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CIA Foreknowledge of the Mumbai Attacks
9/11
Blogger
Monday, Dec 01, 2008
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."
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
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.
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