informationliberation
http://www.911blogger.com…

CIA Foreknowledge of the Mumbai Attacks

Yesterday, Outlookindia.com reported that the CIA’s station chief in Delhi approached one of India’s intelligence agencies, the Research and Analysis Wing, and passed on a fairly specific warning;

“In mid-September this year, the CIA station chief in Delhi sought an urgent meeting with his counterpart in R&AW to pass on some critical inputs. This was part of an understanding that Indian and American intelligence had institutionalised in the aftermath of 9/11. From its assets in Pakistan and Afghanistan, American intelligence had come to learn that the Lashkar-e-Toiba was planning to launch a major terrorist attack in Mumbai, which would be carried out from the sea.“

Later in the article;

“By the middle of November, as Indian intelligence continued to check out further inputs, the pieces of an intricate jigsaw puzzle began to fall into place. Sources say they learnt that the attack would come from the sea and that the Taj Hotel would be a major target. However, it was not known whether this attack would be carried out by planting bombs in the hotel or by terrorists carrying small arms. Indian intelligence assessments were tilting towards bombs being planted and security at the hotel was beefed up accordingly to prevent terrorists from planting bombs inside the premises.”

But the Hotel eased these security enhancements the week before the attack, according to the Chairman of the company that owned the Hotel where took the brunt of the attacks;

“The Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai, India, temporarily increased security after being warned of a possible terrorist attack, the chairman of the company that owns the hotel said Saturday.

But Tata Group Chairman Ratan Tata said those measures, which were eased shortly before this week’s terror attacks, could not have prevented gunmen from entering the hotel.”

So let’s get this straight… the CIA and Indian intelligence have figured out that Mumbai will be attacked, and Indian intelligence even nailed down the Hotel, and warned the Hotel… so the Hotel slacked off on security. Of course.

The Outlookindia report does not tell us that the Hotel stood down, and this is not the only troubling aspect of the report. The article parrots information from Indian intelligence about a fishing trawler that the Indian Coast Guard “discovered”, that just happens to be rich with damning evidence;

“On November 18, R&AW passed on a specific advisory to the Coast Guard, which serves as the Lead intelligence Agency for the coastal area. The advisory asked the coast guard to intensify patrolling and look out for a suspicious vessel, probably of Pakistani origin, which had sailed off from Karachi. While the coast guard began to patrol the area with renewed intensity, the terrorists had an entirely different plan.

According to details available with Indian intelligence and the information given by the terrorist who was picked up by the Mumbai police in an encounter near Chowpatty, the terrorists hijacked an Indian fishing boat, the Kuber, somewhere near Pakistani waters. They beheaded the majority of the boat’s crew of six and only allowed one crew-member, Amarsinh Solanki, to live so that he could help them with navigating the boat to Mumbai. The coast guard found a Global Positioning System abandoned on the fishing trawler that was drifting nearly four nautical miles off the coast of Mumbai early on Thursday, November 27 morning, several hours after the terrorist attack began…

…What has surprised investigators piecing together the details of the attack is that the GPS recovered from the abandoned trawler, Kuber, had two maps fed into it to aid navigation. One was a route from Karachi that was plotted quite close to the Indian coast, while a return route had also been mapped into the GPS from the Mumbai coast back to Karachi. “We think this was done to give the terrorists some semblance of hope that they would go back home after a successful raid,” a top security official told Outlook. The fact that these two maps were fed into the GPS has confirmed that there was some help from people with a naval or army background, and had extensive knowledge of navigation at sea.

…Meanwhile, investigators are poring through the call data details downloaded from the satellite phone also recovered from the abandoned trawler. Many of the call details have revealed numbers that have been traced back to the LeT’s (Lashkar-e-Toiba) chief of operations, Muzamil, as well as to Lakhvi. Interestingly, the international SIM cards recovered from the bodies of the killed terrorists correspond to the intelligence picked up earlier, when Muzamil had asked his Bangladesh operative Yayah, to procure them.

How convenient. The gunmen left behind brutally damning evidence just to erase any lingering doubts that anyone might have had about the origins of this attack.

