News:

Sources have now revealed that [Rashid Rauf] was planning a major attack at the time of his death, and that the Mumbai murders show all the hallmarks of one of Rauf’s "terror spectacular" plots.

Except, of course, for Rashid Rauf's trademark hallmark -- the mission has to be impossible!

The Indian Mujahidin, which carried out a blast in Delhi in September and warned that they would strike next in Mumbai, is understood to have been behind this week’s terror outrage.

Not exactly. But the media are on that theme, and it works well for them, as we will see.

The group is made up of several different militant organisations, the most dangerous of which are the Pakistani-based Kashmiri "freedom" movements Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM).

Rauf was known to have strong links to both organisations.

He married a relative of JEM’s founder and worked with LET to train British jihadis who travelled to Pakistan. London 7/7 bombers Shehzad Tanweer and Mohammed Siddique Khan both studied at an LET madrassa near Lahore in 2004.

Here again, Goldby gets ahead of the facts. There has never been any public proof that the alleged London 7/7 bombers were anything but patsies. There has never been any public proof of any aspect of the London 7/7 story. But the alleged 7/7 bombers aren't even called "alleged" anymore; they're just "the 7/7 bombers". Of course, being dead, they can't do much about it.

Last night, a terror expert told the Sunday Mercury: "It is understood that this attack in Mumbai is the work of the Indian Mujahidin, based on plans and support from Kashmiri groups based in Pakistan.

"The planning seems to have been done by an Islamist militant group called Lashkar-e-Toiba and they have close links to other Kashmiri fighters including Jaish-e-Mohammed.

"In Rashid Rauf we have a man who dreamed up an alleged plot to blow up 10 transatlantic planes. We know he plotted spectacular attacks and we know that we was planning a terror operation when he was killed.

"This attack in Mumbai, with the synchronised terror strikes in multiple locations, is certainly consistent with his approach to militant tactics."

It's not consistent with anything we know about the so-called Liquid Bomb plot, but our anonymous sources aren't letting facts get in the way of a good story -- except in one important respect.

The source says Rashid Rauf dreamed up "an alleged plot", and the reason for this particular qualifier is clear -- because the alleged plotters have already been tried and the jury refused to convict them. The jury didn't believe that the alleged plotters were plotting to blow up 10 transatlantic planes. The jury didn't believe they were plotting to blow up even one transatlantic plane. In other words, the jury believed the allegations were false. But those allegations are still treated as if they were untested. How utterly unremarkable!

But it would be remarkable if Rashid Rauf had planned the assault on Mumbai. For the terror warriors, it would be remarkably fortunate, because then they could claim to have scored a major victory in the war on terror, and they could more confidently ignore their critics, who say that dropping Hellfire on anybody -- especially somebody who has never been convicted of a crime -- is more like terrorism than justice.

But it would be even more remarkable in another sense. Last week at this time we were reading about how Rashid Rauf was killed along with a couple of the other top-level al Qaeda masterminds, who drew attention to the mud bungalow in which they were meeting, by using a mobile phone.

So now we're supposed to forget that, too, and we're supposed to believe that a tightly coordinated commando raid, an assault on 13 targets in a foreign country, was planned by a mastermind who couldn't even use a cell phone without being monitored -- and murdered.

 

[M_Saint]

Arrest Provides More Evidence India, Israel, and the U.S. Behind Mumbai Attacks

Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
Sunday, December 7, 2008

It is becoming increasingly a hard sell to pin the blame for the Mumbai attacks on Pakistan and thus set the stage for an attack on Pakistan after Barack Obama enters the White House in a few weeks. It now appears Indian intelligence played a large part in the terrorist attacks. On Saturday, the Associated Press reported that a “counterinsurgency police officer who may have been on an undercover mission” was arrested for illegally buying mobile phone cards used by the gunmen.

Mukhtar Ahmed is an Indian police operative who provided cell phone SIM cards to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan terrorist group blamed for the Mumbai attacks.

The counterinsurgency operative, Mukhtar Ahmed, worked for the police in Indian Kashmir. “The implications of Ahmed’s involvement — that Indian agents may have been in touch with the militants and perhaps supplied the SIM cards used in the attacks — added to the growing list of questions over India’s ill-trained security forces, which are widely blamed for not thwarting the attacks,” reports the Associated Press.

In other words, Indian intelligence had penetrated Lashkar-e-Taiba and were running a false flag operation through the terrorist group, putatively connected to Pakistan’s ISI.

Indian police in the Kashmir city of Srinagar told Calcutta police that Ahmed is “our man and it’s now up to them how to facilitate his release,” said one senior officer speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the information. Other police officials in Kashmir supported his account, reports the Associated Press.

