Mumbai Attacks and their impact

[davidbfpo]

The BIJ return with a lengthy article asking 'Four Disturbing Questions About the Mumbai Terror Attack':http://www.propublica.org/article/fo...-terror-attack

Q. Why doesn't Pakistan capture Sajid Mir?
Q. What was the full extent of the role of Pakistani intelligence in Mumbai?
Q. What risk does Lashkar-e-Taiba pose in the future?
Q. Why didn't U.S. authorities stop Headley sooner?

It ends with a lawyer's quote:

Headley proved that for all our changes in security, we are not much safer.....It was too easy. When the real big bad terrorist showed up, no one saw him.

[omarali50]

Psyops in Pakistan seem to be determined to make hay with a stupid Indian newspaper headline. This may not be smart..

http://www.brownpundits.com/2013/07/...umbai-attacks/

[omarali50]

http://www.brownpundits.com/2013/07/...umbai-attacks/

Above link updated with explanation of sorts

[Ray]

Psyops in Pakistan seem to be determined to make hay with a stupid Indian newspaper headline. This may not be smart..

http://www.brownpundits.com/2013/07/...umbai-attacks/

That is rich.

Maybe the officer could explain how Hafeez Saeed and the LeT are part of the Indian intelligence!

The man is said to be on vendetta to get to some officers of his organisation who have, as per him, not given him a fair deal.

And then there is a whole lot of politics.

This is an election year.

The Govt has performed dismally to include total looting by Ministers including possibly the 'honest' Prime Minister (or helping his mentor) and so it has to organise issues that diverts the attention.

The simple question is that how does it help India to organise terrorism against itself?

Indeed, if it does, what are the motivations to do it?

Destabilise India and for who? Foreign interests?

Too outlandish to feel India is controlled by foreign interests.

And if it is true, then let us once again be a colony so that we know where we stand!

[omarali50]

[davidbfpo]

A NYT piece on the information and intelligence before the Mumbai attacks. A choice passage:

What happened next may rank among the most devastating near-misses in the history of spycraft. The intelligence agencies of the three nations did not pull together all the strands gathered by their high-tech surveillance and other tools, which might have allowed them to disrupt a terror strike so scarring that it is often called India’s 9/11.

Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/wo...=67232673&_r=1

Many insights are within the article and rightly an Indian politician ends with:

The key is the analysis, we didn’t have it.

[omarali50]

But isnt this a bit of "grabbing the wrong end of the stick"? Modern intelligence gathering generates more data than can possibly be analyzed in real time by human analysts. The biggest problem is not that the human analyst did not pick up X out of all random bits; it is that the human analysts did not have a good idea of where they should have been looking most carefully.
That does not imply a fixed set of priorities, but it does mean having a constantly updated model that captures where the biggest problems are likely to come from.
In this case, it does not seem that neither Western analysts or Indian ones were fully awake to the possibilities.
Of course there will be surprises. But at that point, should this have been such a total surprise?
I dont know. I am not an intelligence analyst. But those who are: what do you think? in retrospect, should it have been such a shock?

[omarali50]

btw, another judgement in Lakhvi's favor.

http://www.dawn.com/news/1153831/ihc...cks-mastermind

Being a Pakistani, I tend to suspect that "the fix is in" (i.e. the US and the GOP have agreed that low level Kashmir Jihad is the best option to siphon off various explosive young men who might otherwise explode in more sensitive locations), but what do more rationally trained people think? Happenstance? Coincidence? or enemy action?