This reminds me of the luggage allegedly left behind in Boston, on 9/11 by Mohamed Atta;

“Former federal terrorism investigators say a piece of luggage hastily checked in at the Portland, Maine, airport by a World Trade Center hijacker on the morning of Sept. 11 provided the Rosetta stone enabling FBI agents to swiftly unravel the mystery of who carried out the suicide attacks and what motivated them.

A mix-up in Boston prevented the luggage from connecting with the plane that hijackers crashed into the north tower of the trade center. Seized by FBI agents at Boston’s Logan Airport, investigators said, it contained Arab-language papers revealing the identities of all 19 hijackers involved in the four hijackings, as well as information on their plans, backgrounds and motives.“

It also reminds me of the evidence bundle conveniently dropped in Memphis that was used to set up (and convict) James Earl Ray of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.;

“On April 4, 1968, within minutes after the shooting of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a local police officer discovered a Remington 30-06 rifle, several unused bullets, and other effects that belonged to James Earl Ray, wrapped inside a blanket, outside Canipe’s Amusement store. The owner of the store recalled someone dropping the package at his door before the time of the assassination.“

The over-eager evidence-droppers in this case jumped the gun. Like Atta’s luggage, and Ray’s self-damning evidence bundle, there is something about that fishing trawler that is just too good to be true. The fact that the article uses intelligence sources so uncritically is in itself questionable.

As Michel Chossudovsky comments;

“Were the ISI to have been involved in a major covert operation directed against India, the CIA would have prior knowledge regarding the precise nature and timing of the operation.The ISI does not act without the consent of its US intelligence counterpart.”

We know now that the CIA did indeed have “prior knowledge”, derived from its own “assets”, at least according to the spin from Outlookindia.com.

http://www.informationliberation.com…

Mumbai Attackers “White Foreigners,” “Neatly Dressed” with “Blonde” and “Punkish” Hair
Policeman and onlookers tell an unheard tale
Chris | InformationLiberation

From The Guardian:

One police officer who encountered the gunmen as they entered the Jewish centre told the Guardian the attackers were “white”, although this could mean they were paler-skinned Indians from the country’s north. (Or it could mean they were actually white, as the police officer himself said. - IL)

“I went into the building late last night,” he said. “I got a shock because they were white. I was expecting them to look like us. They fired three shots. I fired 10 back.

From The BBC

Cafe attack

Not far across town, Judith Rosta, a German teacher from Vienna, had completed a shoot for a music video for two Indian singers and was walking past the market at Colaba, the hip, touristy hub of posh south Mumbai, with her Russian girlfriend, Valentina.

She says she was buying papayas when she noticed three men on a motorcycle stopping on the road and taking out “big guns”.

“They wore white jeans and T-shirts. They were shouting, getting agitated and waved their guns around.

“I dropped my shopping and began walking away towards my hotel. Minutes later, a friend called up saying that there had been a bloody incident of firing in the area,” she says.

Leopold Cafe owner Farzed Jehani: ‘A grenade was thrown in to the restaurant’

Hours after the shooting at the Leopold Cafe, a cult city cafe and a favourite hangout of foreigners and locals alike, the place smelt of stale beer and bleaching powder.

Broken crockery from a market stall lay strewn on the sidewalk. Fresh blood stains on the bullet-pocked wall were mixed with the old betel- leaf spit stains.

Locals say the orgy of killings in Mumbai began here. Three men walked into the cafe, drank beer, settled their bills and walked out. Then they fished out guns from their bags and began firing.

Gaffar Abdul Amir, an Iraqi tourist from Baghdad, says he saw at least two men who started the firing outside the Leopold Cafe.

He was returning to his hotel from the seaside with a friend when he saw two men carrying bags and brandishing AK-47s walking in front of them, shooting.

“They did not look Indian, they looked foreign. One of them, I thought, had blonde hair. The other had a punkish hairstyle. They were neatly dressed,” says Mr Amir.

As the two girls fell near the cafe, he saw the two men quickening their steps towards the Taj Mahal hotel further up the road.

A few minutes later, gunfire was heard from the hotel, and much later, Mr Amir heard that gunmen had taken guests hostage.

Surely these are significant reports? The recounting of multiple attackers as white foreigners and men with blonde and punkish hair should have merit as a significant news story, should it not? One must ask then, why is it being ignored?