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)



Indian intelligence staging false flag terror attacks and blaming them on Muslims is nothing new. On November 23, Andrew Buncombe, writing for the Independent, reported: “India is in something of a state of shock after learning from official sources that its first Hindu terror cell may have carried out a series of deadly bombings that were initially blamed on militant Muslims.” In addition to bombing attacks in the Muslim town of Malegaon in the western state of Maharashtra in September, the Hindu terror cells are allegedly responsible for last year’s bombing of a cross-border train en route to Pakistan, which killed 68 people, according to Buncombe.

It should be noted that the head of the Maharastrian Anti-Terrorist Squad making the allegations about Hindu false flag terrorism, Hemant Karkare, was assassinated as he led his team into the Hotel Taj Kahal during the Mumbai attacks. “Killed in the line of duty, Hemant Karare was targeted as the man who was an immense problem for the BJP [the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party] because his forthright investigation revealed Hindutva terrorism and he was not about to stop. Clearly this invalidated the BJP campaign rhetoric against Muslim terrorism, but the BJP will still use the emotional fervor of Hindutva to win against the Congress party,” writes Allen Heart for OpEdNews.

An exposé carried in a national daily published in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh alleges that Indian intelligence supported extremist Hindutvadis in their murderous Malegaon campaign with the cooperation of Israel’s Mossad. “The newspaper writes that relations between Mossad and CIA are world known,” notes the Pak Alert Press blog. “The national daily… has exposed that the officials of the national intelligence agencies have categorically stated that American secret service agency, CIA together with Israel’s secret organization Mossad, has carried out several secret operation all over Asia,” Pak Alert Press reports, translating from the original Urdu.

Indian intelligence, however, is no minor player and its foreign policy objectives currently parallel those of the CIA and Mossad in regard to covert destabilization in South Asia and elsewhere. “RAW [the Research and Analysis Wing, the Indian version of the CIA] , ever since its creation, has always been a vital, though unobtrusive, actor in Indian policy-making apparatus,” writes Isha Khan.

Since its creation in 1968, RAW has been “given a virtual carte blanche to conduct destabilization operations in neighboring countries inimical to India to seriously undertook restructuring of its organization accordingly. RAW was given a list of seven countries (Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Pakistan and Maldives) whom India considered its principal regional protagonists. It very soon systematically and brilliantly crafted covert operations in all these countries to coerce, destabilize and subvert them in consonance with the foreign policy objectives of the Indian Government.”

Specifically, RAW “considers Sindh as Pakistan’s soft under-belly. It has, therefore, made it the prime target for sabotage and subversion. RAW has enrolled and extensive network of agents and anti-government elements, and is convinced that with a little push restless Sindh will revolt. Taking fullest advantage of the agitation in Sindh in 1983 and the ethnic riots, which have continued till today, RAW has deeply penetrated and cultivated dissidents and secessionists, thereby creating hard-liners unlikely to allow peace to return to Sindh.” Sindh includes Urdu-speaking Muslim refugees who migrated to Pakistan from India upon independence.

It now appears obvious that India’s RAW with the help of the CIA and Israel’s Mossad created the current situation and have set-up Pakistan’s ISI to take the blame for the Mumbai attacks. Senator McCain, flanked by senators Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham, told Ejaz Haider, a senior editor with the Daily Times group, that it could be a “matter of days” before India carried out surgical air strikes if Pakistan did not act on the evidence provided to it on elements linked to the attacks, according to the Daily Star. “If the terrorists succeed in confounding relations between these two great countries, they will achieve their aim. We cannot let that happen,” McCain declared.

A conflict between the two nuclear armed nations may very well be the “international crisis, a generated crisis” Joe Biden mentioned in October that will “test” president Barack Obama.

In August, 2007, Obama said “the United States must be willing to strike al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan,” a comment that has led more than a few commentators to conclude that the U.S. will attack Pakistan in the coming months. It now appears the false flag Mumbai attacks, described as India’s “9/11,” will serve as a pretext to get the ball rolling on “surgical strikes” against Pakistan.

Alex Jones' Prison Planet: The truth will set you free!

 

[Keysersoze]

Can we have some opinion rather than just posts from other peoples blogs please

 

[A1Kaid]

Hey I have commented about this subject on my thread. The link is below, please read my comments about this subject.

[URL="http://www.defence.pk/forums/strategic-geopolitical-issues/17033-mumbai-attacks-analysis-something-learn.html"]http://www.defence.pk/forums/strategic-geopolitical-issues/17033-mumbai-attacks-analysis-something-learn.html[/URL]